Masturbation

She slowly spread her knees until I understood that little show under the table was for me, and for no one else in the whole café.

I’d entered her tower to settle an old debt. What I hadn’t expected was to stand frozen behind the curtain, holding my breath, unable to look away.

I went into the third fitting room, left the curtain exactly how I like it, and when I looked up I caught her looking inside. One of mine, I thought.

I knew he went around the house without a bra. What I didn’t know was that he counted every time, and kept a wet souvenir under his pillow.

Every morning I put on my shackles before I head out to the fields. No one forces me: I do it because the weight of the chain on my ankles is the only thing that makes me feel alive.

There were two hours left before the video call and my body was already trembling. I wasn’t going to touch myself once; it was enough that he wrote what I had to do to myself.

There are mornings when I wake up wet, my nipples hard, with one fixed thought. Another of my heat weeks has begun and no one at home suspects what I’m hiding.

I never saw him in person. I only needed my words, a candlelit altar, and the certainty that a man can kneel before someone who will never return the gesture.

It started as an admirer’s email about my stories. It ended with me hiding her photos, aching to cross an ocean just to touch her once.

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.

She left her panties on the nightstand like every night. But this time I went into her room without warning and found something that changed everything between us.

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 hallway without thinking, my heart in my throat. I knew that if I pushed that door open there would be no going back—and I pushed it anyway.

She had learned to dismantle any man with a smile, but none of them could keep up the game to the end. Until a stranger matched her pace without hurrying or running.

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.

Whenever he closed his eyes in that armchair, he returned to the harbor loft, to the hands of the only man before whom he stopped pretending to be someone else.

We’d been flirting between monitors for a month when she took me to the back seat of my car. What I discovered weeks later changed everything, and not in the way I feared.

I had been stealing his dirty laundry for years without anyone knowing. The night he caught me, instead of hating me, he decided to use my weakness like a leash.

I was alone in my friend’s apartment when I saw her sandals beside the sofa. I knew I shouldn’t touch them, but that night I discovered what I was capable of for a secret craving I had never confessed.