Lovers

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

When I opened the laptop Gonzalo had “forgotten” in my car, I realized the two husbands had spent months preparing me as the centerpiece of their darkest fantasy.

She dissected other people’s minds for a living; so did he. Sharing a table was enough for them both to stop pretending they only wanted 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, running from my husband. I wasn’t looking for shelter: I was looking for impact, for something to finally crack the glass I lived trapped inside.

That morning she looked at her hands and no longer recognized them: they had signed a commitment and 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 understood 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.

“She came to see her boyfriend, the doctor,” the receptionist told him. Damián had no girlfriend. But when she described the visitor’s blush, he knew exactly who was waiting inside.

I had buried it under years of exams and routine, but all it took was hearing him say my name from across the bar for my body to remember what my mind wanted to forget.

I took off my ring before getting into the water. I didn’t want any souvenir photo to give me away, or for him to get ideas that weren’t his to have.

“Welcome to my beach,” his voice said behind me. I was completely naked on the towel, and he was the last person I expected to see there.

He could tell something was off in my breath, but he never dared name it. My best work wasn’t on any screen: it was inside his head, on a loop.

He did not look at the frescoes; he looked at her, as if she were the material he had to break. And for the first time, she wanted something in her life to collapse.

When she opened my study door, I knew she hadn’t come for the inheritance. She came for what we left unfinished ten years ago, and I’d been waiting for her ever since.

It’s been seven years since we signed the divorce papers and I never stopped looking for him. What I miss isn’t him: it’s what he does to me when no one else is watching.

I warned her through clenched teeth, in the kitchen, that she would pay for deceiving me. I never imagined she’d end up on her knees in my room, begging me as she had never begged him.

She had been burning for months and her husband never got home in time. That afternoon, seven months pregnant, she got off the subway at the wrong stop... or the right one.

Sebastián told her to destroy it all. The only thing she destroyed was the promise she’d made to him, in the bed of a stranger who smelled like triumph.