Desire

They had spent weeks trying to meet. When they finally closed the car door, the parking lot faded away and there were no more excuses to pretend they were only friends.

Marina had spent months pretending not to look at him. That night, trapped between the cold glass and her boss’s heat, she stopped pretending.

Every time I walked into the garage, he looked up before he even heard the door. That afternoon, with the shutter half down, I stopped pretending.

It started with private jokes and ended with screenshots neither of us should ever have shown the other. She liked girls; I liked her audacity.

What we had lived in the shadows, hidden from everyone. It took me eleven months to understand that, for him, I had never been anything more than a game between friends.

In front of the bedroom mirror, she discovered her body still knew how to ask. What she did not expect was for someone to be willing to listen that very night.

There is one instant, just when the door closes and I hear the car driving away, when I stop being her husband and become something very different.

The toy was still on the nightstand, staring at me like a witness. And my body remembered everything she’d taught me just hours before.

We had whispered about it a thousand times and I never believed it would happen. But that night she knelt in the middle of the room and all I could do was sit and watch.

I thought selling a few photos would be harmless. But that night, phone in hand, I discovered how badly I wanted someone who was only my friend.

I had forty minutes of class ahead of me, the camera on and the entire dildo inside me. I only had to keep my face still. That was all.

She came downstairs with a smile that was no longer the same and one hand hidden behind her back. “Guess what I’ve brought,” she said. That night I understood what she was becoming.

It’s eleven, I’m alone again, and your last message is still glowing on the screen. I turn off the light, and then my mind —and my hands— decide for me.

A month went by without hearing from him. When he finally wrote, I knew that night I was going to give him something I’d never dared to give before.

The light stayed red, his latest photo stayed on my screen, and my hands had already stopped asking permission. I just had to get home. Or not.

We’d been sharing an apartment for two years, and she had never looked at me like that. That summer afternoon I found out what she was really hiding on her phone when I walked in unannounced.

I don’t know who you are or where you are, but as I write this I imagine you reading me, and that idea is exactly what’s soaking my thong.

I thought she wouldn’t come. But the doorbell rang, I looked out the window, and there she was, with that innocent face that had kept me up for years.

That warm stain on my dress changed everything: for the first time I understood what it meant to desire and be desired, and I never wanted to go back.

The first night I only wanted to look. By the third, I could no longer stop my hand. When she turned in the darkness and smiled at me, I knew I was lost.