Lovers

She told me, “Distrust my husband,” and I laughed. Three months later, my wife walked into my office unable to look me in the eye.

For two years, she gave her body every Friday to keep her husband alive. Now he is coming home, and she refuses to give up the cell that set her free.

I went down to the pool in my underwear just to provoke him. I never imagined I’d end that same night begging him not to stop inside me.

I’d never cheated on my husband in eighteen years. One screen, one bold stranger, and one empty afternoon were enough to make all of that stop mattering.

For her, it’s just affection, a way of taking care of him. For him, it’s love. And between them grows a secret that beats every night just a few feet from her sleeping boyfriend.

When my mother opened the door and I saw who was coming to dinner, my blood ran cold: it was the man I’d been secretly sleeping with for two months.

She had spent months imagining his hands, his cologne, his voice. She never thought a storm would be enough to make them stop pretending they didn’t want each other.

I never knew my grandfather, but his final wishes bound me to an unexpected woman and a house where everything eventually changed.

I woke to the smell of coffee and knew that those two days with her, shut inside while the rain fell outside, would stay with me forever.

When she told me she hadn’t enjoyed sex in years, the sensible thing would have been to leave. Instead I reached for her leg and she didn’t pull away.

For thirty years we’d kept crossing paths by chance. That rainy afternoon, in the pharmacy queue, she looked at me differently. And I did too.

Mateo had just thrown his wife out of the restaurant when someone knocked on the office door. It was the tattooed waitress, and she hadn’t come to talk about the day’s accounts.

The rustle of the sheet woke me, and when I turned my head I found her asleep beside me. I remembered nothing from the night before, but my body did.

I met him among paintings that seemed to whisper, and two hours later I was against the door of his apartment, wondering how I’d come this far without saying a word.

An old ballad comes on the radio and I stop listening to the lyrics. I start seeing something else, a scene I shouldn’t tell you about, but I confess anyway.

I never imagined the skinny boy I remembered would become the man who made me tremble in front of the mirror. And it all began with a name.

They had traveled to close a deal, not for this. But in the elevator of that hotel, Lucía understood they had been pretending not to want each other for months.

When he invited me up for a drink, I had no idea I was about to discover what it was really like to be with a man who knew what he was doing.

I needed to tell someone who wouldn’t judge me, and the only thing I could think to do was knock on his door. What I didn’t expect was what would happen at dawn.

I’d never accepted an invitation from a man I’d just met. But something about his smile, and the way he looked at my cleavage, made me say yes.