Fantasies

I turn off the light, open the story, and let my hand drift down. In my head there’s always someone in the corner of the room, watching, waiting to come in.

The straps tightened the more I pulled. I was tied, blind, and soaked on my own bed when the bedroom door opened and I heard two voices.

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.

He watched me from the armchair while I knelt in front of the stranger I’d picked at the bar. It was my first night being a whore.

I watched her fold sheets in those light-colored leggings and prayed she wouldn’t notice the bulge in my shorts. Then one day she turned and asked why I was looking at her like that.

I asked him to imagine my hand on his thigh. I didn’t expect to feel his trembling under mine, or for the trance to become mine too.

Twenty years married, and each hid a secret of their own: him in strangers’ bathrooms, me not yet knowing what the yoga woman was about to awaken in me.

Forty minutes earlier my hands were shaking. Now I’m holding the harness, and for the first time in eighteen years, I’m the one deciding what happens in this room.

I showed her the video, and she collapsed on the living-room floor. But when she rose again, she was no longer the woman her husband had humiliated for twenty years.

I saw him in the rearview mirror: sporty, with a hard bulge under his Lycra, waiting for my signal. I rolled down the windows and I still don’t know why.

Rubén filled the coffee maker while, on the other side of the window, our women stopped pretending. Neither of us looked away, and then his hand found mine.

In the car, with his hand on the wheel and mine between his legs, I understood that that night I would make the rules. And he would obey every one.

No one around me suspects it, but all day long I obey orders that exist only in my head... and I want more and more for them to become real.

I left work without underwear and with my blouse half-open. I only wanted to feel the air between my legs. I had no idea who I’d find in the train car.

That afternoon, sitting across from me, Mariela stopped talking about her problems and began unbuttoning her blouse with a calm that froze my breath.

My father taught me that monsters stay in the closet if you don’t open the door. What I never told him is how badly I want mine to dare to come out.

Beneath the austere habit she wore a secret of black lace. And every time he arrived with the provisions, that secret burned her a little more.