Forbidden

She tied the ropes to her wrists and stepped toward the mud, unaware that someone was watching from the undergrowth, a sharpened knife in hand.

I’d been filling her head with the idea for years, until the beach trip gave us the perfect setting. What I didn’t expect was the name she would say.

When Damián offered me the body of his model, I knew the bill was coming due. And it came, on his bed, with my wrists cuffed behind my back.

I hadn’t seen Mateo, Diego’s father, in years. When we ran into each other that afternoon, I never imagined I’d end up on his sofa with borrowed red swim trunks and my breath coming fast.

We shared a room to save money. I was married, a father of two. Then came that night at the hotel when he decided we were going to be something else.

We sat facing each other with a martini each. One rule: see, talk to, smell each other. Touching was forbidden. And she had an ice cube in her hand.

Bruno was waiting at the door with a bouquet of roses and a smile that was not a brother’s. The apartment still smelled like paint, and we had the whole afternoon to break it in.

Until that night I thought I already knew all my limits. One look, one gesture from her, and everything I thought I knew about my desire collapsed in silence.

The music was playing far away, the family was toasting downstairs, and I was still sitting on the bed, not understanding when his kisses had stopped being a game.

When she came into the shower, she said nothing. She only pressed her nipples against my back and whispered for me to let her take control. My wife was thousands of miles away, with another man.

I thought the rain would leave me with nothing. Twenty meters away I saw the dark-skinned boy by the bench, soaked, and I knew the night was only beginning.

When I went down the stairs naked, my sister-in-law still had no idea what kind of surprise my father-in-law had prepared for her that night.

After years carrying that secret, I said it out loud: my wife slept with other men, and I knew it. What I saw in my uncle’s eyes was not judgment, but something darker.

As soon as the last classmates left, she went upstairs. She took off her skirt first. Then her blouse. Then everything else.

Santiago walked into the classroom that Monday in that fitted shirt and with a deep voice that raised goosebumps on my skin from the first word he spoke.

Natalia had her legs spread on the table and the doctor was pretending to apply cream. I watched from the corner, motionless, not wanting him to stop.

I slipped in quietly and found him by the window, absorbed in what was happening across the street. My youngest son was no longer a boy, and I saw everything.

Diego sent me affectionate messages while I was, inside that jacuzzi, feeling Sergio’s hands on my waist and pushing my ass back against him.

Alone in the house for the first time in months, I turned on the screen with the vague intention of killing time. No one could imagine what I was about to discover about myself.

She was my best friend’s girlfriend, and she knew exactly what effect she had on me. Every skirt, every neckline was a message meant only for me.