Mature

I was the impeccable stepmother, the woman who made the rules. But when my stepson appeared naked before me, I knew my rules were made of paper.

When she turned off the hallway lights and closed the door, I understood we weren’t going to talk about my record. Something had changed in the office.

I saw her alone in the café for weeks: voluptuous, pretty, with a body her clothes couldn’t hide. When she confessed she’d gone months without sex, I knew something was about to happen.

They tried to pry a secret out of me. What I didn’t know was that they were hiding something much bigger—and that afternoon would change our family forever.

The teachers’ lounge seemed empty at that hour. I pushed the door open without knocking and there she was on the sofa, completely lost in herself.

The August heat crushed the apartment courtyard, and Adrián couldn’t take his eyes off the window opposite. Mrs. Valverde had no idea she was being watched.

When she came in soaked with her friends, I knew that night was going to wreck all my plans. And when she called me by name, I understood the past never really disappears.

Rodrigo held her hips during their workouts and she pretended not to notice his erection. When she found her panties in his room, she could no longer ignore what was happening.

He’d been waiting for me for years and I didn’t know it until it was already too late. When he confessed at the end, I understood why everything had felt so different.

Carmen appeared at my window as if she had been waiting for that moment. She didn’t leave. She made me come downstairs. What happened next was beyond anything either of us imagined.

When I saw him come in, too afraid to lift his gaze, I thought it would be just another appointment. It wasn’t. What I found beneath that gown kept me awake for days.

I went to Andrea’s party with nerves on edge. I didn’t expect to meet her mother: a mature woman with a perfect body and a fiery gaze who hooked me from the first second.

I was eighteen and had no experience. She had a husband, a daughter in my class, and the skill to keep me from sleeping since the first day.

She was washing dishes in rubber gloves when the other woman whispered in her ear how much she’d enjoyed her husband.

When she opened the door in that tight dress, I knew that afternoon was going to change everything I thought I knew about myself and my limits.

I had known her for years. That afternoon at the bar, when she came over to greet me, something in her eyes told me it would not end with a simple hug.

I thought facing an untrained woman would be easy. Her first bear hug erased that idea from my mind forever.

We were lying there naked, still smelling like what we’d just done, when Sofía told me she had something to confess. Something about Elena. Something that would change how I saw her forever.

The first time I saw her, her husband was in the next room. The second, her lips were on me. I couldn’t think about another woman for weeks.

When she invited me up to her apartment, I knew I couldn’t say no again. She was almost seventy and I was thirty-six, and that had never mattered so little.