Lovers

I stepped out of the pool in my underwear and felt her watching me. I was no longer her friend’s son—I was a man, and she knew exactly what she wanted from me.

I looked in the mirror, bit my lip, and knew that photo would have consequences. It didn’t take three minutes for the key to turn in my lock.

They had known each other since adolescence and desired each other in silence. When both married men who let them be free, they stopped hiding.

We’d spent five days giving ourselves over without taboos, but it was that last morning by the water, with her trembling in my arms, when I understood what had really happened.

I crossed my legs slowly until my knee brushed hers in the neighboring seat. She never took her eyes off my thighs, and I knew we wouldn’t finish the movie that night.

She lowered the blinds, locked the door, and stood behind me. “You just need to relax,” she whispered. What came next wasn’t on any exam.

I knew it before either of them admitted it: every Thursday she made up a clumsy excuse, and I let her go, knowing exactly where and with whom.

I had twenty minutes before logging on to my husband’s party. Tomás closed the hotel door, and I knew that night I’d congratulate my husband with another woman’s voice.

Two beeps, a lit screen, and his wife’s voice filling the garden: “Everything that’s happening to me… everyone needs to know this.”

The screen lit up, her voice filled the speakers, and in front of the whole family, she said goodbye to me forever. I still didn’t know who the other man was.

The email wasn’t a question, it was a challenge: a photo, a woman who beat time, and a husband ready to hand her over. All that was left was for her to say yes.

The parish priest asked me to stay after the church was empty. What happened in his office became my Sunday secret, and I don’t want it to end.

I accepted the assignment thinking it was just another job. I had no idea that man from the calendar would get under my skin until he became impossible to forget.

At forty-one, I thought desire had gone out—until a man caught me off guard and, for the first time in years, made me feel truly seen.

I got out of the car, climbed the three flights without thinking, and the moment she opened the door, I knew I wouldn't let her get as far as the sofa that night.

When Tobías’s teacher gave me her personal number “in case anything urgent came up,” I knew it had nothing to do with my son’s grades.

Whenever he closed his eyes in that armchair, he returned to the harbor loft, to the hands of the only man before whom he stopped pretending to be someone else.

Midnight in the empty station. Iván leaned in to kiss me, and for a second the world was simple, until the ghost of the other voice returned to interfere.

For years his wife called me “the mistress.” But I never was. I was his sex worker, and this is the truth she never wanted to hear.

Some people collect stamps or travel souvenirs. I collect nights, mouths, and hands I’ve already forgotten, and I still don’t understand why I should be ashamed of that.