Forbidden

For years I accepted to please them, then ran to the bathroom to spit it out. With him I discovered that the barrier I struggled most to break was also the one hiding the most pleasure.

I went into his room just to talk and ended up discovering something that woke every hormone in my body. Once he caught me, there was no pretending I didn’t want him.

She had never touched a belly like that without gloves and a gown in between. This time it was Marisol’s, her sister-in-law’s, and she couldn’t pretend she was only there to feel for the twins’ kicks.

I was days from giving birth and could think of only one thing. When the contraction bent me double with pain, I asked Rocío to put her hand beneath the sheet.

When the bathroom light suddenly came on, I froze, bikini bottoms in my hand and her eyes locked on mine. I knew I wasn’t in charge anymore.

I went down to the garden in the dark, not knowing that this time she wouldn’t leave me alone with her underwear: she had something of her mother’s saved for me.

She had something hidden in her hand, and that smile promised nothing innocent. “Stick out your tongue,” she ordered, and I already knew I would obey.

Every night she asked me for something new through the bars of her window, and I couldn’t bring myself to say no, even if it meant rummaging through my own mother’s laundry basket.

Carla appeared barefoot among the shadows of the garden, with that good-girl face that hid the most perverse girl I had ever known.

“I’m your lady and I order you to stay still,” she whispered. I had survived three combat missions, but nothing had prepared me to obey her.

I was trained to please and obey, but that half-open door awakened something else: a spark of defiance that even cold rings against my skin couldn’t extinguish.

I was still naked on the bed when the door opened, and for a second neither of us knew what to do with what the other had just seen.

She crossed half the kingdom for a legendary relic; what she didn’t expect was to kneel before those guarding it, or to desire it with every fiber of her body.

I watched him from before his failure. He said I was too perfect to walk in the mud, not knowing that sentence condemned him never to leave it.

That night I went down for a glass of water and he was awake on the sofa. What happened after that in my bed, with my stepfather breathing on the other side of the door, still burns me.

She swam toward me without taking her eyes off me, and in the warm evening water I understood that what we had felt as kids had never really gone away.

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, tossed my heels into the air, and let my imagination do what I’d never dare do at the office.

His heart was racing and the sheet was soaked in the seven-degree dawn. The problem wasn’t the cold —it was who he’d dreamed about.