Office

It was two in the morning, we were alone on the 25th floor, and her back was stiff. What started as a favor ended up becoming something else.

Blindfolded, with clamps pulling at my breasts, I stopped being the director who kneels before no one. Up there, I was only a number surrendered to his hands.

She called her “babe” in the same voice from twenty years ago, and Helena knew the severance check would never leave that drawer. The debt was going to be collected with her body.

“If you stay, you stop being the perfect student,” he said without touching me yet. I looked at the locked door. My legs did not move.

That morning I decided to take his coffee to his office myself, in front of everyone, so they’d understand what kind of woman I meant to be by his side.

She had all the proof of everything on the desk. She could ruin me with one call. Instead, she locked the door and told me to kneel.

I sent him two photos hidden in the bathroom to provoke him. His answer wasn’t praise: it was an order to open the drawer I always kept locked.

At twenty-nine she still had a good girl’s face, but that morning she walked into my office knowing exactly what she’d have to do for her father to sleep at home.

Four purplish marks on my hips were the exact shape of his fingers. I dressed like an impeccable executive, but we both knew who my body already belonged to.

I’d spent weeks avoiding her, convinced what we had was over. Then the phone rang and her voice was enough to tell me I’d fall again.

When she slipped her hand under my desk, I knew that morning wasn’t going to solve a single incident. I could only think of her and what she had just left me.

We had spent three years living by one rule between partners. That cold night, in her green dress and the dark office, we knew we were about to break it.

I turned fifty, I’ve been married for thirty years, and I’ve never been faithful. These are the secret getaways that kept my marriage alive.

I asked her to dress to provoke, and on the fourth day she came home with a trembling voice and a story she couldn’t tell me with her clothes on.

My husband had spent two decades waiting for me to cross that line. I never imagined I’d do it on an ordinary afternoon, against the wall of my own office.

They went up to the second floor carrying a tray of pastries. None of them imagined they’d learn that afternoon how much desire had been sleeping between the three of them.

We’d fantasized about it for months. As she went upstairs behind the waitress, I knew I was going to watch everything from the room next door.

It was almost eleven when the elevator dropped me at the empty parking garage. I had no idea those keys would cost me so much, and so little, at the same time.

I sent my secretary home, turned up the heat, and left only my blazer over my sheer bra. I wanted Mariela to see everything I’d been craving for weeks.

I went down to the garden looking for her and found her behind the glass, seated in the chair, with her assistant kissing her eyelids as if I didn’t exist.