Deceit

Every insult shouted by that masked stranger was aimed at one person: the man beside me who slept believing 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 did not look at the frescoes; he looked at her, as if she were the material he had to break. And for the first time, she wanted something in her life to collapse.

When she opened my study door, I knew she hadn’t come for the inheritance. She came for what we left unfinished ten years ago, and I’d been waiting for her ever since.

I warned her through clenched teeth, in the kitchen, that she would pay for deceiving me. I never imagined she’d end up on her knees in my room, begging me as she had 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 in amusement… until the boy revealed who he intended to seduce next.

Sebastián told her to destroy it all. The only thing she destroyed was the promise she’d made to him, in the bed of a stranger who smelled like triumph.

She told me, “Distrust my husband,” and I laughed. Three months later, my wife walked into my office unable to look me in the eye.

I accepted the massage out of curiosity and because of the heat of his hands. What I didn’t imagine was how much I’d be willing to pay before his alarm went off.

I went down to the pool in my underwear just to provoke him. I never imagined I’d end that same night begging him not to stop inside me.

I’d never cheated on my husband in eighteen years. One screen, one bold stranger, and one empty afternoon were enough to make all of that stop mattering.

When that stranger’s fist put my boyfriend on the canvas, I knew I was about to do something I could never fully regret.

For her, it’s just affection, a way of taking care of him. For him, it’s love. And between them grows a secret that beats every night just a few feet from her sleeping boyfriend.

He only came to use our computer on a rainy afternoon. But he showed me a program that could strip anyone naked, and without thinking, I asked him to try it on me.

I told him to strip too. It was only fair: he’d already seen me naked on the screen, and I’d spent the whole afternoon pretending it was technical curiosity.

I thought I knew him after three years together, until that night he set the glass on the table and told me he had a fantasy he didn’t dare confess.

Daniel slept in the front seat while, three feet away, his uncle and girlfriend shared the truck’s narrow bunk. And Noelia no longer wanted to sleep.

Mateo had just thrown his wife out of the restaurant when someone knocked on the office door. It was the tattooed waitress, and she hadn’t come to talk about the day’s accounts.

An old ballad comes on the radio and I stop listening to the lyrics. I start seeing something else, a scene I shouldn’t tell you about, but I confess anyway.