Desire

Every time her sister turned away, she slipped off her sandals and left her feet on display, knowing exactly what she was doing to me and savoring every second of my torment.

At one in the morning she slipped off her heels to provoke, as always. She had no idea that night someone would turn her whim into an order.

It took three months of patience to reach Mariana’s sofa, slowly remove her shoes, and discover whether she really minded that I couldn’t stop staring at her feet.

I told her I liked her feet and she laughed. She had no idea that that afternoon, while she looked after her nieces, I was on my knees in front of her bed with her sneakers in my hands.

I learned to count the hours until she fell asleep. Only then, in the darkness of the bunk bed, were her sandals mine and no one could see what I did with them.

I went to her house for a school assignment and found her in flip-flops. From that moment on, I could never look at her without thinking of her feet.

I turned my back to the camera, moved my hips slowly, and waited. I only wanted a stranger to tell me what to do with my own body.

On weekends I don’t go to the movies for the film. I go to sit in back and wait for unknown feet to settle on me and decide how much I can take.

It was exactly midnight when I crossed the patio barefoot. Her pink flip-flops were still there, warm, with the imprint of every one of her toes waiting for me in the dark.

I started graduate school not knowing anyone. It only took one look at her crossing her legs and slipping off a sandal for me to stop paying attention to anything else.

The moment the gathering loosens up and no one is looking, I slip into the bathroom. I know exactly what I’m going to find in the hamper, and I know perfectly well what I’m going to do with it.

I’d never paid for anything like that before. We met on a Tuesday morning, she handed me the bag in a hurry, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what was waiting for me at home.

She lifted her skirt, looked at me hard, and said not to be embarrassed, that we all did it. That’s when I knew that night wouldn’t be like any other.

For years I’d chased this moment in airports and trains, but I never imagined a stranger would let me worship her bare feet on a flight.

Each step made the hidden metal beneath her skirt ring out. Vera had learned to live wet, on the edge, waiting for the next needle he would drive into her flesh.

When we close the bedroom door, we stop being the proper couple everyone knows. In there there are no limits, only the ones we set in order to break them.

The night I waited for him with my blouse half-open, I knew I was no longer the same woman: I had remade myself to ignite one man's desire.

I’ve spent years working among the dead and thought I’d seen everything. Until that man on my steel table twitched when I sank the scalpel into his chest.

Balloons had terrified and aroused me in equal measure since childhood. On that birthday, locked in the bathroom, I discovered how far that contradiction could take me.

When she knelt in the shower and looked at me with that smile, I knew there was no turning back: her fantasy and mine were about to cross a line.