Forbidden

I had my ex’s blackmail on my phone and the law firm’s bill on my mind. When he saw the videos and smiled, I knew that fee wouldn’t be paid with money.

I promised him this time would be different. I kept it up for exactly three weeks, until the bar bouncer arrived an hour early.

For months we kept crossing paths in the water without saying a word. That Sunday, when his hands brushed my waist on the ladder, I stopped pretending I didn’t want him.

For weeks I kept him at bay with a smile and an “not yet.” That night, when his hand found mine, I knew I didn’t want to keep waiting.

He ordered me into the confessional in my finest lingerie and told me to whisper my sins to the priest. What I didn’t expect was for him to decide I needed penance.

She was forty-two, newly buried in a marriage, and desperate to feel desired again. That night, at the bar, someone was watching her.

I asked for a bar job at a roadside club. Three weeks later I was serving drinks in a thong, heels, and a new name: Adriana.

She walked down the carpeted corridor with her heart racing: behind that door waited the man she had spent half her life imagining.

I had watched him for days from the terrace, pretending I wasn’t. That hot afternoon I decided to stop pretending and went down with a glass of lemonade in my hand.

I only peeked through the crack in the door for a second. It was long enough for it to stay with me forever, and ruin every night that came after.

You texted me “I’m hungry,” and I knew exactly what you wanted. We’re not a couple, not even my type, but there’s something between us no one would understand.

“Do you want to try it before you decide?” he said, and Mariana understood that neither of them was going to be talking only about the projector that afternoon.

I didn’t find him attractive, but feeling desired turned me on. When he climbed onto the stool to check the fan, I knew exactly how I’d repay him.

I opened his bedroom door expecting to find him asleep. What I saw brought back memories I thought were buried, and I couldn’t bring myself to turn away.

He came up behind my son with Bruno pressed against my back, holding my breath. I knew it was wrong, and that was exactly why I couldn’t stop.

It had been less than five minutes into the movie when his hand was already reaching under my shorts, and instead of pulling away, I prayed no one in the theater would turn to look at us.

When she told him she was “hanging in there,” Tino understood that word weighed the same as his own: years of cold sheets. And in the middle of the street, they decided to fix it.

I’d spent years swallowing her taunts and playing the patient friend. That August afternoon, on her balcony facing the sea, something inside me broke.

I never imagined that the elegant, serene woman who raised me was hiding, at two in the morning, another completely different woman on the living-room sofa.

I went down to the living room half asleep and found her on the floor, in leggings, following a video. Then she turned her head, smiled, and asked if I wanted to join her.