Desire

Marisol couldn’t sleep. She left the hut, leaving Gonzalo among dreams, and walked to the campfire, where the silent guide was waiting. That night she would cross a point of no return.

He could tell something was off in my breath, but he never dared name it. My best work wasn’t on any screen: it was inside his head, on a loop.

When she opened my study door, I knew she hadn’t come for the inheritance. She came for what we left unfinished ten years ago, and I’d been waiting for her ever since.

It’s been seven years since we signed the divorce papers and I never stopped looking for him. What I miss isn’t him: it’s what he does to me when no one else is watching.

She had been burning for months and her husband never got home in time. That afternoon, seven months pregnant, she got off the subway at the wrong stop... or the right one.

I bought a tiny bikini without letting her choose it, counted the hours until dawn, and lay down on the small mattress, praying she’d stay alone with him.

Sebastián told her to destroy it all. The only thing she destroyed was the promise she’d made to him, in the bed of a stranger who smelled like triumph.

She told me, “Distrust my husband,” and I laughed. Three months later, my wife walked into my office unable to look me in the eye.

For her, it’s just affection, a way of taking care of him. For him, it’s love. And between them grows a secret that beats every night just a few feet from her sleeping boyfriend.

He only came to use our computer on a rainy afternoon. But he showed me a program that could strip anyone naked, and without thinking, I asked him to try it on me.

I told him to strip too. It was only fair: he’d already seen me naked on the screen, and I’d spent the whole afternoon pretending it was technical curiosity.

I told him I wasn’t going to touch him, just look. But each folder he opened on the screen pushed me a little closer to crossing the line we’d been skirting for months.

The night she threw me out, I dreamed of my own corpse rotting in an empty workshop. I woke up soaked in tears, with her asleep a handspan from my skin.

When I left them alone at the hotel bar, I only wanted to give them some privacy. I never imagined she’d go upstairs with another man while I waited below.

She accepted the job to escape a dead relationship. What she never imagined was that that arrogant boss hid a man capable of taking her breath away.

She went down for water and found them laughing in the garden. That night, on her knees in the hallway, I decided to remind my husband who he belonged to.

I went back to the room quietly so I wouldn’t wake him, and found him with my underwear between his fingers and the sheet pitched up like a tent.

We booked the hotel to rest, but what I had in my backpack had other plans for that cold, rainy night.

When my mother opened the door and I saw who was coming to dinner, my blood ran cold: it was the man I’d been secretly sleeping with for two months.

When the doctor told me I’d never have children, I thought I’d lost everything. I never imagined the answer would be sitting across from me, toasting as if nothing had happened.