Forbidden

It was late, we were alone at home, and Mom began talking about something she never should have told us. By the time I wanted to stop her, I no longer wanted her to stop.

We lived in the same apartment, naked, unable to touch each other. He looked at me as if he meant to devour me. A month of abstinence before he earned it.

His breathing grew more ragged on the other side of the wall. I tried to ignore it. Then I heard my name in his mouth and everything changed.

They had spent their whole lives being the responsible mothers. That night, in a house smelling of salt and wine, they decided to stop.

Five thirty. The dark hallway. I went to wake her, and what I heard behind that door left me breathless for fifteen minutes.

Marcos was crying with rage in that adjustable bed, convinced he would never feel a woman again. I locked the door and took off my clothes.

I got naked in my in-laws’ pool at two in the morning. Ten minutes of silence and freedom. Then I heard a door open.

Half-drunk beside the stream, I searched my pocket for the wipes and pulled out something that shouldn’t have been there. Bad decisions are always the ones you remember best.

I’d go down in the middle of the night to the mattress on the floor where he slept, pull the sheets over us, and stay there until he finished. We were almost never caught.

We’d been locked up for days when the conversation turned dangerous. His confession in the dark ended with my hands on him.

I closed the fridge slowly, a syringe in my hand. Only I knew what I was about to do in that kitchen.

Every Friday, she dressed for me: nothing beneath her dress, fingers between her legs on the way to the theater, and the car hood as our bed in the dark.

We had fantasized for years. When the sealed envelope arrived with the word “Quimera,” I knew that night would break something between us forever.

I was bleeding inside my torn stockings, but I kept walking to his door. I needed to look him in the eyes and know whether what I felt was mutual.

Climbing seven floors on foot in heels was no joke. What I didn’t know was that the doorman had been watching me for weeks as if I were a promise waiting to be fulfilled.

I propped the phone on the dresser with the video call live. My lover watched in silence while a stranger kissed my neck. He didn’t want to miss a thing.

At three in the morning I went to the bathroom with her smell still on my skin, and when I came back to bed I saw a slit of light under the door across the hall. Someone was watching us.

I wasn’t sleepy. He came up behind me, kissed my neck, and put his hands where I couldn’t allow myself to moan. The bedroom door was still closed.

My shoes had worn holes through my pantyhose, and every step burned like penance, but I didn’t stop until I rang his bell.

When that twenty-year-old boy appeared in my doorway for the second time, hands trembling and voice breaking, I knew the night was about to change.