Mature

I’d been running into her in the garage for weeks with that smile. The day she pressed against me in the elevator, I knew it wouldn’t stay a neighborly hello.

She crossed her legs, looked at me over the book, and I knew that woman hadn’t asked permission for anything in years. The dead hour of the metro turned into something else.

I went into that gray office ready to beg for a document. I came out knowing that night the one begging would be him, on his knees in his own home.

She was thirty-eight, had a predictable husband, and a body nobody had ever known how to read. That night, alone at home, she decided she wanted to feel something at last.

Every time she leaned over to write down my answers, her vest opened a little more, and I could no longer concentrate on a single question in the questionnaire.

I’d only gone downstairs for a glass of water. What I heard on the ground floor left me frozen on the last step, holding my breath so they wouldn’t hear me.

When the most elegant woman in the ballroom took my hand and whispered “come with me,” I knew that night would be unlike any other in my life.

“Come at five. We need to talk about Saturday. Alone.” I wrote that to her in the morning, and since then I thought of nothing but hearing her come down the stairs.

I’d been married for seven years and had never looked at another man. Until my husband took my hand and confessed what he really wanted.

I sat on the edge of the dock not looking for anything, but his gaze, the gaze of a man who knows what he wants, undid me before I said a single word.

I sat between them in the car and, when my friend got out at her house, I was left alone with her father and a tension neither of us dared name.

When I climbed into the pickup with my unconscious boyfriend in the back seat, his father already had that smile of someone who knows exactly what’s about to happen.

From the very first day she asked me for a photo to brag about me to her friends. I never imagined how far her pleasure in showing me off to other women would go.

He had only done his job as a doctor. She walked in unannounced, closed the door, and told him that tonight she hadn’t come to talk about her sick son.

She had been married for twenty years to a man who prayed before every meal. That afternoon, beneath the park tree, she confessed who she truly missed.

I left the curtain half-open on purpose. That afternoon wasn’t just for Adrián and me: someone else was waiting for the show from across the street.

She had been married for more than forty years and had never looked at another man. That morning she opened the door to an empty house, unaware nothing would ever be the same.

I was alone at the bar, bored and two drinks in, when he sat beside me and looked at me like he already knew everything we were going to do that night.

She came upstairs with two containers and a smile that was far too friendly. He was twenty-two, had the whole weekend free, and an idea he knew he shouldn’t have had.

She came to their door soaked by the rain, with no pride and nothing to offer but her body. They looked at her, looked at one another, and she knew everything was beginning again.