Mature

I had been lying in my hammock for weeks, rubbing myself with oil and closing my eyes, until one afternoon I felt someone watching me through the cypresses.

I’d spent weeks wearing lingerie under my clothes, but that night, alone in the house, I decided to become completely the woman he wanted to see.

She had never been with someone fifteen years older. That night, in the hotel room, she discovered that intelligence can be seductive too.

When I bent down to put the box away in the storeroom, Adela turned slowly and let me see the white lace under her blouse. That night I knew the route had changed forever.

I got to her place an hour before my girlfriend. My mother-in-law opened the door in a short robe, a poured whiskey, and a smile that was anything but innocent.

At sixty-four, I thought that part of me was dead forever. One phone call and a carrot were enough to prove how wrong I was.

I thought I was alone at home. I left the bathroom door open, closed my eyes, and said her name out loud, never imagining she’d already come back.

Marina turned off the television to sleep. Then the sounds above her head began, and she knew that night she wouldn’t be getting any rest for a very different reason.

She climbed into the back seat with the boss’s wife thinking she was going to find me. She got out thinking about when she could see her again.

It had been ten years since anyone had touched me with those intentions. That afternoon, face down on the therapist’s table, I discovered my body still knew exactly what it wanted.

Turning off the light would have been the sensible thing. But that night, on the ninth floor of an empty hotel, the last thing I wanted was to go unnoticed.

Renata entered the dean’s office expecting a suspension. The dean locked the door, told her to stand up, and said the punishment would be very different.

“If you’re a good boy, you’ll get a reward,” she told me before we left. I never imagined the reward would be shared, or that my mother would enjoy watching so much.

Nadia had spent years alone, training so she wouldn’t have to think. Her nephew was the only one who looked at her as a woman, and that hungover afternoon they both stopped pretending.

“If you open that box, I won’t be the boy you protect anymore,” I warned her. My older sister held my gaze for a moment, then tore the red paper.

When the study door creaked behind me, I knew we were not alone, and that the woman hidden in the shadows did not plan to leave.

My uncle was driving in a rage, lost for the umpteenth time, and she used every bump and sharp turn to drive me crazy without him noticing a thing.

I heard the lock click behind me. When I turned, she was smiling with the calm of someone who had planned every step from the first look at the table.