Desire

I had imagined it in silence for years, telling no one. That night, at the bar of a hotel that wasn’t mine, a stranger made the choice for me.

I was still naked on the bed when the door opened, and for a second neither of us knew what to do with what the other had just seen.

When the sun began to sink, neither woman needed words to lead: a single glance was enough for every hand to know where it belonged.

She had wanted that man, who was twice her age, for half her life. That afternoon she closed the shutter, turned off the shop lights, and decided she wouldn’t wait anymore.

When I lowered my hand to touch myself, what I found between my legs was not what I had gone to sleep with. And worst of all, I didn’t want to pull away.

Four hands lifted her above the sand as the entire circle held its breath, waiting to see how far she would dare to go that afternoon.

I locked the door and it was like flipping a switch: for the first time I was going to strip in front of the camera so someone on the other side could desire me.

I booked two seats in an almost empty theater and gave one to a stranger who read me. I didn’t know if she’d come until I saw her find her seat in the dark.

I took the first motorway exit without thinking. What she’d just told me made it impossible to keep driving, and I still hadn’t confessed what I really wanted.

We’d been drinking for two hours when I half-jokingly blurted out what I’d been imagining for years. He laughed. I didn’t.

I was lightly dressed, wearing almost nothing, when something huge and wet burst out of the undergrowth and seized my arms before I could scream.

When I saw her photo, I knew I wouldn’t sleep that night: I undressed her in my mind and let my imagination cross the kilometers my body couldn’t.

It was almost closing time when the bell rang. He and she came in, asked for black lace, and, without knowing it, offered me the afternoon I’d spent months fantasizing about alone.

I know I shouldn’t, but whenever I walk home alone after dark, I look for him: the stranger who will pin me against the wall without asking permission.

She crossed half the kingdom for a legendary relic; what she didn’t expect was to kneel before those guarding it, or to desire it with every fiber of her body.

“I live inside the lake,” she told him without blinking. Damián took her for an eccentric and followed her anyway. What he found at the bottom was no heaven.

That night I went down for a glass of water and he was awake on the sofa. What happened after that in my bed, with my stepfather breathing on the other side of the door, still burns me.

I followed a trail of blood to a clearing where something waited for me, hanging between the trees. I never imagined the forest creature would choose me as its prey.

She swam toward me without taking her eyes off me, and in the warm evening water I understood that what we had felt as kids had never really gone away.

Clinging to the handrail in the car, all I could do was glance at him and imagine everything that would never happen between us.