Forbidden

I walked into her room with a tray and she looked at me from the bed, almost naked, and asked: “Do you like what you see?” Something in me woke up without warning.

Every excuse to cross the room was a calculated provocation. Every touch, a promise of what we’d do when we were finally alone.

Her perfume was still following me when I opened the card in the taxi. An address in Recoleta. The door will be unlocked, she had told me.

He paid in cash, took the key without a word, and went upstairs. The room was dark and the screen flickered, waiting. Diego knew exactly why he had come.

The moment I let my first heel drop under the table, I knew that dinner wouldn’t end with dessert, but with him surrendering in silence while the waitress smiled at us.

I left the panic button on the cot pillow. The bars pressed into my back when his tongue went down, and I knew I was no longer his lawyer.

Every Friday he took her home, pretending they were just friends. She knew it. So did he. But neither dared say it aloud.

We posted the ad not knowing what to expect. Two weeks later he rang the bell at ten on the dot, no phone or watch, ready to serve.

When the candle went out, I thought it was my husband touching me. When the light came back, I realized it had all been planned long before that night.

The candle burned out. The darkness was absolute. And then I felt a hand moving up my thigh that wasn't my husband's. It was only a second, but it changed everything.

He was nineteen, his hands were shaking, and he asked me to teach him. I was thirty-eight, wearing a silk robe, and had the whole night ahead of me.

As soon as we left the parking lot, she slipped her hand down and closed her eyes. I looked for a dead-end road. We’d spent a whole week unable to touch each other.

Outside, the snow kept falling. Inside, on the other side of the wall, someone was moaning. And I had my aunt asleep beside me, her robe barely closed.

As soon as we left the parking lot, she undid her trouser button and whispered: find an empty lot, an alley, anything. I can’t get home like this.

I had been ignoring their looks for months. That night, for some reason I still don’t quite understand, I decided not to keep walking.

The day Clara entered my house unannounced, I realized the only clean space I had left no longer belonged to me.

We were sitting across from each other in the most discreet corner of the restaurant. No one could have imagined what I was doing with my feet beneath that table.

We were alone in the house with fever and boredom. On the third night, with the lights off, Marcos confessed something no one else knew about him.

Lucía took my neck with the same calm as always. That night the destination was different: her lover had just been there, and she didn’t need to say anything else.