Mature

I’d been going to the same boring gym for weeks when the owner showed up: mid-forties, defined arms, and a calm that’s more intimidating than any gesture.

I was fifteen and didn’t know what I was seeing. Now, at twenty-two, every memory of those afternoons takes on an entirely different meaning.

That night I walked into the living room with my heart racing. I knew what I wanted and I knew he wanted it too. All that was left was to make the first move.

Her perfume was still following me when I opened the card in the taxi. An address in Recoleta. The door will be unlocked, she had told me.

I boarded in Cologne looking for rest. What I found in that group was something I had never known how to ask for before.

He was nineteen, his hands were shaking, and he asked me to teach him. I was thirty-eight, wearing a silk robe, and had the whole night ahead of me.

I had been ignoring their looks for months. That night, for some reason I still don’t quite understand, I decided not to keep walking.

When I opened his gallery to clean the camera, I found hundreds of photos of me. I thought about leaving. Then I saw what was under his pants and changed my mind.

My mother-in-law never knew the mirror she thanked me for was my private window into her, every night my wife slept in front of the TV.

They turned off the bus lights and he put his hand over mine. None of the sleeping passengers knew what was happening under that blanket.

I’d gone weeks without anyone touching me. When the driver looked at me through the rearview mirror with that half-smile, I knew I wasn’t going home alone that night.

The director looked me over when I signed the form. I’d been with that company twelve years, and I knew exactly what I had to do to win.

When I went downstairs to the kitchen it was three in the morning. He was sitting there with a cup in his hand, bare-chested, looking at me as if he’d been waiting for me.

By day I was the invisible wife I had always been. By night I wrote what I was too afraid to ask for. Then someone read it and decided to give it to me.