Mature

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.

When I opened the door and saw him there, with that good-boy look and those defined arms, I knew that afternoon was going to change something for both of us.

She got on my bike in that tight leather outfit and told me to go slow. But neither of us wanted to go slow that night.

When I stepped out of the elevator, my thong already soaked and my dress clinging to my sweat, I knew that tequila wouldn’t remain just tequila.

For five years we met every January. She ran the spa, I always booked the same room. Nobody suspected a thing.

She went into Diego’s room wearing only a black thong under her robe. He was asleep. She sat on the edge of the bed and her hand went there on its own.

I parked half a block away so I wouldn’t make noise. The door was unlocked and the lights were off. What I found at the end of the hallway changed everything.

The afternoon Diego showed up sweaty from the game and took off his shirt, everything changed. The tattoo Carmen had zoomed in on the night before.

He smelled of tobacco and the countryside. He wasn’t handsome, but from the moment I first saw him, something in me stopped working normally.

When she dragged me to the bathroom with one hand in my sweater, we stopped being boss and employee. There was no turning back.

I went down to the kitchen at midnight never imagining he was still awake. He was in the garden smoking, with that effortless air. He looked at me and I made no move to leave.

I climbed the gate at three in the morning, with my dress torn and my stockings bloodied, just to look him in the eye and ask whether I was making it all up.

At sixty-three, after a decade of masturbating alone, I never expected the girl in the spare room to change everything forever.

The boy from the neighborhood looked me up and down without shame while I tried to keep my voice from trembling. I was forty-six, with a son to save.

When Héctor put his hand on Sofía’s back and she didn’t pull away, I understood that this trip was going to be different from all the others.

A half-open door was the beginning. Then came the mirror I installed in her room so I could watch her better, night after night.

When I opened the door dressed in the button-down blouse and heels, I knew that winter morning would not be just another class, but a surrender arranged with him.

When Marcos came down from the roof, soaked in sweat, Carmenza already knew she wasn’t going to let him leave. She’d been waiting too long for a man like him.

There was something her uncle had been asking for months. She had been refusing for months—until she saw that phone on the counter and everything between them changed.

They meant to humiliate them in front of their children. They didn’t count on Beatriz’s black belt, or on Silvia always carrying rope in her bag.