Masturbation

I subscribed without thinking. It was her face, her body, her voice. And I, her father, couldn’t look away from the screen.

We lived in the same apartment, naked, unable to touch each other. He looked at me as if he meant to devour me. A month of abstinence before he earned it.

Two days after arriving in the capital, I discovered that from my window I could see a terrace where three people practiced something no one was meant to witness.

His breathing grew more ragged on the other side of the wall. I tried to ignore it. Then I heard my name in his mouth and everything changed.

When I realized she had seen everything, the first thing I felt wasn’t shame but something much harder to control.

It wasn’t the first time Camila had called late, but that night something in her voice was different. I knew I wouldn’t be sleeping anytime soon.

She thought she was alone. She raised her phone, framed her body from below, and waited for the timer. I didn’t look away for a second.

I put on the tightest pants I owned and wore nothing underneath. What happened next was a secret only I knew while I was at work.

Five thirty. The dark hallway. I went to wake her, and what I heard behind that door left me breathless for fifteen minutes.

When the first ones came up to the car and she didn’t look away, I knew that night we were going much further than we’d planned.

Marcos was crying with rage in that adjustable bed, convinced he would never feel a woman again. I locked the door and took off my clothes.

Half-drunk beside the stream, I searched my pocket for the wipes and pulled out something that shouldn’t have been there. Bad decisions are always the ones you remember best.

I’d go down in the middle of the night to the mattress on the floor where he slept, pull the sheets over us, and stay there until he finished. We were almost never caught.

We’d been locked up for days when the conversation turned dangerous. His confession in the dark ended with my hands on him.

We’d been talking for three weeks on the phone. When I finally opened the door, I knew that night wouldn’t end with a simple kiss.

I came home without showering, wearing yesterday’s clothes and another man’s smell on my skin. Marcos knew it before I said a word.

I closed the fridge slowly, a syringe in my hand. Only I knew what I was about to do in that kitchen.

Every Friday, she dressed for me: nothing beneath her dress, fingers between her legs on the way to the theater, and the car hood as our bed in the dark.

When I opened the door, the first thing I noticed was his lips. The second was how he looked at me before coming in. I already knew how the afternoon was going to end.

At three in the morning I went to the bathroom with her smell still on my skin, and when I came back to bed I saw a slit of light under the door across the hall. Someone was watching us.