Office

I’d spent months thinking about her, about her feet, about her mouth. The Halloween party gave us the night we’d both wanted without saying it out loud.

Four weeks watching her move between the tables, wanting what I didn’t dare name. After that, nothing was ever the same.

When she turned off the hallway lights and closed the door, I understood we weren’t going to talk about my record. Something had changed in the office.

I dressed to impress no one, or so I thought. Two guards stopped me with a smile that said they knew exactly who I was.

When Don Eduardo closed the office door, Valeria knew they hadn’t come to discuss any report. They both held a secret, and that made them equals.

That morning Rodrigo closed his office door and pulled out a small gold bag. Inside was something that would change the office mornings forever.

She was washing dishes in rubber gloves when the other woman whispered in her ear how much she’d enjoyed her husband.

When she confessed it to me, we were already alone in the room. Her sister had asked me to watch her for the day. No one imagined what would happen between us.

I went to the clinic for a simple backache, never suspecting that the company doctor had a kind of treatment that appears in no medical manual.

My boss introduced him with a laugh, like it was an inside joke. Seven days later, that man had me bent over my own desk.

I’d had that drawer locked for years. That morning I found it open, and inside was a black disc with Sofía’s name written on it in marker.

I was cleaning the offices in the hallway when I found her alone, with an open neckline and a tense neck. I offered her a massage. Neither of us thought we’d go that far.

I had been living this double life for months, and that week was mine alone. Until the club door opened and I saw the last man who should have seen me walk in.

When he pointed the camera for the first time, he told himself it was the last. Six weeks later, he was still filming. And Laura was still smiling on the other side of the lens.

As soon as the last classmates left, she went upstairs. She took off her skirt first. Then her blouse. Then everything else.

I’d been watching him cross the hallway for weeks. That afternoon he called me to his office, and something inside me knew everything was about to change.

I brought wine to his room at eleven at night under the pretense that I couldn’t sleep. We both knew it was a lie, but neither of us said it out loud.

When Rafael ordered me to take off my blouse, the other two men in the room didn’t move. No one protested. No one looked away. That was what he wanted me to understand.

We had planned Saturday, but she called on Friday: come tonight, I’m anxious. When she opened the door, I could no longer pretend this wasn’t serious.

When the scissors finished their work, the mirror gave him back a gaze that was not quite his own. And the voice he heard in that salon would not leave him alone.