Mature

I thought I was only going to delete those photos and return to my life. The moment Don Marcial opened the door, I knew I’d come for something very different—and that he knew it better than I did.

I went up to the apartment alone to shower before the others. What I didn’t expect was someone across the courtyard waiting for exactly that moment.

Bored in front of the television and alone in a bed that was too large, she closed her eyes and let her hand do what she hadn’t allowed herself to do for two years.

I arrived at his house in a skirt that was too short, with passing as my excuse. He never stopped looking at me, and I hadn’t come exactly to study.

I’d spent weeks watching her from the corner of my eye as she emptied the wastebaskets. That night, alone together in the office, she was the one who asked me to help her.

Her husband opened the door of his home with one intention: to watch two strangers make his wife come. She pretended to hesitate, but her eyes had already decided.

I was the serious girl with the ponytail and notes tucked under my arm. He was twice my age, with a calm that undid me whenever he looked at me.

I recognized her between the supermarket aisles: fuller, more confident, with the look of someone who still remembered what happened between us in that empty classroom.

She avoided looking him in the eyes when she opened the door, afraid he would discover what she had kept silent for months: she desired the man who dominated her own daughter.

When her boss offered to take me out to buy the drinks, my husband was left looking like a fool. I already knew that outing wouldn’t be innocent.

When I went down to the kitchen at three in the morning, she was already there waiting for me, wearing a nightgown so thin it left nothing to the imagination.

I saw him get out of the car in that light-colored suit and knew I wouldn’t be sleeping alone in the borrowed apartment that night.

I heard every filthy word they said about my body, convinced I couldn’t understand them. When I spoke to them in their own language, their faces turned red.

I hadn’t seen her in more than four years. I bought a ticket to her play without suspecting what would happen afterward, in the early hours at my place.

We had spent half our lives silently measuring ourselves against each other. Until the woman he pursued knocked on my door one August night and chose to stay.

Three nights sleeping beside him in that tiny cab, until one early morning his huge hand began roaming over me as if I already belonged to him.

I returned to the countryside after years in the city and, looking for my father among the corn, found my mother on her knees before one of his farmhands.

She screamed at me in the elevator, and ten minutes later she was dragging me into her apartment. I was a virgin, clumsy, and terrified; she knew exactly what she wanted from me.

I raised the blind just a little, as always. But that night Marina was standing in front of the mirror, and for the first time she didn’t look away from my window.

I had been at reception for a month when the Friday party changed everything: a hand beneath the table, a decision I hadn’t planned, and a Monday that was no longer work.