Desire

It started as a game in the back row of a theater and became an addiction: finding the city’s most impossible corner to lose control.

He told me to close my eyes in front of the shop window. When I opened them, I knew Hugo wanted to see me turned into something I’d always wanted to be without daring to say it.

He walked in thinking the showers were empty, but the steam was hiding someone else. His teammate hadn’t heard him arrive, and he couldn’t look away from what he saw.

They said his blue overalls were lucky. But that night, under the spray of water and his teammates’ stares, he learned luck had another name.

They had set up the screen, served the cider, and endured the whispers. At last alone in the empty square, there was only one thing left to do: go up to the attic.

He’d spent days only seeing him through a screen. When the door finally shut behind us, I knew that night we’d make up for every stolen hour.

When my mother found the stains on my underwear, she thought the worst. She didn’t know Marco wasn’t hurting me: he was helping me stop being afraid of who I am.

I thought the hardest part of coming home would be the banner at the village entrance. I was wrong: the hard part was the dinner table, when we started telling the truth.

He stayed on my sofa for a couple of weeks, polite and distant, until one Sunday afternoon he dropped the line that woke everything we’d buried in those summers.

I’d gone two weeks without cumming and my imagination played a dirty trick on me in the middle of my shift. What I didn’t expect was for someone to notice before I did.

For months I’d been pretending not to look when he came out of the bathroom in his underwear. That Christmas, alone in the flat, I opened the bag of his dirty laundry.

When the officiant asked whether anyone had something to say, the groom raised his hand. Not to say yes, but to confess what he had been holding in for months.

I’m thirty-four and I never doubted what I was. Until that seed started growing inside me, silent and persistent, and I could no longer ignore it.

I learned his schedule, the sound of his boots, the exact moment he’d take off his shirt because of the heat. What I didn’t know was how far that obsession would take me.

She left them by the mat, still warm from her bare feet. It only took my daughter being distracted for a moment for me to commit the madness.

Every time her sister turned away, she slipped off her sandals and left her feet on display, knowing exactly what she was doing to me and savoring every second of my torment.

At one in the morning she slipped off her heels to provoke, as always. She had no idea that night someone would turn her whim into an order.

It took me three months of patience to get to Mariana’s sofa, slowly take off her sneakers, and find out whether she really minded that I couldn’t stop looking at her feet.

I told her I liked her feet and she laughed. She had no idea that that afternoon, while she was looking after her nieces, I’d be on my knees in front of her bed with her sneakers in my hands.

I learned to count the hours until she fell asleep. Only then, in the darkness of the bunk bed, were her sandals mine and no one could see what I did with them.