Forbidden

Thirty-two years old, red nails, and a way of looking at women that seemed like a greeting and a question. I was a married woman. That is, until the night I forgot my keys.

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.

When I saw his socks lying on the hotel bathroom floor, I knew I was about to cross a line I could never uncross with my best friend.

When I offered to shower together to wash off the sweat, I thought it would be an innocent gesture. The way she looked at me from the bathroom door said otherwise.

The door opened just as Carolina crossed the hall naked, with another man behind her. That night I learned my silence would have a price I never imagined.

When I opened my eyes in that white room, my mother was standing naked in front of me, and nothing we had been taught about good and evil ever made sense again.

Every morning I picked her up for work. That dawn, out in the middle of the fields, I discovered she could no longer hide what she felt when she looked at me.

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

The two goons dragged me off to tour the machines while she stayed alone with the owner. When I came back, the desk was empty.

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.

The tide brought me notebooks and pencils the same day everything I thought was solid between Tomás and me began to crumble. I had no idea what I would use them for.

Adela had always avoided being touched. That January night, a translucent-skinned stranger sat on the edge of her bed and knew she could not send her away.

I hadn’t seen her in two years when she came to my door broken, feverish, with a name that wasn’t mine on her lips.

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

Her message came Tuesday at four: “My boyfriend’s away. I need to get out.” My best friend’s sister was waiting for me, eager.

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.

When I learned I had only a few years left, I decided to live them without rules, starting with the person who slept three meters from my door every night.

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.

When I opened that old folder on his computer, I never imagined a photo of her would be the beginning of my own betrayal.