Forbidden

The elevator stopped on the eighth and he got in. I had the last cash in my pocket and the certainty that something was going to happen between us that morning.

I served her the four o’clock coffee as always. Only this time, I’d added something that wasn’t on any schedule.

I crossed the parking lot, hungry and harboring a refined hatred of humanity, and then I saw her fall to the pavement from a punch. She was my boss.

I went in with the key he’d left in the planter. What I didn’t expect was to find her waiting for me, arms crossed and jaw clenched.

When the classroom emptied, he stayed in front of my desk with a clumsy excuse about an exercise he already knew how to do. And I stopped pretending.

Under the morgue lights her hands did not tremble. But when she closed her eyes, she felt her again against the locker-room tiles, sweaty, biting her neck.

Camila closed the blind without taking her eyes off me, and when I got into bed, I could think of nothing else but what she had said about my mother.

The theater was almost empty and the movie was just an excuse: what mattered to me was her hand moving up my thigh in the darkness of the back row.

We had grown up sleeping in adjoining rooms, until one night a sound on the other side of the wall made me understand I no longer looked at her like a sister.

I only meant to rest on the table for a while. I never imagined I’d end up with my hand inside my clothes, biting my lip so no one in the hallway could hear me.

That morning she thought she was alone. I shut my office door, asked not to be disturbed, and opened the app just as she walked into the bedroom.

I got there forty minutes early, turned off the engine in the underground garage, and then the smell of that dawn came rushing back to me like a current.

When Sofía opened that closet box, I knew the night wouldn’t end like the others. And yet I didn’t move.

I warned her that if I didn’t like it, I’d drop her at the next corner. She smiled, reclined my seat, and asked me to close my eyes for a second.

When I went into the kitchen she already had the lasagna in the oven and two glasses poured. I pressed her against the marble before she could set the dish down.

The first client asked me for something that wasn’t in my contract. When I went back to the room, Salvador was breathing like he’d been awake for hours.

What started as a silly afternoon on his sofa ended with me kneeling between his legs, learning that some favors can’t be undone.

I stopped in the hallway with my hand in the air. The sighs coming from my sister’s room wouldn’t let me knock or turn back.

Four years ago, her mother walked in just in time to stop the sin. This time, with everyone gone and the band booming below, no one was opening that door.

Daniel took the wrong alley at the worst possible moment. Weeks later, in front of the mirror, a stranger with his eyes began to appeal to him more than she should.