Mature

My parents were gone. The afternoon was long and the desire unbearable. When the name 'Valeria_sola' appeared on the list, I knew that day would be different.

It was the first time I went to the transport base to look for him. What I didn’t know was that Rodrigo was already waiting for me with a smile that wasn’t innocent.

When night falls in this house, I turn off the light in his room, close the door, and stop being only his mother to become something more.

She was famous, perfect, and in her fifties. I was the striker of the moment. That night I went up to her suite and learned what it means to play above your league.

When I passed by the bus stop, Don Rodrigo saw me from the bus. What started as a birthday beer ended in a way I never expected.

I’d been putting up with his looks in the office for months. The day I read his private messages, I made a decision his wife should never have provoked.

Fifty-four years old, suitcase packed, and a week on the coast. She wasn’t looking for anything. But a blue-eyed waiter had a way of looking at her that changed everything.

Ernesto hadn’t looked at me like that in years. Then the neighbors moved in, and one dinner lit something we thought had been asleep forever.

The door opened in the middle of the storm and the woman looked us over before making her offer. It was direct: five hundred for everything, paid in advance.

The villa was perfect for an affair: four bedrooms, husbands fishing offshore, and two men due at seven. Until the gate rang at six.

There were seven women in that apartment, the wine had done its work, and Camila started talking. None of us expected what she confessed that night.

That afternoon four men came to visit me. None knew about the others. I was the only one who had the full picture, and I felt no guilt at all.

I hadn’t come to Málaga looking for anything. And yet Mateo showed up with his twenty-eight years and those eyes that make you feel the world owes you something.

When Rodrigo crossed the threshold, Valentina looked at him with the calm of a woman who knew exactly what she had in mind—and that night, neither was innocent.

When she dialed maintenance for the second time that night, she already knew it wasn’t to ask him to clean anything.

At five in the morning, the hallway in my house should have been empty. But there I was, back against the wall, unable to move and not wanting to.

She wore knee-high boots and the kind of look women have when they already know exactly what they want. I got up to give her my card before the moment slipped away.

We were four forty-year-olds who’d never broken a plate. Raquel said we had to do something we couldn’t tell anyone about.

When I went down to the garage, Valeria was waiting for me in leather pants and a smile that was anything but maternal.

He’d come in looking for the bathroom and stayed standing in the doorway, staring at me. Twenty years old, nervous as hell, and asking me something I hadn’t expected.