Desire

I went to her house for a school assignment and found her in flip-flops. From that moment on, I could never look at her without thinking of her feet.

I turned my back to the camera, moved my hips slowly, and waited. I only wanted a stranger to tell me what to do with my own body.

I don’t go to the cinema for the movie. I go to the back row and wait for unknown feet to rest on me and decide how much I can take.

It was midnight when I crossed the patio barefoot. Her pink flip-flops were still there, warm, with the mark of every one of her toes waiting for me in the dark.

I started graduate school not knowing anyone. It only took one look at her crossing her legs and slipping off a sandal for me to stop paying attention to anything else.

The moment the gathering loosens up and no one’s watching, I slip into the bathroom. I know exactly what I’ll find in the basket, and I know perfectly what I’m going to do with it.

I’d never paid for anything like that before. We met on a Tuesday morning, she handed me the bag in a hurry, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what was waiting for me at home.

She lifted her skirt, looked at me hard, and said not to be embarrassed, that we all did it. That’s when I knew that night wouldn’t be like any other.

For years I’d chased this moment in airports and trains, but I never imagined a stranger would let me worship her bare feet on a flight.

Each step made the hidden metal beneath her skirt ring out. Vera had learned to live wet, on the edge, waiting for the next needle he would drive into her flesh.

When we close the bedroom door, we stop being the proper couple everyone knows. In there there are no limits, only the ones we set in order to break them.

The night I waited for him with my blouse half-open, I knew I was no longer the same woman: I had remade my whole body to ignite one man’s desire.

I had spent years working among the dead and thought I had seen it all. Until that man, laid out on my steel table, moved when I sank the scalpel into his chest.

Ever since I was a child, balloons both terrified and aroused me. At that birthday party, locked in the bathroom, I discovered how far that contradiction could take me.

When she knelt in the shower and looked up at me with that smile, I knew there was no turning back: her fantasy and mine were about to cross a line.

Three years barefoot, two rings on her toes, and the certainty that at day’s end he will kneel to lick every footprint she left behind.

There was only one condition I asked of her that evening, and when she walked through the door I knew, just from the way she looked at me, that this time she had decided to obey me completely.

I went up to help her like a good neighbor. I came down as something very different, kneeling in her bathroom and obeying every word that came out of her mouth.

That night, as I drove home, I knew that behind her wicked smile there was a new idea. And that I wasn’t going to be able to get it out of my head.

For years I accepted to please them, then ran to the bathroom to spit it out. With him I discovered that the barrier I struggled most to break was also the one hiding the most pleasure.