Forbidden

I had promised Daniel I would never look at another man. And yet, when he closed that room’s door, I was the one who took the first step.

I kept telling myself it was only part of the therapy, that it was nothing personal. But with another man’s cum running down my thighs, I didn’t believe a single word of it anymore.

When Diego came out of the shower with his towel barely tied, Lucía knew that week was going to be very hard to endure in silence.

I opened the door expecting an awkward visit. I never imagined that man would make me kneel in my own kitchen and completely forget I was his daughter-in-law.

When she crossed the workshop threshold that night, she knew she would leave as a different woman. She wasn’t going to resist. She was going to surrender, because her husband’s life depended on it.

My body was still burning from the weekend with him. I never imagined that same night I’d hear, through a door, the conversation that would break me apart.

That hot afternoon, Lucía sat beside him on the sofa and confessed something no brother-in-law should ever hear. Damián knew he was doomed before he answered.

She dissected other people’s minds for a living; so did he. It only took sharing a table for the two of them to stop pretending they were just looking for conversation.

She climbed the stairs knowing that, once she crossed that door, the naive woman she had been until then would cease to exist forever.

I went up the mountain alone under a red alert, fleeing my husband. I wasn’t looking for shelter: I was looking for impact, for something that would finally break the glass I’d been trapped in.

He sat on the sofa, a handspan away from me, with that repentant-boy face that worked so well on him. And I, who hadn’t slept in weeks, knew I was going to forgive him again.

That morning she looked at her hands and didn’t recognize them: they were the same hands that had signed a commitment and the same ones that had betrayed everything for him.

For years I pretended not to understand why she lingered when passing that shop. The afternoon I followed her inside, I realized my mother had already stopped belonging only to my father.

A photograph pinned to the studio wall was enough to make the professor understand he could never look at her like a student again.

She told herself she was only helping him feel better. But every afternoon, with her boyfriend out of the house, the distance between them grew shorter.

“She came to see her boyfriend, the doctor,” the receptionist told him. Damián had no girlfriend. But when she described the visitor’s blush, he knew exactly who was waiting inside.

When he went down to the supermarket for beer, his uncle cornered me against the freshly painted wall and I knew my boyfriend wouldn’t be the one breaking in the bed.

Adrián fell asleep ten minutes after takeoff. The man by the window waited until he heard his steady breathing before leaning toward Marina and whispering in her ear.

I started by telling him made-up dreams about other men. What he didn’t know was that every word that made him moan had really happened that same week.

I took off my ring before getting into the water. I didn’t want any souvenir photo to give me away, or for him to get ideas that weren’t his to have.