Forbidden

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.

I only knew Beatriz because she was my wife’s friend. One night she came down to the kitchen with an unexpected proposal.

When Inés opened the door to the two men in uniform at exactly midnight, I knew the promise of a quiet night had been a delicious lie.

I thought I’d lost the bag containing my most intimate photos. When the doctor messaged me that night, I knew he’d already seen exactly who I was.

I went in looking for lingerie to please another man and came out discovering that a woman’s hands can make tremble what I had never felt tremble with myself.

I saved his number as “S.1.” Two days to regret it, and not once did I want to: I wanted them to use me again, worse than the first time.

Carolina said she was bored of men. But when I dropped my pants beside her pool, her eyes never left me for a second.

I saw him in briefs only once and since then I can’t sleep without thinking about him. The fact that he’s my half-brother should be enough to stop me, but it isn’t.

When I ran into him on that beach after three years without seeing each other, he was no longer the boy who used to throw sand in my hair. Something in his look told me this wasn’t going to end well.

My wife came back from that visit with a different gleam in her eyes. Her cousin was the only witness, and she took months to tell me what really happened.

Her post on the book app said “looking for a baby.” I answered without thinking, and for almost a year I learned to obey every word she said over video call.

It was six in the morning and the bar was empty. He poured me a tequila, looked at me the way he’d been looking at me all night, and told me he wouldn’t let me leave so soon.

My sister’s friends kept coming to my door with one excuse or another. What I never imagined was who would end up in front of me at three in the morning.

“Good night, princess,” my wife whispered in my ear. And something inside me, something she had planted weeks earlier, answered as if it had been waiting for that name all my life.

That morning, when I half-opened my eyes on the mattress pushed up against the balcony, she was already there on hers, smoking, waiting for me to turn over.

The old neighbor gave me the betrayal photo before I said goodbye. I could only think about Sofía’s door and whether she’d let me back into her house.

I needed company. Without thinking, I asked him if he wanted to get in with me. What happened next changed everything I thought I knew about myself and my friends.

We climbed the rusty stairs and heard moans behind the curtain. I couldn’t stop watching—or feeling my best friend pressed against my shoulder.