Desire

I’d spent years fantasizing about it, but I was still a virgin in back. That December afternoon, in a motel room, I finally let him cross that last frontier.

I didn’t go looking for pleasure. I went to remember a buried desire: soft skin, curves, feeling desired. And she, with a whisper in French, gave me permission.

When he lowered his voice to confess it, I thought of a thousand betrayals. None of them was this: he wanted to watch me in bed with his best friend while he sat there and missed nothing.

I close the storage-room door, change clothes, and turn into someone else. No one on my street suspects what I’m going to do tonight, and that’s exactly what I like most.

I sat on the edge of the dock not looking for anything, but his gaze, the gaze of a man who knows what he wants, undid me before I said a single word.

We always played at being girlfriends in front of everyone, until the heat, the river, and a few beers erased the line between the game and what we really wanted.

You begged me in whispers, holding your breath while I reached for the lubricant. And I never told you I looked forward to that dawn as much as you did.

I was drying my back when the door flew open. She saw me completely, apologized, and ran out. I never imagined I’d cross paths with her again that same morning.

He had only done his job as a doctor. She walked in unannounced, closed the door, and told him that tonight she hadn’t come to talk about her sick son.

We agreed to meet early, when nobody was there yet. What started as another of our texting games ended up being something I couldn’t get out of my head all day.

At three in the morning she was still awake, her head on my arm, waiting for the exact moment I opened my eyes to begin.

In front of the mirror, with my lips painted and my heels on, I didn’t see anyone in disguise: I saw the woman I’ve always wanted to be when I let myself go.

I walked through the bar door in new heels and with my heart in my throat. I had no idea that night someone from my past would walk in.

She came to their door soaked by the rain, with no pride and nothing to offer but her body. They looked at her, looked at one another, and she knew everything was beginning again.

She came into the maintenance room without warning and caught me without my shirt. That shameless laugh of hers was the beginning of something I took years to admit.

The divorce didn’t break me: it gave me back my breath. That night, with a button-front dress and a poured drink, I let a much younger stranger make me feel alive.

I’d been sleeping with men for five years, and kneeling there again, I did the exact math of how many had gone through my mouth. That night I realized something had broken.

Her anger made her get out of the car on the highway. What she didn’t imagine was that she’d end the night in the cab of a truck driver she’d just met.

Every night she touched herself in secret and cried with guilt. That dawn she walked toward the dunes not knowing the desert held a temple, and inside it, a figure that would change everything.

I recognized her at the bar by the way she moved. She was my ex-player’s girl, the one who used to cheer behind the bench, and that night no one was holding her back anymore.