Mature

The day they lowered Rubén’s coffin into the earth, Mariela already knew that night she would seek out Damián in the back room, and that no one in the house would judge her for it.

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.

I hid the phone behind a book and opened the camera. Sebastián had no idea two more pairs of eyes were watching me undress in front of him.

She arrived at the school with her son’s expulsion letter in her handbag. She left with trembling knees and a secret she could never tell her husband.

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 boarded the train resigned to spending my birthday alone. When she sat across from me and lit a cigarette, I had no idea what would happen next.

I went in looking for lingerie to please another man and came out discovering that a woman’s hands can make tremble what I had never felt tremble with myself.

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.

That morning, when I half-opened my eyes on the mattress pushed up against the balcony, she was already there on hers, smoking, waiting for me to turn over.

I used the gap in the curtain to spy on her, but she caught me in the mirror and, instead of covering herself, began undressing for me again.

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 five to four I was naked in the armchair, staring at the window across from me and waiting for her to come out and close hers.

My sister was laughing while I told her what I’d read on my son’s WhatsApp, and I never imagined that afternoon would end with me kneeling in front of him.

When my mother and her friend showed up unannounced, my boyfriend was still naked in the pool and I was topless. What happened next still makes me smile.