Mature

I was sixty and my marriage was asleep when I noticed the boy next door spying on me through the hedges. I didn’t cover up. I played along.

I hid on the locker-room mezzanine with Bruno pressed against my back. Below, my mother and her friend were undressing among the workers, and I couldn’t look away.

I thought the picnic area would be empty in that rain. Then she appeared, asked for a light, and two hours later let her dress slide to the floor.

I thought I was alone among the hanging laundry. Then a voice behind me asked if I liked her panties, and I knew there was no turning back.

I only meant to be nice and carry her grocery bags up to her apartment. She offered me a soda, changed clothes, and left her bedroom door ajar.

I wanted to surprise him in the shower, like every afternoon. I slipped naked behind that broad back and, when it started to turn, I realized it wasn’t my boyfriend.

She was fifteen years older than me, drove a red convertible, and knew exactly what she wanted that night. All I had to do was obey and enjoy it.

At four in the morning, locked under the sheets with my mother’s phone, I started opening folder after folder without suspecting that nothing would ever be the same again.

At eighteen I entered medical school with the country’s highest score. At twenty-four I still didn’t know what an orgasm was. This is my story.

She was old enough to be my mother and married to a man who barely looked at her. I only wanted to go back to that kitchen every afternoon.

We’d spent three years obeying one rule between partners. That cold night, in her green dress and a dark office, we knew we were about to break it.

“I want you to give her what my mother never had,” she said with a smile. And when I saw that mature woman, I knew I wasn’t going to say no.

I turned fifty, I’ve been married for thirty years, and I’ve never been faithful. These are the secret getaways that kept my marriage alive.

I stopped my bike in front of Andrés’s house not knowing his mother was waiting for me in the doorway, and that that empty afternoon would change everything between us.

I’d been a widow for fifteen years and sexually asleep. Then that man, nearly twenty years younger, looked at my lips and I knew the morning wouldn’t end in notes.

From below, while she pushed the guide wire at the top of the ladder, her top lifted from her body and Adrián realized that summer would not be like the others.

I took my time handing her coat over, enjoying the way men looked at her. I never imagined one would dare that much in front of me.

She was crying drunk on my shoulder, saying nobody wanted her anymore. She had no idea that that very night, on the sand, I was going to prove exactly the opposite.

When the downpour flooded the city, everyone ended up at my place. I never imagined I’d feel Damián inside me again that night—or that we wouldn’t be alone.

I put on the white apron and the little cap, did my makeup like a slut, and called him to let him know the room was ready. We had the rest memorized.