Couple

I left the curtain half-open on purpose. That afternoon wasn’t just for Adrián and me: someone else was waiting for the show from across the street.

The first afternoon, I still hadn’t unpacked, and I already knew no one there would take their eyes off us. And the worst part was this: I was starting to like it.

I put on the wine-colored dress he had chosen, took a deep breath, and understood that night would be the real gift: finally feeling like the woman I had always been.

I went to his house to make him leave my partner alone. I left knowing I’d be back the next Sunday, and the one after, and every one after that.

I’d been sleeping with men for five years, and kneeling there again, I did the exact math of how many had gone through my mouth. That night I realized something had broken.

There was one boundary Marisa never crossed, and I’d learned to respect it. Until one morning, over breakfast, I figured out how to get around it without making her suffer.

I look at myself in the mirror in my garter belt and fishnets, and I smile: I lost the bet, and I know exactly what he’s going to ask of me this afternoon.

The walls were paper-thin. We heard her moaning in the next room and realized she’d been listening to us the whole time, waiting for an invitation.

No one at the bank, pharmacy, or bakery imagined what I was hiding beneath my clothes. And that was precisely what excited me most.

I’d spent years making sure no one looked at her too long. That afternoon, hidden among the tall weeds, I couldn’t stop looking myself.

We crossed that threshold knowing that, once we did, we would no longer have any will of our own until Monday. Neither of us wanted to turn back.

We thought we were sneaking around in the sand, until a stranger came over and confessed he’d been watching us for hours. And he had a proposition.

The apartment walls were paper-thin, and my girlfriend’s best friend slept just on the other side. That first morning, we pretended not to remember she was there.

I came out of the water shivering and saw her adjusting her bikini in the sun. Neither of us knew that morning would change everything between us.

We weren’t planning anything that afternoon. But when he dropped his pants in front of me, I knew I was about to try something I’d never tried before.

It had barely been five minutes into the movie when his hand was already reaching under my shorts, and instead of pulling away, I prayed no one in the theater would turn to look at us.

We had signed the contract knowing Saturday would be worse than Friday. What we couldn’t imagine was how far she intended to take us into the woods.

I got out of the shower and there she was, looking between my legs with that smile I already knew. She knew exactly where to press to make me stop arguing and start obeying.

I told her to choose where to put the depilatory cream on me. I never imagined she’d point to the exact place that would hurt me most.

If I came at the exact second, she would let me do it. If I failed, she promised me a punishment I had feared and desired for weeks in equal measure.