Forbidden

We’d been meeting for six years to do the same thing: tell each other things and touch ourselves shamelessly. That night Camila promised a surprise and opened the adjoining room door.

The parish priest asked me to stay after the church was empty. What happened in his office became my Sunday secret, and I don’t want it to end.

When Tobías’s teacher gave me her personal number “in case anything urgent came up,” I knew it had nothing to do with my son’s grades.

Midnight in the empty station. Iván leaned in to kiss me, and for a second the world was simple, until the ghost of the other voice returned to interfere.

I offered to massage her feet without knowing she’d place hers exactly where I didn’t dare ask for it, and that neither of us would say a word.

I spent a year cleaning his house without him ever looking me in the eye. The afternoon I took off my shoes by the pool, I discovered he’d been staring at my feet for months.

She sits two chairs to my left and, while the family talks, my head already has her astride my lap. No one knows. Not even her. Not yet.

I’d kept that desire locked away for years. That dawn, drunk and defenseless, I let it slip in front of the one person who could make it real.

A firm hand on her nape was enough for her to understand that tonight I made the rules. The rest depended on whether she dared to stay.

For twelve years I’d been fading in silence. That night I put on the dress he hated, left without saying a word, and came back changed.

Marina had spent months pretending not to look at him. That night, trapped between the cold glass and her boss’s heat, she stopped pretending.

It started with private jokes and ended with screenshots neither of us should ever have shown the other. She liked girls; I liked her audacity.

When I felt my sleeping son’s body pressed against my back that dawn, I did not move away. Something older than me chose for me, and I knew I no longer wanted to stop it.

She didn’t call me by my name the first time. She looked at me whole, without sleaze and without pity, as if my body were not a problem she had to solve.

He had been sleeping pressed against her back for a week to soothe the baby. A week of pretending not to notice what was happening between them in the dark.

Esa mañana mi hermana me prestó su nombre, su vestido y su vida entera. Esa tarde, un chico me miró como nadie me había mirado y, por primera vez, me reconocí.

My mother got up from the chair, kissed me on the mouth, and without saying a word slid her hand under my pajamas. Only then did I understand what my parents had agreed to during the night.

As soon as I heard her keys fighting the lock, I knew I’d have to play it cool. What I didn’t know was that she’d come home determined not to let me off the hook.

She stood in front of her bedroom door, holding her breath. One step more and reason would have burned away between us.

I’d spent two months pretending to go to the office while really wandering aimlessly around Barcelona. That night I dialed the only number that could save me.