Mature

In the car, with his hand on the wheel and mine between his legs, I understood that that night I would make the rules. And he would obey every one.

I had her caged beside the table, on all fours, while my friends ate and tossed leftovers onto the metal tray. That was only the beginning.

I’d been fantasizing about her in silence for months. That afternoon, during class, she looked up from the book and told me: you have to be more careful with the bathroom door.

With days left before my trip, she called me for an innocent favor. Neither of us imagined we'd end up locked inside, in the dark, without clothes.

I’m 55, with a calm husband and dreams that leave my body burning. That night, in a restaurant storeroom, I understood I could no longer keep pretending.

When she hung up the phone, I knew I’d be at her place the next day. Her husband was away. And my daughter would never look at me the same way again.

I got there at seven in the evening to look after her. At midnight I carried her to bed. At dawn I passed her half-open door and knew my life had just changed.

He had spent years perfecting an expression that revealed nothing. But that afternoon, in the hotel lobby, his eyes betrayed the one thing he must not feel for her.

When he staggered against me on that packed bus, I felt something I should never have felt. Since that day I haven’t been able to think of anything else.

When I moved her panties aside to tend her wound, I thought she’d protest. But she only pressed her face into the pillow and opened her legs a little wider.

For weeks I’d been pretending everything was fine, until that night a man looked at me the way my husband had stopped looking at me, and I chose not to resist.

I was forty-four, had two daughters, and a recent divorce when the girl from across the street looked at me differently and said what I didn’t dare think.

I was ready from four in the afternoon, soaked and aching, when that short man knocked on my door, never imagining I’d force out his nickname.

We were up in the cherry tree stealing fruit when Hugo confessed the obsession he’d carried since childhood. That same afternoon, his mother still had no idea what was coming.

When she walked into her room naked except for the blouse, those white hips swaying, I knew I would never sleep in that house again without thinking of her.

At forty-eight, in a Miami bar, my best friend grabbed me by the neck and kissed me. It was my first time with a woman, and I knew I could never go back.

I arrived at the square expecting a polite coffee with the woman who taught me to read poems at seventeen. What happened next wasn’t in any book.

When I saw them come out of the elevator together, I knew that afternoon was going to be very different from all the others I’d had with him.

When Bruno looked up from his monitor and saw his boss staring at his mother, he knew he had two options: make a scene or stay silent.

I got off the museum ship with my head spinning. That same night, facing the Pacific, a woman I barely knew kissed me like no man had ever kissed me before.