Mature

When her boss offered to take me out to buy the drinks, my husband was left looking like a fool. I already knew that outing wouldn’t be innocent.

When I went down to the kitchen at three in the morning, she was already there waiting for me, wearing a nightgown so thin it left nothing to the imagination.

I saw him get out of the car in that light-colored suit and knew I wouldn’t be sleeping alone in the borrowed apartment that night.

I heard every filthy word they said about my body, convinced I couldn’t understand them. When I spoke to them in their own language, their faces turned red.

I hadn’t seen her in more than four years. I bought a ticket to her play without suspecting what would happen afterward, in the early hours at my place.

We had spent half our lives silently measuring ourselves against each other. Until the woman he pursued knocked on my door one August night and chose to stay.

Three nights sleeping beside him in that tiny cab, until one early morning his huge hand began roaming over me as if I already belonged to him.

I returned to the countryside after years in the city and, looking for my father among the corn, found my mother on her knees before one of his farmhands.

She screamed at me in the elevator, and ten minutes later she was dragging me into her apartment. I was a virgin, clumsy, and terrified; she knew exactly what she wanted from me.

I raised the blind just a little, as always. But that night Marina was standing in front of the mirror, and for the first time she didn’t look away from my window.

I had been at reception for a month when the Friday party changed everything: a hand beneath the table, a decision I hadn’t planned, and a Monday that was no longer work.

He was the age of my older daughter and stretched up to look down my cleavage while I signed papers. I said nothing. The next day I chose the dress with him in mind.

I turned off the light, convinced he wasn’t coming. Then the doorbell rang twice, and I knew I wouldn’t be sleeping that night.

I peered around the waterfall expecting an empty cave. What I found inside changed my entire afternoon.

I hadn't gone back for two weeks, but his midnight message found me in bed, nearly naked and without a single argument for saying no.

She had the seriousness of someone who knew the effect she caused and chose to administer it drop by drop. That night, on the massage table, I stopped pretending I’d only come for my back.

I heard him every night on the other side of the wall and imagined taking my mother’s place with the man who devoured me with his eyes whenever he thought no one was watching.

I had been unemployed for months when I started working at his warehouse. I never imagined that my best friend’s serious, broad-handed father would undo me with a single look.

My phone fell into the water, so I had to use my mother’s. I never imagined a saved chat would show me who came into our house when I wasn’t there.

Her husband spent months at sea and she was climbing the walls. I only went to move some furniture, but that afternoon the house was empty and the door was open.