Desire

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.

I’d been watching her train for months without daring to do anything. That night she invited me to her place, and I discovered the shy woman from the gym was hiding someone very different.

I had watched her through the peephole at exactly 7:15 every morning. What I didn’t know was that she counted my footsteps behind hers whenever she went downstairs.

The first morning I found her in the kitchen almost naked, moving as if I didn’t exist. That’s when I understood her husband’s game had only just begun.

She walked down the carpeted corridor with her heart racing: behind that door waited the man she had spent half her life imagining.

I said yes to the game for one night only: a dress, a wig, and a name that wasn’t mine. I never imagined the girl in the mirror would look back as if she’d been waiting for me.

Marcos thought he was in charge of the game. His wife looked at me over her shoulder, let the towel fall, and I understood that she set the only rule.

I grew up understanding naturism as something natural, but nothing prepared me for the day my mother’s boyfriend stopped covering himself in front of me.

We had climbed over the fence into an empty property. He set the pace with his hand on my neck, and I let myself go without thinking of anything else.

I’d watched him for days from the terrace, pretending I wasn’t. That hot afternoon I decided to stop pretending and went down with a glass of lemonade in my hand.

I only peeked through the crack in the door for a second. It was long enough to brand itself into me forever, and ruin every night that came after.

I get up early so I can have the gym to myself. But for the past three weeks, there’s been a much better reason to arrive before anyone else: him, and that scandalous smile.

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

He was twenty-seven, had a girlfriend, and led an orderly life. Then a neighbor looked at him on the bus as if he knew what Tobías dared not name.

I arrived at her place an hour before dinner and found her naked in front of the mirror, torn between two dresses and about to change everything.

When I opened the door, I expected to find her alone on the sofa, as always. I hadn’t counted on the second silhouette watching me from the shadows.

He asked me to hold some tools while squatting down. I knew perfectly well what he was doing, and still I didn’t get up.

You texted me “I’m hungry,” and I knew exactly what you wanted. We’re not a couple, not even my type, but there’s something between us no one would understand.

She caught me looking at her while she leafed through a Cortázar. She held my gaze for three seconds, smiled crookedly, and I knew that afternoon in the bookstore wasn’t ending among books.

I never told anyone, but the moment he closes the door to leave, one name and one body take over my whole imagination.