Forbidden

Tomorrow marks eight years since that last night with him, and I still wonder whether I was brave or just selfish to ask him for that.

I was her assistant. We worked twelve hours a day. That night, barefoot on her sofa, she looked at me like never before, and I knew something had changed forever.

I told the guys at the bar I liked men and, without meaning to, opened a door I couldn’t close. That same night, someone followed me into the bathroom.

I bit the pillow when he said that name. And then everything I’d hidden for years began to unravel between the sheets, blow by blow.

When I opened the door to the empty apartment, I wasn’t expecting to see him there with that smile. The client was running late, and the clock was silently marking our only chance.

When she leaned in to say goodbye at the door, her mouth found mine and everything I’d buried for years came rushing back.

He’d asked that no one in the building see him. When she locked the door and pressed her back to the wood, she was already trembling in his hands.

I’d spent five years waiting for my husband, and that night, with my sister-in-law’s lover in front of me, I realized my body could no longer bear silence.

I went downstairs for ice and he shut the door behind me. With the party going on outside, I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop him even if I wanted to.

When I leaned out the car window to see if my sister was still awake, I found him in his window, smoking. And I knew he wasn’t going to look away.

When I put my hand on his chest and didn’t take it away, I knew that afternoon wasn’t going to end like the others. He was twice my age and smelled like cold beer.

For months I kept running into him in the elevator, knowing he was out of my reach. That night I found a yellow sign with a phone number and a binding spell.

When he tied the black mask over my eyes and opened the private-room door, I never imagined that one of those masks hid someone I’d known since childhood.

I heard it through the ajar door: the laborer was fucking the secretary in the storeroom. That afternoon I went back to the office for more than documents.

We were having a perfect day when she came to sit on my lap. I never imagined that one touch, one curiosity, and one mistake of mine would erase the line between father and daughter.

The prince’s convoy rolled in unannounced between the cranes. He got out of the second car, took off his sunglasses, and I knew those three months of silence would break tonight.

The doorbell rang at half past seven and I knew my marriage had just changed forever. She came down the stairs without a bra, looked at them, and smiled.

When I opened the door, he wasn’t alone: behind him, wearing that practiced rent-boy smile, he had brought a man I had never seen in the neighborhood in my life.

I’d been lying to Mateo for months, and when he understood that I knew everything, I didn’t fall apart. I put on the blue dress, left the house, and crossed the city to meet Adrián.