In Public

I thought the steam room was mine alone, along with my toys. Then the door opened and a very tall stranger looked at me without any hurry to cover herself.

She had spent years going to that club alone, waiting for a glance that would stay on her. That night, unknown fingers took her hand and dragged her into the dark.

We queued for the slides all morning, but it was in the water, with her hand sliding over my waist, that I understood what she really wanted from me.

I was in my forties, married, with two children, and I had never once looked at another woman. That night, leaning on the bar in a pub, everything I thought I knew about myself came undone.

We got turned on in class and couldn’t wait until we got home. The vacant lot behind the college was the first of many places where we shouldn’t have touched each other.

I didn’t know anyone at that girls’ dinner, until she walked through the door and our eyes got stuck on each other over the plates.

We’d been brushing against each other all night without saying a word, and when I saw the turnoff into the forest, I knew neither of us would make it home.

It wasn’t sale season and the store was empty. The blonde saleswoman followed me into the fitting room with an excuse, and I left the curtain open on purpose.

I felt a hand on my hip and a mouth in my ear: “You smell incredible.” When I turned around, it was her—the girl my friend had come to flirt with.

All it took was for her to tilt her head toward the back door for me to set my glass on the bar and follow her without thinking twice.

My hands were ice-cold in the boarding lounge, but it wasn’t the weather: in a few hours I’d see her again, and I didn’t know whether I’d run to her or hide.

I was only serving drinks. She was looking at me from the other side of the bar as if she already knew, before I did, how that night would end.

I felt her hand slide up my thigh in the packed subway, and even though I couldn’t move an inch, I didn’t want her to stop.

When she took off her blouse in front of the open window, I knew she wasn’t going to stop even if half the neighborhood was watching. And I didn’t want her to stop either.

I’d never thought about Nora that way—until she brushed against me in the bar and I understood, from her smile, that she’d been thinking about it for a long time.

I thought stripping naked in front of strangers would be enough to lose my shame. Then that couple lay down beside me and looked at me as if they already knew what I still didn’t dare ask for.

She chose her clothes thinking of him, not her husband. That night she would stop being a faithful wife and become, for an entire weekend, another man’s woman.

“What happens on the coast stays on the coast,” we told each other before crossing that curtain. Neither of us imagined how far we’d go without the other couple.

Nadia knelt in front of the glass wall knowing the neighbors in the garden next door wouldn’t miss a thing. And that was only the first afternoon.

I came out of the bathroom and found her on her knees in front of him. Instead of stopping him, I sat in the chair across from them and decided to watch it to the end.