Lovers

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 so far without saying a word.

A sad old ballad comes on the radio and I stop hearing the lyrics. I start seeing something else, a scene I shouldn’t tell, but I confess it anyway.

I never thought the skinny kid I remembered would become the man who made me tremble in front of the mirror. And it all started with a name.

They had traveled to close a contract, not for this. But in the elevator of that hotel, Lucía realized they’d 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 all 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.

A year had passed since the last time. I turned a corner downtown and crashed into her: the same perfume, the same gaze, the same desire I thought I’d forgotten.

I asked my neighbor for help with a pipe I could have fixed myself. The truth is I just wanted to see him walk into my house knowing we were both alone.

I’d wanted it all summer and never dared. That afternoon, with the pool silent and no one nearby, Adrián jumped in naked and looked at me from the middle.

I recognized his devil’s smile leaning on the bar, with the black towel and red harness, and knew that night the whole sauna would witness what was ours.

Iván was still asleep in my arms when a noise in the hallway pulled me out of bed. I had no idea the last day would be the hottest of all.

We sat there like any two friends, but we both knew why we’d come. When the door closed, neither of us dared take the first step.

It was three in the morning when I felt his mouth searching for me in the dark, and I knew this time I’d be the one to guide him to the end.

We crossed the apartment threshold knowing we had two hours left, and he lunged at me before I could set the keys on the table.

I put on the lingerie she would never wear and wait for him to knock on the motel door. I know he’ll come back: at home there’s a man starving.