Forbidden

Diego looked at me before turning off the engine. We both knew what it meant if I invited him up. Even so, I opened the car door.

He was big, calloused, with hands that did the heavy work without ever complaining. He wasn’t the man I would have imagined. But that snowy afternoon, something broke.

We’d spent years avoiding those childhood games, until one winter afternoon I asked him to take me on his bike and my hand landed where it shouldn’t.

I spent six months waiting for him on the same corner. One night in an empty house was enough for him to stop waiting for me.

I’d spent years filling her head with the idea, until a trip to the beach gave us the perfect setting. What I didn’t expect was the name she would say.

I thought I was just going to meet an older woman. When I understood what they really wanted from me, I was already naked in her room and there was no turning back.

I put down my suitcase without knowing that one of the wardrobe drawers held something that would change the course of that weekend at my partner’s family home.

I thought it was a dildo. When she removed the blindfold and I saw the mirror, I understood she’d been preparing me for something very different.

When Damián offered me the body of his model, I knew the bill was coming due. And it came, on his bed, with my wrists cuffed behind my back.

My boss introduced him with a laugh, like it was an inside joke. Seven days later, that man had me bent over my own desk.

I hadn’t seen Mateo, Diego’s father, in years. When we ran into each other that afternoon, I never imagined I’d end up on his sofa with borrowed red swim trunks and my breath coming fast.

We shared a room to save money. I was married, a father of two. Then came that night at the hotel when he decided we were going to be something else.

I went into the doctor's office because of abdominal pain. I left with a number saved in my phone and a question I'd avoided answering for years.

We sat facing each other with a martini each. One rule: see, talk to, smell each other. Touching was forbidden. And she had an ice cube in her hand.

Looking for sex online had always gone well—until that Friday afternoon in room 207, when I learned you never know with strangers.

When I came out of the bathroom in heels, stockings, and a red baby doll, his face said it all: I was no longer his best friend’s “daughter,” I was something else.

That Saturday my aunt left in a hurry. Her lover was still asleep in the room. What I did in silence changed everything I thought I knew about myself.

Three months trading messages with a married stranger, until that afternoon at the mall when we knew we could no longer keep it online.

We’d spent years avoiding each other’s eyes at every family dinner. That New Year’s Eve, when everyone had fallen asleep, she set down the glasses and kissed me in the kitchen without saying a word.

She only came to drop off some papers. When she sat on the sofa and crossed her legs, I knew the problem was going to be mine, not hers.