Forbidden

When she turned her head on the summit, I knew it was her. The girl from that party. Seven years later, her gaze was still claiming what I never finished.

She climbed three floors to a door with no sign, thinking she knew what she was there for. What she found in that room wasn’t in any ad.

I sipped my coffee, pretending to focus on my phone, but I was watching them both. If they knew I’d already had every inch of their bodies separately, we’d all have left together already.

I was thirty-two and still had never let myself think about another woman without feeling ashamed. That night I turned off the light, breathed deeply, and stopped running.

I pulled a dildo from the drawer that still smelled of her and found her with her gaze lowered, biting her lip as if I’d caught her in something more intimate than a secret.

When he confessed his fetish that night, I knew I could never look at him the same way again. I told him it would happen only once. We both knew that was a lie.

When I looked out the window of my new room and saw them naked in the pool, I knew that year would teach me far more than biochemistry.

She’d been dimmed for years by a deep pain, until that grave voice filled the room and I saw her eyes shine again like when I first met her.

When we got off the plane we had a check and a secret. The check paid the debts; the secret, though, can’t be erased, not even with the tattoo covered.

When I saw Iván raise his phone and smile, I knew the drill had been a trap—and that I wouldn’t leave that basement intact.

I hadn’t done anything wrong. Even so, while I scrubbed the floor on my knees, I felt my body belonged to him more than ever.

I went into the living room in my schoolgirl skirt ready to surprise her. I didn’t expect to find her naked, bow in hand, with a smile that changed everything.

We shut the door, turned on the console, and my brother lay back on my legs with that nervous smile he only gets when he’s hiding something he’s dying to tell.

When I opened my eyes that morning, I wasn’t in my room. I was completely naked in a bed that smelled like someone I should never have spent the night with.

When the wooden door of my cell creaked open after midnight, I knew it was him. I closed my eyes. I didn’t come to the convent fleeing the world: I came fleeing what I felt for that man.

She opened the door in a white nightgown, barefoot. My girlfriend was asleep in the other room and my best friend was still on the terrace. I didn’t know how to move.

When he took off his T-shirt in my living room, I recognized the tattoo my wife zoomed in on every night. The anonymous single was there, sweaty and smiling.

In the airport bar, only one seat was free. I took it, not knowing that the redhead across from me was about to destroy my entire life.

Mateo promised he’d watch everything from his table, but when two strangers started touching me at once, his silence scared me as much as their hands.

Three weeks of voice notes negotiating limits. That night I arrived at his loft with my wrists ready for rope and a yes that would learn how to be nuanced.