Desire

That afternoon, in the silence of the house, an accidental brush revealed a language my body spoke and I still didn’t know how to read.

When she slipped her hand under my desk, I knew that morning wasn’t going to solve a single incident. I could only think of her and what she had just left me.

I got home at six in the morning with her perfume clinging to my body and my ass still red. My wife was waiting up, smiling, suspecting nothing.

He kept saying it was wrong, that he shouldn’t touch me. But his hand was already seeking my waist, and we both knew nothing would stop us for those five days.

We’d spent three years obeying one rule between partners. That cold night, in her green dress and a dark office, we knew we were about to break it.

She was her father’s wife, but that dawn, sitting in the sand and pressed against his chest, I no longer knew where affection ended and something else began.

I agreed to go up to a room with twelve mattresses on the floor, never imagining that by morning I’d leave with more than one man marked on my skin.

She lied to me about everything: her name, her job, the reason she came close to me. The only truth was how she trembled when I touched her again.

I didn’t tie her hands to restrain her. I tied them so she’d understand, before anything happened, that tonight her body no longer belonged to her.

I’ve spent thirty years pretending to be the modest wife my husband thinks he set free. What he doesn’t know is that on this cruise, I’m the one pulling the strings.

I accepted the dare without thinking: kiss whoever was to my right for five seconds. And to my right was her, the woman who had spent a year pretending not to want me.

“I want you to give her what my mother never had,” she said with a smile. And when I saw that mature woman, I knew I wasn’t going to say no.

On the last night before becoming mortal, she curled up between her two divine mothers, knowing that at dawn she would have to bury everything she was under layers of plain cloth.

When I opened the door, I was expecting a paper bag and a “good morning.” I wasn’t expecting him to keep looking inside and ask, in a low voice, if I lived alone.

I’d gone almost two years without touching anyone when I saw her step off the minibus with that smile. I promised myself that before I flew home, that mouth would be mine.

A yellow Post-it on the little box said just one word: “Play me.” It was two in the morning, and curiosity beat out the night’s accumulated exhaustion.

I had never felt so much from a simple brush of hips. When she settled behind me on the crowded bus, I knew that ride wouldn’t end like the others.

I’d been a widow for fifteen years and sexually asleep. Then that man, nearly twenty years younger, looked at my lips and I knew the morning wouldn’t end in notes.

He unzipped her dress in front of the entryway mirror, and when she saw herself wrapped in his arms, she knew there was no going back that night.

She came down from the plane of pleasure to a flat in Ruzafa, and as soon as the street’s desire brushed her skin, she knew no loose clothing could contain what she was.