Forbidden

She swam toward me without looking away, and in the warm water of dusk I understood that what we had felt as kids had never really disappeared.

My whole life I believed I belonged only to him. The afternoon he walked into the dean’s office and found me on the desk, I discovered how much he liked seeing me with another man.

She went back to confession every week for the same reason, always leaving out the most important part: that the man on the other side of the grille was the owner of all her sins.

I got home, flung my heels through the air, and let my imagination do what I’d never dare do at the office.

His heart was racing and the sheets were soaked at seven degrees in the early morning. The problem wasn’t the cold: it was who he’d dreamed about.

The store was closed and she had the whole morning free. The driver noticed before she did, and that smile in the mirror made her think things she shouldn’t.

We shared a hallway, an elevator and a coffeemaker, but never a real word. Only what each of us imagined when the other turned away.

The will said my family’s fortune had been built between my mother’s legs. That very night I understood it was now my turn.

I slipped barefoot to the chapel at midnight to ask forgiveness for my dreams. I never imagined something waited coiled in the shadows, ready to teach me what my body had kept silent.

I tripped over a root, and before I could get up, she was already on top of me. Her cold skin brushed mine, and I knew that night I wouldn’t leave the forest unchanged.

She came to the clearing seeking silence and found torches, naked bodies, and dozens of deer masks waiting for her as if they had always known she would return that night.

No one believed him when he said the beast was real. So he went back into the mountains to find her, even if it meant losing himself forever in the snow and in her claws.

I gave him two kisses in front of his mother and, without anyone noticing, decided to play along until neither of us thought we’d go that far that morning.

I had never told anyone that my body wouldn’t respond. I confessed it to her, my mother’s friend, never imagining she would end up teaching me everything I was missing.

He arrived at the den little more than a chained skeleton. The she-wolf promised to teach him what it meant to serve her... and he learned better than she expected.

I woke up unscarred in a bed that wasn’t mine, healed by a stranger of impossible beauty. What he didn’t tell me was what that cure had done to my body... and my desire.

When the attic window gave way to the wind, he no longer saw the servant who served his coffee: he saw the soaked woman who held his whole world together.

My friend thought we’d just come for some fresh air. I’d already picked my prey: the dark-haired man playing with his son ten meters from us.

When the train left without me, I thought the night was lost. Then I saw him across the platform, motionless, looking at me as if he’d been waiting forever.

—You don’t have to believe you can —he whispered in her ear—. I do. Your only job tonight is to surrender and let your body obey.