Lovers

He was the age of my older daughter and stretched up to look down my cleavage while I signed papers. I said nothing. The next day I chose the dress with him in mind.

I turned off the light, convinced he wasn’t coming. Then the doorbell rang twice, and I knew I wouldn’t be sleeping that night.

Everyone in the waiting room stared when we came in hand in hand. None of them imagined the secret I was hiding beneath my calm.

I hadn't gone back for two weeks, but his midnight message found me in bed, nearly naked and without a single argument for saying no.

I heard him every night on the other side of the wall and imagined taking my mother’s place with the man who devoured me with his eyes whenever he thought no one was watching.

I wrapped my legs around his waist just as he came. It wasn’t an accident: I knew exactly what I was doing, and I wanted it.

I had been unemployed for months when I started working at his warehouse. I never imagined that my best friend’s serious, broad-handed father would undo me with a single look.

My phone fell into the water, so I had to use my mother’s. I never imagined a saved chat would show me who came into our house when I wasn’t there.

Her husband spent months at sea and she was climbing the walls. I only went to move some furniture, but that afternoon the house was empty and the door was open.

For almost a year I lived two lives: the perfect wife at the family dinner table and the woman who waited for Monday to meet him at that hotel on the outskirts.

I never planned for it to end like this, but when he opened the door and saw us, I knew that night I would choose with my body, not my head.

The idea was his: to look for a stranger who would do to me what he didn't dare. What he didn't calculate was that I'd never look at him the same way again.

My mother thought I was still in class. She didn’t know the closet door was ajar and that I saw everything from inside her room that afternoon.

I went down for coffee with the woman from the fifth floor and came back stunned: she told me, in vivid detail, what she did with the married man from the eighth floor.

I recognized his face at the traffic light and knew that work trip would not end like the others. All I needed was an excuse to knock on his door at night.

Every night she invented a new excuse on the phone while he waited for her in the room upstairs. She knew that sooner or later everything would explode.

I ran back at my grandfather’s request, and halfway up the stairs, a half-open window showed me what I never imagined seeing my mother do.

I’d been watching her at the traffic light for weeks, with those denim shorts and that tired smile. That afternoon I dared to speak to her, never imagining where we’d end up.

Under the torch I go over my sketches and feel my body burning for her. My contract is ending, and I already know one thing: I’m not leaving this jungle without Yuma by my side.

When I came back to my daughter’s house still trembling, I knew the days I had left alone with her husband would change everything.