Lingerie

When I opened the recent files folder, the images appeared as thumbnails. I wanted to close it fast, but she was already looking at the screen with me, in silence.

I ordered my first toy online so I wouldn’t die of embarrassment in the store. What I didn’t imagine was the delivery guy’s face when he handed me that box.

I was twenty-seven and still a virgin. That afternoon, alone in someone else’s house, I found something that forced me to look in the mirror and admit what I’d been hiding.

She knew he watched her too long, trying to hide it. And, as always, she decided not to let it go.

When I texted her “do your thing,” she knew exactly what to do with the stranger who would knock on the door at six-thirty that evening.

I had never worn a thong, but that afternoon I decided to break it in in the busiest corner of the market, right where no one could stop staring at me.

I had never done anything like that before, but that night the neckline, the music, and two persistent stares pushed me across a line I didn’t want to come back from.

Her hand slid up my thigh and beneath my underwear. I expected to find what I had imagined so many times, but what I touched left me breathless.

I was always a man of soccer and conquests, until the first thong brushed my shaved skin and I understood there was no going back.

She came out of the bathroom in lingerie, posed in front of me, and asked how hot she was on a scale of one to ten. I already knew where that night would end.

Every Sunday, when she left, I opened her wardrobe and became someone else in front of the mirror. That afternoon she forgot her keys and came back early.

She said she’d be home late, but when I opened the bathroom door, candlelight revealed her favorite lie: she was naked, waiting for me.

Four men, a thick envelope on the table, and me deciding who I’d call over first. My rule was always the same: I choose, I set the pace, and I leave whenever I feel like it.

In the mirror I stopped being Sebastián. I put on her stockings, her skirt, her perfume, and became the woman nobody knew I carried inside.

I told my parents I’d spend the day with a friend. In reality, I was going to Renata’s, where a wig, a pink cage, and a man who knew what he wanted from me were waiting.

Under my track pants I wore only fishnets and a lace thong. I wasn’t looking for just any doorway: I was looking for the place where they’d treat me like an object.

The dress hugged my body, the stockings brushed me with every step, and when that man held out his hand to dance, I knew I wouldn’t return home the same.

I thought I’d lost the bag containing my most intimate photos. When the doctor messaged me that night, I knew he’d already seen exactly who I was.

I crossed the living room to get a glass of water, forgetting the curtains were still open. On the other side of the glass, his eyes had already found me.

I went in looking for lingerie to please another man and came out discovering that a woman’s hands can make tremble what I had never felt tremble with myself.