In Public

The theater was almost empty when she chose the seat one place away. She wasn’t watching the screen—she was watching me, and wanted me to notice.

Her mother went to mass on Wednesday afternoons, and that half hour became the office’s best-kept secret.

I worked while the city slept locked away, and the only time that was mine was that empty train car. Until he stopped asking for the permit and started asking for something else.

I boarded the last car expecting a quiet trip. I never imagined the woman in the green dress would invite me to watch what her partner was about to do to her.

I told her she set the limit. What I didn’t expect was how much I would enjoy standing aside and watching others discover her.

We’d been teasing each other with our eyes in the courthouse for months. That fair afternoon, between two cars and far from everyone, we stopped pretending nothing was happening.

She was nearly twice my age and had a smile that promised trouble. She told me she’d see whether I was truly hungry or just bored, and I was already lost.

A week after that first night, my feet carried me back to the cabaret. Verónica was waiting with a velvet box and a sentence.

She stood there among the trees, red with embarrassment, her hands clasped behind her back. “Just let me watch,” she whispered. “I’ve never seen a man do it.”

She was alone on the grass, in the shade, with legs that made me forget the book. I had no idea how far we’d go before we said goodbye.

I could have held it, but I didn’t want to. I got out, left the door ajar, and waited for the headlights to find me squatting by the road.

Adrián just wanted to get home after class. Two strangers in an alley decided that night would turn him into the neighborhood’s humiliated plaything.

She went up on the stage fully dressed while the others were already nearly naked, and I knew that night she was going to lose all her shame in front of everyone.

I thought I’d buried the woman who charged for her time. One offer from my own boyfriend was enough to wake her and take control of the night.

The bus’s swaying pressed us together so tightly that her hand ended up exactly where it shouldn’t have, and neither of us did anything to stop it.

It began in front of a webcam, in the dark and safe. But that afternoon, at the reservoir beach, there was no screen—only my body, the sun, and men who couldn’t look away.

By day she humiliated me in front of her friends; by night she begged me to put her in her place. No one imagined what was happening inside that car.

I got out of the car to sit in front, and as soon as I noticed the bulge in his trousers, I knew that taxi wasn’t taking me straight home.

I chose the emptiest screening to be alone with my exhaustion, until she crossed the theater and sat two seats to my right with a smile that promised trouble.

I lost my friends, lost my way, and somehow ended up on my knees between two women I had just met. This really happened.