Desire

I never saw her face. Only her brown back breathing hard while my hands went lower than a massage therapist should ever dare.

I’d been divorced for three weeks and thought I no longer knew how to want. That first night at sea, a stranger leaning on the bar proved me wrong.

They had traveled to close a contract, not for this. But in the elevator of that hotel, Lucía realized they’d been pretending not to want each other for months.

I was only looking for a place to sleep. I never imagined a hole in her pajama pants would change everything that night.

When he invited me up for a drink, I had no idea I was about to discover what it was really like to be with a man who knew what he was doing.

I never told anyone what I did that afternoon. I went in alone, with no names, no rules, ready to let a stranger lead me into the dark.

I arrived trembling at the barn, on my knees in the straw, waiting for a man whose face I would never get to see. I did it for my boyfriend. Or so I told myself.

She locked the door, hung up the “closed” sign, and led him to the back of the shop with a flimsy excuse. What came after wasn’t fully planned.

I needed to tell someone who wouldn’t judge me, and the only thing I could think to do was knock on his door. What I didn’t expect was what would happen at dawn.

I went in to sort out some boring paperwork and came out trembling. What that man did to me with his hands behind his desk still keeps me up at night.

“Only the first three levels,” I promised him on the plane. Neither of us imagined where that challenge notebook would take us before we got home.

I’d never accepted an invitation from a man I’d just met. But something about his smile, and the way he looked at my cleavage, made me say yes.

She had a girlfriend and I was dragging along a relationship that was fading fast. We went to the coast as friends. What happened in that room with two beds was not in my plans.

We were coming home from the movies frozen through, but once the elevator doors closed I knew we weren’t going straight to bed that night.

We’d been brushing against each other in the hallways for weeks without daring to do anything. That night I got tired of waiting, took off my sweatshirt in front of his door, and told him what I wanted.

Marcos introduced him as a cousin’s son, staying for a few days. But Elena quickly noticed the way the boy looked at her when no one else was paying attention.

A year had passed since the last time. I turned a corner downtown and crashed into her: the same perfume, the same gaze, the same desire I thought I’d forgotten.

I asked my neighbor for help with a pipe I could have fixed myself. The truth is I just wanted to see him walk into my house knowing we were both alone.

She came into the hallway looking for me, fixed me with a stare, and said she had a question. I had no idea what was going to happen when she closed the room door.

For eons I knew only the silence of the void. Until I hooked a signal in a blue world and, without asking permission, slipped into the body of a woman on fire.