Desire

She was forty-seven and had a thirst no man had ever quenched. That dawn, in the deserted park, she decided she was done pretending otherwise.

I had just lifted the biggest trophy of my career. What I did next, with him cornered against the tiles, doesn’t appear in any sports report.

I wrote to half a dozen girls asking for the same thing. Only one replied, and that afternoon, in a shopping center bathroom, I discovered something I didn’t expect.

By day she had an ordinary name and practical steps. By night, under red lights, she chose a stranger and never missed.

She closed the door without locking it and stood looking at him, not yet knowing that this man was about to disprove everything she believed about casual sex.

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 deal, not for this. But in the elevator of that hotel, Lucía understood they had 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 took him to the back of the shop with a flimsy excuse. What came after, she hadn’t entirely 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.

“Just the first three levels,” I promised him on the plane. Neither of us imagined how far that book of challenges would take us before we came 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 came home from the cinema freezing cold, but the moment the elevator doors closed I knew we weren’t going straight to bed that night.

We’d been brushing against each other in the halls 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.