Forbidden

When Valentina walked into the kitchen that morning, he was leaning on the island with a coffee in his hand and a look that was anything but fraternal.

The flyer promised an orgy, couples, strippers. What happened at that motel was something else: he stripped me in front of thirty strangers.

They’d gone years without saying it out loud. That night someone did, and the two women stood up from the table without looking back.

On Monday he only realized that he couldn’t take his eyes off me. On Friday he gave me the library key and summoned me for six.

I slipped off my heel beneath the tablecloth and, while he smiled absentmindedly, started reminding him who had control that night.

He was twenty-one and had been looking at me for months in a way I pretended not to notice. That night my son went to bed and we were left alone.

I’d always liked men. Or so I thought—until the night my friend looked at me differently, and something inside me answered before I could choose.

It had been a month since I couldn’t get that corner of Industria out of my head. That night I decided to go back, but this time I wouldn’t be alone.

When he called me up to his desk and told me to stop distracting him, I knew that by Friday my thong wasn’t going home with me.

The hallway was silent, his door ajar. I knew I shouldn’t go in. I went in anyway.

She saw her walk in and something stopped in her chest. She couldn’t explain it, but from that moment on she could think of nothing but her.

I went to the airport in a red dress that was too tight, with a secret between my legs. That night, the red got into our skin, our mouths, everything.

I was forty and she was fifty-two. It took only seeing her adjust her clothes, believing herself alone, for the air in that house to become unbreathable.