Deceit

That morning she looked at her hands and didn’t recognize them: they were the same hands that had signed a commitment and the same ones that had betrayed everything for him.

For years I pretended not to understand why she lingered when passing that shop. The afternoon I followed her inside, I realized my mother had already stopped belonging only to my father.

She told herself she was only helping him feel better. But every afternoon, with her boyfriend out of the house, the distance between them grew shorter.

“She came to see her boyfriend, the doctor,” the receptionist told him. Damián had no girlfriend. But when she described the visitor’s blush, he knew exactly who was waiting inside.

I had buried it under years of exams and routine, but all it took was hearing him say my name from across the bar for my body to remember what my mind wanted to forget.

When he went down to the supermarket for beer, his uncle cornered me against the freshly painted wall and I knew my boyfriend wouldn’t be the one breaking in the bed.

Adrián fell asleep ten minutes after takeoff. The man by the window waited until he heard his steady breathing before leaning toward Marina and whispering in her ear.

I started by telling him made-up dreams about other men. What he didn’t know was that every word that made him moan had really happened that same week.

I didn’t shower before going back home. I wanted my boyfriend to feel the gym sweat on my skin and the trace of another man, and not have the courage to ask whose it was.

“Welcome to my beach,” his voice said behind me. I was completely naked on the towel, and he was the last person I expected to see there.

Marisol couldn’t sleep. She left the hut, leaving Gonzalo among dreams, and walked to the campfire, where the silent guide was waiting. That night she would cross a point of no return.

He wanted me to go back to telling him my invented adventures. He didn’t know that every word I whispered to him that night was a lie with a hidden edge.

Every insult that masked stranger shouted was aimed at one person only: the man sleeping beside me, who believed I was his.

He could tell something was off in my breath, but he never dared name it. My best work wasn’t on any screen: it was inside his head, on a loop.

He wasn’t looking at the frescoes: he was looking at her, as if she were the material he had to break. And for the first time, she wanted something in her life to come crashing down.

When she opened the door to my study, I knew she hadn't come for the inheritance. She'd come for what we left unfinished ten years ago, and I'd been waiting for her all that time.

I hissed in the kitchen that she’d pay for her deception. I never imagined she’d end up kneeling in my room, begging me like she never begged him.

The drive to the gym didn’t account for eighty extra kilometers every Thursday. That number was the first thread of a truth that would end up exciting me more than destroying me.

Aitor bragged that no woman could resist him, and his elderly neighbor listened with amusement… until the boy revealed who he planned to seduce next.

Sebastián told her to tear it all apart. The only thing that broke was the promise she’d made, in the bed of a stranger who smelled like victory.