Masturbation

Damn the hour I opened my mouth. It was only a thought said out loud, but my wife already had the other woman’s phone number in her hand and a smile I’d never seen before.

I thought it was just a joke between the sheets, until she said our youngest friend’s name and confessed she really wanted him.

I came to therapy in pieces. The only way to understand how I lost him was to go back to that night when I was completely his, not knowing it would be the last.

A single photograph on the studio wall was enough for the professor to realize he could never look at her as just a student again.

I never answer the phone at three in the morning, but that night I knew it was him—and what he had to confess about my wife and the old man couldn’t wait until dawn.

I’d never cheated on my husband in eighteen years. One screen, one bold stranger, and one empty afternoon were enough to make all of that stop mattering.

I told him I wasn’t going to touch him, just look. But each folder he opened on the screen pushed me a little closer to crossing the line we’d been skirting for months.

When he stayed to practice a few poses, I could feel him looking at me. I hadn’t had a partner in months, and my body had decided for me long before my head did.

She had never been in a sex shop, she told me. We went into a booth together, and amid the moans on the screen, she asked me for something I never imagined hearing from her lips.

I put on the red dress with nothing underneath and thought it was just a thank-you dinner. I had no idea how the night was going to end.

She ran her marriage, but that morning on the sand I found out how much she loved a stranger telling her who was in charge, with her husband watching.

I wrote to half a dozen girls asking for the same thing. Only one replied, and that afternoon, in a shopping center bathroom, I discovered something I didn’t expect.

I never imagined the skinny boy I remembered would become the man who made me tremble in front of the mirror. And it all began with a name.

I never thought I’d be capable of something like this, but the bank ultimatum was on the table and I could only think of one way out neither of us would ever forget.

She closed the door without locking it and stood looking at him, not yet knowing that this man was about to disprove everything she believed about casual sex.

She locked the door, hung up the “closed” sign, and took him to the back of the shop with a flimsy excuse. What came after, she hadn’t entirely planned.

I walked out of the shower thinking no one had seen us. That same night I found on his phone that someone had recorded every moan from the next cubicle.

I only wanted to watch the sun go down and photograph the sea. Then I heard another bicycle approaching through the sand, and I knew that afternoon wouldn’t end like the others.

The door has barely closed and already his mouth is finding mine, still with the taste of the night between our teeth. Now the bed is ours alone.

The headboard of his bed hit the wall in a steady rhythm, and I, awake in the dark, could no longer pretend it didn’t affect me.