Lovers

My girlfriend had been out of town for a week and I could think of only one thing: text Mariana and meet her at our usual café for a little game.

Every morning she chose a different garment knowing it would end up torn on the living room floor. What she hadn’t accounted for was the day the door opened early.

I told Andrés that therapy was helping me clear my head. I didn’t tell him that every session left my body shaking and my conscience split in two.

Marisol sat on the armchair in her robe. She had just filmed her revenge with the man her husband despised most, and there was no turning back.

Ten years of marriage collapsed with a gold ring forgotten on the passenger seat. Carla decided the divorce would not be the end, only the beginning.

I agreed to therapy to understand my body before marriage. No one warned me I’d end up begging the wrong man not to stop.

While he puts away the domino tiles and heads off to the club, she’s already feeling her body heat up, thinking of what awaits her in that student apartment.

I opened the door half-dressed, my hair a mess and the bed still warm. He looked at the basket of my lingerie before he looked at me, and I didn’t bother to cover myself up.

I kept telling myself it was only part of the therapy, that it was nothing personal. But with another man’s cum running down my thighs, I didn’t believe a single word of it anymore.

My body was still burning from the weekend with him. I never imagined that same night I’d hear, through a door, the conversation that would break me apart.

She’d had twenty-four hours of pent-up desire trapped in her body. When the boy in the blue uniform came to deliver the package, Renata knew she wouldn’t be going without that morning.

That hot afternoon, Lucía sat beside him on the sofa and confessed something no brother-in-law should ever hear. Damián knew he was doomed before he answered.

When I opened the laptop Gonzalo “forgot” in my car, I understood those two husbands had spent months preparing me as the main course of their darkest fantasy.

She dissected other people’s minds for a living; so did he. It only took sharing a table for the two of them to stop pretending they were just looking for conversation.

She climbed the stairs knowing that, once she crossed that door, the naive woman she had been until then would cease to exist forever.

I went up the mountain alone under a red alert, fleeing my husband. I wasn’t looking for shelter: I was looking for impact, for something that would finally break the glass I’d been trapped in.

That morning she looked at her hands and didn’t recognize them: they were the same hands that had signed a commitment and the same ones that had betrayed everything for him.

I’d known her for almost thirty years. She was my girlfriend, my impossible love, my daughter’s godmother. That night she came into the bathroom wrapped in a towel and let it fall.

For years I pretended not to understand why she lingered when passing that shop. The afternoon I followed her inside, I realized my mother had already stopped belonging only to my father.

She told herself she was only helping him feel better. But every afternoon, with her boyfriend out of the house, the distance between them grew shorter.