Gym

I got in the car thinking only about the trip. Ten minutes later, my boss was on top of me, her sister was twisting around to miss nothing, and her husband was smiling in the rearview mirror.

Bruno carried me aloft, pinned to his body as if I weighed nothing, and I let myself go. What I never imagined was that someone was watching us from the window across the way, camera in hand.

When Marina led them to the sofa and told them to start nice and slow, I knew that dinner with the gym couple would not end like any other night.

Marcos and Nadia had only ever done it with us. That night, blindfolded and with the neighbors on the way, they would discover how far they were willing to go.

I had just enough budget, and my boyfriend offered me his aunt’s house. What I didn’t know was that his cousin would turn that week into something I never told him about.

He went up those five floors to argue with his girlfriend’s mother. He had no idea her husband was home, or the proposal that would come out of his mouth that afternoon.

Bruno’s curiosity awakened something in me I could no longer control: I wanted my trainer to touch me for real, not just in my words.

Ten years of marriage collapsed with a gold ring forgotten on the passenger seat. Carla decided the divorce would not be the end, only the beginning.

I didn’t shower before going back home. I wanted my boyfriend to feel the gym sweat on my skin and the trace of another man, and not have the courage to ask whose it was.

The drive to the gym didn’t account for eighty extra kilometers every Thursday. That number was the first thread of a truth that would end up exciting me more than destroying me.

When that stranger’s punch knocked my boyfriend flat on the canvas, I knew that night I would do something I’d never fully regret.

I had the pen in my hand and a lifetime of debt on the table. All he wanted in return was for me to leave my pride at the door.

The rule was simple: when the elevator doors closed, I stopped being a person and became part of his furniture.

On a Friday at ten, the gym was nearly empty and a guy who was loading twice what I was on the bench beside me. One look in the mirror was enough to send everything off the rails.

He thought he was alone under the water, until an arm circled his neck from behind and a rough voice whispered in his ear what was already obvious.

We were alone in the weights room when he took off his shirt and told me to touch. I never imagined how far we’d go after closing the locker room door.

The moment he heard the key turn in the lock, Nico knew his cousin’s arrival was going to change everything, even if neither of them said it out loud.

He took off his sweat-soaked shirt in front of me, not knowing I’d heard everything from the shower. What I offered him that afternoon changed his idea of pleasure.

I hadn’t thought about my own body in ten years. It only took that masseur digging his fingers into my back for something I thought impossible to start waking up.

At thirty-three, with an athlete's body and a secret he'd been smothering half his life, one boy walks into his shop and looks at him without fear.