Forbidden

When I opened my eyes at nine in the morning, Daniel wasn’t the only one in bed anymore. And his best friend was looking at me like he’d been waiting for that exact moment for hours.

Daniela had disappeared without leaving me a number. I was still counting the days when I saw her at the café, smiling at him the way she never smiled at me.

I parked three streets away, climbed to the sill, and slipped into the room where she was sleeping with her husband. I only put a finger to her lips.

When I saw his silhouette crouched behind the glass, I knew he’d been watching us for a while. And instead of stopping, I held his gaze.

When I walked into the bar and saw her at the back, I knew I wasn’t sleeping that night. Three months without her hands weighed more than I was willing to admit.

Catalina came out onto the terrace in a white nightgown, sat beside me without a word, and that night we stopped being just siblings in the house by the sea.

When the other students left and the evening light came through the windows, she locked the door and asked me to play for her—just for her.

At three in the morning, Damián was still sunk into my sofa, shirt soaked with sweat and breathing heavy. And I was no longer thinking about anything else.

The office door was left ajar, and without meaning to, I became a witness to something I shouldn’t have seen or heard, but couldn’t look away from.

Diego’s voice in the audio sounded defeated. When I heard her name, I knew he’d been cheating on me from his office for months.

When the fourth escort entered the room in a red dress, the tray of drinks slipped from my hands. She was my wife.

She was twenty-five and, on paper, his stepmother. Dinner began with seafood and white wine, and neither of them planned to end it at his place.

The number wasn’t in my contacts, but the first two lines forced me to read to the end. What came next changed everything I remembered about Saturday.

I recognized the moans behind that door. I knew every cadence. But the woman at the desk had something my wife swore she would never have.

Three hours earlier I’d bitten her neck under warm water. Now another man held her arm like she was his, and she didn’t pull away.

Lucía looked at me over the fire and I knew that night we wouldn’t be sleeping alone. Two bottles of wine were missing and no one was talking about going to bed anymore.

It was our first sleepover with her parents away. When she turned out the light, her hand found mine beneath the sheets, and I understood she’d waited years for that gesture.

Between boxes, with the door barely closed, she bit her lip to keep from screaming while I held her against my chest. No one could hear us.

When I went barefoot into the kitchen that morning and saw my father sitting there in his underwear, I knew something was going to break before the first coffee.