Desire

I rode out on my bike without underwear, my phone buzzing with messages I should never have opened. The road was empty, but I felt watched by everyone.

I got home, flung my heels through the air, and let my imagination do what I’d never dare do at the office.

There’s a bathroom no one uses at the back of the garage. I’ve spent days imagining you there, against the mirror, while I whisper everything I want to do to you.

The store was closed and she had the whole morning free. The driver noticed before she did, and that smile in the mirror made her think things she shouldn’t.

We shared a hallway, an elevator and a coffeemaker, but never a real word. Only what each of us imagined when the other turned away.

I slipped barefoot to the chapel at midnight to ask forgiveness for my dreams. I never imagined something waited coiled in the shadows, ready to teach me what my body had kept silent.

I tripped over a root, and before I could get up, she was already on top of me. Her cold skin brushed mine, and I knew that night I wouldn’t leave the forest unchanged.

She wasn’t looking for love or company. She wanted to be watched, desired, imagined naked beneath her dress. That night she chose to be pure fire.

Convinced a creature had stolen his fortune, Damián tied her to his table leg. What he didn’t expect was for her to offer to settle the debt with her body.

It only took a certain tone of voice for my son to drop the controller and my wife to strip naked. It took me two weeks to figure out what to do with that.

He opened the door without looking through the peephole and recognized that smile from a thousand screens. His neighbor was her. And she had just asked him for the most innocent of favors.

She came to the clearing seeking silence and found torches, naked bodies, and dozens of deer masks waiting for her as if they had always known she would return that night.

It was three in the morning, the house was silent, and I had the phone pressed to my chest, waiting for that bodiless voice to tell me, at last, everything I’d been imagining for weeks.

No one believed him when he said the beast was real. So he went back into the mountains to find her, even if it meant losing himself forever in the snow and in her claws.

I gave him two kisses in front of his mother and, without anyone noticing, decided to play along until neither of us expected to go that far that morning.

I saw him looking at me in the elevator mirror and something lit up. That night I knew I didn’t just want him to watch me: I wanted him to see absolutely everything.

I’m shy with almost everyone, except my husband. That’s why I was so surprised to want that stranger who sat down in front of me, as if she’d been waiting for months.

She expected a frail husband she could despise. When the king bowed to kiss her hand, the tip of his tongue brushed her skin and she knew she was wrong.

He arrived at the den little more than a chained skeleton. The she-wolf promised to teach him what it meant to serve her... and he learned better than she expected.

Barely reaching his elbow, he took my hand. In six minutes I discovered my body didn’t care about the rules I’d imposed on myself.