Desire

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.

I offered her a job and a roof, nothing more. But that first night in the house by the river, neither of us pretended it was still just an arrangement.

I put on the shortest skirt I had, and when that college guy rested his hand on my thigh, I knew the trip was going to be a lot longer than the ticket said.

The rustle of the sheet woke me, and when I turned my head I found her asleep beside me. I remembered nothing from the night before, but my body did.

He had never seen a naked woman until that afternoon by the waterfall. What he didn’t know was that desire would end up shipping him to the end of the world.

I thought I was the most disciplined man in the faculty. Then she leaned against the empty classroom door and made it clear she knew everything I was hiding.

I met her in a dive bar, and at thirty I thought I knew everything about sex. That woman proved in a single night that I knew nothing.

I met him among paintings that seemed to whisper, and two hours later I was against the door of his apartment, wondering how I’d come so far without saying a word.

I looked toward the window opposite and understood that night, among parked trucks, nobody was going to draw the curtains.

I never thought that a comment about how obedient her dog was could ignite something like this between two old acquaintances on her sofa.

I put on the red dress with nothing underneath and thought it was just a thank-you dinner. I had no idea how the night was going to end.

I took an empty shot glass with me when I left the dance floor. I didn’t even understand why, until we were alone in his car and I knew exactly what I was going to do with it.

A sad old ballad comes on the radio and I stop hearing the lyrics. I start seeing something else, a scene I shouldn’t tell, but I confess it anyway.

She was forty-seven and had a thirst no man had ever quenched. That dawn, in the deserted park, she decided she would no longer pretend otherwise.

I had just lifted the biggest trophy of my career. What I did next, with him cornered against the tiles, doesn’t appear in any sports report.

I wrote to half a dozen girls asking for the same thing. Only one replied, and that afternoon, in a shopping center bathroom, I discovered something I didn’t expect.

By day she had an ordinary name and practical steps. By night, under red lights, she chose a stranger and never missed.

She closed the door without locking it and stood looking at him, not yet knowing that this man was about to disprove everything she believed about casual sex.