Desire

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 to be technically curious.

I told him I wouldn’t touch him, that he should only look. But every folder he opened on the screen pushed me a little closer to crossing the line we’d been skirting for months.

The night she threw me out, I dreamed of my own corpse rotting in an empty workshop. I woke up soaked in tears, with her asleep a handspan from my skin.

When I left them alone in the hotel bar, I only wanted to give them some privacy. I never imagined she’d go upstairs with another man and I’d be left waiting downstairs.

She took the job to run from a dead relationship. What she didn’t expect was that the arrogant boss would hide a man capable of stealing her breath.

She went downstairs for water and found them laughing in the garden. That night, on her knees in the hallway, I decided to remind my husband who she belonged to.

I went back to the room quietly so I wouldn’t wake him, and found him with my underwear between his fingers and the sheet pitched up like a tent.

We booked the hotel to rest, but what I had in my backpack had other plans for that cold, rainy night.

When my mother opened the door and I saw who was coming in for dinner, my blood ran cold: it was the man I’d been secretly sleeping with for two months.

When the doctor told me I’d never have children, I thought I’d lost everything. I never imagined the answer would be sitting across from me, toasting as if nothing were wrong.

She had spent months imagining his hands, his cologne, his voice. She never thought a storm would be enough to make them stop pretending they didn’t want each other.

I never knew my grandfather, but his final will tied me to a woman I didn’t expect and to a house where everything ended up changing.

I woke to the smell of coffee and knew those two days locked inside with her, while it rained outside, would stay etched in me forever.

When she told me she hadn’t enjoyed sex in years, the sensible thing would have been to leave. Instead I reached for her leg and she didn’t pull away.

When he stayed to practice a few poses, I could feel him looking at me. I hadn’t had a partner in months, and my body had decided for me long before my head did.

On the outside I was the perfect girlfriend, the one who turns off the light and moans softly. That morning I came home fired up from the dance floor and decided I was done pretending.

I went upstairs to see why the girl in the back room was screaming. I never imagined she’d drop the towel and ask me to look, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

She spent years kneading bread with her eyes fixed on the floor, until one summer afternoon she was left alone with the man who looked at her differently.