Desire

Our bedroom window faced his rooftop exactly. That night I realized the idea of being watched aroused me more than I’d ever admit.

We’d met to review for finals, but by six o’clock the books were closed and no one wanted to leave. What came after still makes my pulse race.

She pulled my pants down in the middle of the path without a word, and I understood that afternoon my body didn’t belong to me, but to her.

I opened the curtain just enough to confirm my suspicion: he was outside, with his hand inside his pants, waiting to see something he shouldn’t have seen.

At eighteen I entered medical school with the country’s highest score. At twenty-four I still didn’t know what an orgasm was. This is my story.

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 came home at six in the morning with her perfume clinging to my body and my ass still red. My wife was waiting, 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 had spent three years living by one rule between partners. That cold night, in her green dress and the 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 to his chest, I stopped knowing 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 immobilize her. I tied them so she would understand, before anything happened, that her body was no longer hers that night.

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 me, in a low voice, whether 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.