Forbidden

He’d spent months sleeping beside a woman who prayed instead of touching him. Then he walked into the veterinarian’s office, and she locked the door.

I went into the clinic with my back wrecked from work. I left with hard nipples, overwhelming desire, and an address saved in my phone.

A small-town, religious married woman never imagined the secret photos my husband kept would end up all over the region.

He texted me at ten in the morning, and I knew that afternoon, with the house empty, I’d give him exactly what his girlfriend would never allow.

When she entered that club hidden behind a theology bookstore, Marlene knew her husband’s freedom would be paid for with every garment she shed before the judge.

He went up those five floors to argue with his girlfriend’s mother. He had no idea her husband was home, or the proposal that would come out of his mouth that afternoon.

My wife left for work and I was left alone with my reports. Then I heard the key in the lock and she came in, unannounced, in that red miniskirt.

When he brushed her forearm as he left the restaurant, Marina knew it hadn’t ended at the table. He was her husband’s best friend.

I came out of the shower dripping, thinking it was my mother at the door. But when I opened it, there she was—the only woman I could never get out of my head.

I found him half-naked in the kitchen’s dim light, and his gaze traveled over my nightgown. In that instant I knew there would be no turning back.

“I started thinking and came up with a few ideas,” he wrote. Three hours later, a stranger was ringing our doorbell.

When the dressing room door opened, I knew it wasn’t my assistant. It was him, and he had that look that made me choose between desire and guilt.

She only wanted to understand her body before getting married. She never imagined that therapy group would lead her to betray everything she believed about herself.

I held her gaze while lying, my hand still remembering his skin as it trembled against the cup, praying she wouldn’t connect the dots.

I told Andrés that therapy was helping me clear my head. I didn’t tell him that every session left my body shaking and my conscience split in two.

At three in the morning I sent the client my personal number. When her name appeared on my phone, I knew I’d crossed a point of no return.

Each excuse she gave my fiancé was more elaborate than the last. I left that office trembling, aching, and with a smile I couldn’t hide.

—I need you to sleep with my fiancée —he told me, as calmly as if he were asking the time. And I still didn’t know the trip would change me more than it changed them.

I climbed the fourteen stairs with the cold stuck to my clothes and the secret stuck to my skin: no one in the building imagined what was happening one floor below.

Marisol sat on the armchair in her robe. She had just filmed her revenge with the man her husband despised most, and there was no turning back.