Forbidden

She showed up in my rest room at three in the morning, married and dangerous, and I knew that night was going to wreck my whole life, one look after another.

She arrived at the school with her son’s expulsion letter in her handbag. She left with trembling knees and a secret she could never tell her husband.

When he staggered against me on that packed bus, I felt something I should never have felt. Since that day I haven’t been able to think of anything else.

I thought nobody had seen me that afternoon at my grandfather’s house. I was wrong: there were a pair of eyes behind the door, and they took fifteen years to speak.

What happened that night between Lorena and me was never supposed to come out. But the scream from the other side of the wall told me it was already too late.

My husband gave me a spa massage for our seventh anniversary. What he never imagined was that another woman would teach me how much I still had to discover.

In the mirror I stopped being Sebastián. I put on her stockings, her skirt, her perfume, and became the woman nobody knew I carried inside.

I found her in a bikini filming videos by the pool. Dad’s new wife. Eight years younger than me. And she thought she could order me around.

His family was eating at the big table while he fucked me in the stable, moving with desperate urgency, as if they could walk in at any second.

I climbed over her garden fence at nine at night thinking only of confessing my feelings. I left with a video that was going to change both our lives.

I grew up between prayers and prohibitions, convinced that pleasure was sin. Until the woman next door sat beside me on the bus and everything began to change.

I’d been trying for years to get her to give in again. That afternoon, between joints and caresses on the couch, she sat up and kissed me like before.

That morning, her husband left on patrol without looking at her. By nine, she had already chosen the clothes she would wear to open the door to another man.

He knew me when I was a shy boy. Years later I opened the door to him dressed and made up, and in his eyes I saw there was nothing left of the friend he thought he knew.

I came out of the shower wrapped in a towel, knowing my father was alone. That night I wanted to see how far he’d dare go without alcohol.

Marina shot me a look through the steam when they came through the door. I already knew then that the night wouldn’t end as we had planned when we came upstairs.

When I moved her panties aside to tend her wound, I thought she’d protest. But she only pressed her face into the pillow and opened her legs a little wider.

I went down to the garage ready to cry alone, but the hand that tapped my car window that night wasn’t bringing comfort: it was bringing an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Everyone in the neighborhood wanted her, but that birthday afternoon she discovered just how far she was willing to go to be the center of her own family again.

When he opened his shirt and I felt his cologne fill the kitchen, I knew that breakfast with my nephew wasn’t going to end with a quiet coffee.