Masturbation

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.

The plan was simple: pool, barbecue, and a weekend with no obligations. What I didn’t expect was what Saturday morning would reveal about the two of us.

First we heard their moans from upstairs. Then they heard ours. None of the four of us stopped.

I wasn’t sleepy. He came up behind me, kissed my neck, and put his hands where I couldn’t allow myself to moan. The bedroom door was still closed.

My parents were gone. The afternoon was long and the desire unbearable. When the name 'Valeria_sola' appeared on the list, I knew that day would be different.

I had tried on the plaid skirt and the shirt knotted at my navel a hundred times in my head. That afternoon, with the house empty, I finally did it for real.

There are mornings when my body beats my mind to it. Damp sheets, hips moving on their own—and then I invent you: a stranger who breaks me wide open.

Every morning I wake up with the same fire. It isn’t love, not exactly. It’s something more urgent, and no relief lasts long enough to put it out.

Under the shower, her fingers finished what he had started in that room. And she knew three days would not be enough.

Carmen was sleeping naked in the sun while I made the worst and best decision of my life. When she woke and saw the state she was in, she didn’t react as I expected.

I kept his texts in a private folder, rereading them at night with the lights off. I’d been doing it for months before I dared to write him.

I walked fifteen minutes to his hotel in the shortest dress I owned. I knew exactly what I was there to do and I didn’t care if it showed.

I got to the door first. I leaned against the wood with my eyes closed, and when I heard him coming down the hallway, I knew that night we’d do it in silence.

When she shouted my name in the parking lot so everyone could hear, I knew the whole week of office tension was about to explode.

Ernesto hadn’t looked at me like that in years. Then the neighbors moved in, and one dinner lit something we thought had been asleep forever.

I never liked him. Never commented. I just read his texts at midnight and wondered if he was thinking of someone like me too.

When I covered her with the blanket and my hand brushed the curve of her hip, I knew it would take me a long time to pull it away.

Marcos arrived under the pretense of divorce. The moment Mateo’s parents left, he took off his swimsuit and asked whether his nephew minded.

As he described calmly how he wrapped his lovers in plastic wrap, I crossed my legs and pretended the wine was the reason I was hot.

After two hours of staring at the ceiling, I decided I wasn’t going to keep waiting. I moved in behind her and started where the process always ends.