Mature

She had been slipping an intimate ingredient into my dishes for five years, and I’d tasted it every day without knowing. Until that afternoon she dared confess.

I got off the museum ship with my head spinning. That same night, facing the Pacific, a woman I barely knew kissed me like no man had ever kissed me before.

I went out to clear my head one Saturday afternoon. When I looked up from my coffee, she was already sitting across from me, smiling as if she’d known me all her life.

I came back sunburned and my aunt called me to her room to soothe me with cream. When her hands reached my hips, I knew something between us had changed.

She was fifty-two, trapped in a lukewarm marriage, and wearing lace stockings for the first time. She didn’t expect the man who would board two stops later.

Her white T-shirt soaked with sweat, her nipples pressing through the fabric, and the question thrown between two glasses of wine: is what they say about you and Lucía true?

When she took off her dress in the middle of the clearing, her huge belly under the sun and her son’s three friends staring at her, I knew that afternoon wasn’t going to be a bike ride.

Camila was waiting for me seated on the edge of the bed, and I didn’t know where to put my hands. I only knew that night I was going to learn something no man had ever taught me.

I’d only been in the alley for a month when I was put in charge of the punch with house 207. I didn’t expect the woman who opened the door and her husband to change my idea of desire that very night.

I turned off the music and pressed my ear to the wall. My mother’s moans came from the other side, and I understood why she moved in silence during the day.

When the hallway lights went out, the moans started on the other side of the wall, and I knew I’d never forget that week at my aunt’s house.

My husband spent the day at his conference while I melted away alone by the pool. When the waiter asked if I wanted something, I knew exactly what I was going to ask for that afternoon.

I was her assistant. We worked twelve hours a day. That night, barefoot on her sofa, she looked at me like never before, and I knew something had changed forever.

When Mariela asked her to take off her panties too, Carla looked to her mother for the stop she expected. She found none—only a complicit smile.

I swear that when I got on that plane all I could think about was closing the deal. I never imagined that night would be the one where I lost myself and us.

My daughter set down her glass, took off her tights on the sofa, and looked at me with a smile I hadn’t seen in ten years. Outside, the first snowfall of winter settled over the attic.

I thought she was just flirting with me, until she took me to her apartment without asking and I understood the night would not end with one drink.

I’d spent half my life with the same woman when that stranger in leopard print sat beside me and looked at me the way no one had in years.

I kept their numbers in the drawer and knew I would never call. But I also knew my husband would never touch me the way he had before that night at sea.

I set the cup on the bedside table, knelt beside the bed, and understood that that morning nothing in this house would ever be the same again.