Masturbation

We’d been meeting for six years to do the same thing: tell each other things and touch ourselves shamelessly. That night Camila promised a surprise and opened the adjoining room door.

I accepted the dare without suspecting that the fifth photo would lead me to a deserted cove, facing a stranger stretched out under the last ray of sunlight.

I followed him down the corridor without thinking, my heart in my throat. I knew that if I pushed that door there’d be no going back, and I pushed it anyway.

She reread the message four times, and her heart beat like it had when she was twenty. She was fifty-nine, and a stranger had just awakened something she thought was lost forever.

My hands were sweaty and my heart was racing when he set down the controller, changed what was on the screen, and, without saying a word, looked at me as if waiting for me to make the first move.

I was alone in my friend’s apartment when I saw her sandals by the sofa. I knew I shouldn’t touch them, but that night I found out what I’d do for a secret I’d never confess.

He only wanted a decent shirt. But then she looked up from behind the counter, and Andrés’s head started inventing what would never happen.

I asked Damián to come with me and wait in the waiting room. The doctor invited him in. I said nothing. That silence changed everything.

It started with private jokes and ended with screenshots neither of us should ever have shown the other. She liked girls; I liked her audacity.

I bought black stockings with my heart in my throat, knowing that once I locked my apartment door I’d become the woman I’d been imagining all day.

He had been sleeping pressed against her back for a week to soothe the baby. A week of pretending not to notice what was happening between them in the dark.

The light stayed red, his latest photo stayed on my screen, and my hands had already stopped asking permission. I just had to get home. Or not.

I turn off the light, open the story, and let my hand drift down. In my head there’s always someone in the corner of the room, watching, waiting to come in.

The straps tightened the more I pulled. I was tied, blind, and soaked on my own bed when the bedroom door opened and I heard two voices.

I don’t know who you are or where you are, but as I write this I imagine you reading me, and that idea is exactly what’s soaking my thong.

I went downstairs for a glass of water at three in the morning. What I found there, with the house silent, should never have happened.

I thought I had the situation under control. I thought an old man with no strength couldn’t do anything to me. That was my first mistake of the morning.

When I followed the sound of her music to the old closet in my office, I didn’t expect to find slits that opened right onto the changing room where she undressed.

I left work without underwear and with my blouse half-open. I only wanted to feel the air between my legs. I had no idea who I’d find in the train car.

My family was one floor below and I was alone in my room, phone pressed to my ear, his voice ordering me to do things I’d never dared before.