Desire

Three nights of messages with a stranger, and when he asked if I was alone, I decided to tell him the truth about myself just before giving him my address.

I opened the door wearing only a button-front dress and nothing underneath. If he understood the invitation, great; if not, I’d know how to make it clear.

I never told her what I imagined at night while she slept beside me. This is the confession I’ve kept silent since we arrived in that city.

I promised him this time would be different. I kept it up for exactly three weeks, until the bar bouncer arrived an hour early.

For months we kept crossing paths in the water without saying a word. That Sunday, when his hands brushed my waist on the ladder, I stopped pretending I didn’t want him.

When I knelt in front of him while he was driving, I knew those last miles of road would stay with me far longer than I admitted.

For weeks I kept him at bay with a smile and an “not yet.” That night, when his hand found mine, I knew I didn’t want to keep waiting.

I put on the red heels, the baby doll, and the wig, placed a random order, and waited for a stranger to knock on my door in the rain.

The walls were paper-thin. We heard her moaning in the next room and realized she’d been listening to us the whole time, waiting for an invitation.

I’d been watching her train for months without daring to do anything. That night she invited me to her house and I discovered the shy woman from the gym was hiding someone very different.

For months I watched her through the peephole at 7:15 sharp. What I didn’t know was that she counted my steps behind hers every time she went downstairs.

The first morning I found her in the kitchen almost naked, moving as if I didn’t exist. That’s when I understood her husband’s game had only just begun.

She walked down the carpeted corridor with her heart racing: behind that door waited the man she had spent half her life imagining.

I said yes to the game for one night only: a dress, a wig, and a name that wasn’t mine. I never imagined the girl in the mirror would look back as if she’d been waiting for me.

Marcos thought he was in charge of the game. His wife looked at me over her shoulder, let the towel fall, and I understood that she set the only rule.

I grew up understanding naturism as something natural, but nothing prepared me for the day my mother’s boyfriend stopped covering himself in front of me.

We had climbed over the fence of an empty estate. He set the pace with his hand on my neck, and I let myself go without thinking of anything else.

I had watched him for days from the terrace, pretending I wasn’t. That hot afternoon I decided to stop pretending and went down with a glass of lemonade in my hand.

I only peeked through the crack in the door for a second. It was long enough for it to stay with me forever, and ruin every night that came after.

I get up early so I can have the gym to myself. But for the past three weeks, there’s been a much better reason to arrive before anyone else: him, and that scandalous smile.