Oral

We were always the last ones to turn off the lights. That night I walked in without warning, and what I saw changed every shift after that.

I’m 46, and I’ve never told anyone this. I entered a dead-end tire shop alone, accepted the first beer, and stopped thinking about going home.

I had promised him a different kind of gift: that weekend I wouldn’t decide anything. He would take the reins, and I would only have to obey and let myself go.

I couldn’t say whether I liked everything about that creature or nothing; I only know that, in the heat before the mirror, a new self began to emerge.

I’d spent the whole day not feeling like doing anything. Until, when I switched on the boiler, I saw the woman in the building across from mine walking nearly naked through her kitchen, oblivious to my gaze.

I watched him through the window while he touched himself, thinking no one could see him. The next day I went down with the excuse of using the bike, and I wasn’t leaving without trying him.

She was alone on the grass, in the shade, with legs that made me forget the book. I had no idea how far we’d go before we said goodbye.

I had spent weeks dreaming about that afternoon, but nothing prepared me for the first order you gave me the moment you closed the door behind me.

No one suspects the respectable woman I pretend to be by day. Only you know what I whisper when we’re alone again, glass in hand.

I thought I’d buried the woman who charged for her time. One offer from my own boyfriend was enough to wake her and take control of the night.

I hadn’t set foot in a club in years, but that night my son’s friend looked at me in a way no man had in a long time.

When the lights went out and we were left suspended at the very top, my cousin stopped pretending to be innocent and told me exactly what she wanted to do to me.

The bus’s swaying pressed us together so tightly that her hand ended up exactly where it shouldn’t have, and neither of us did anything to stop it.

I changed clothes, put on coconut-scented perfume, and went back to the bar with one plan in my head: to find out whether that smile was for real.

I only wanted to sweet-talk him into raising my grade, playing the pickpocket who distracts to steal. I never imagined how far my own bluff would take me.

He thought the locker room was empty when he stepped into the shower. He didn’t count on two strangers watching him, or on how much that look would stir him.

He asked me to go upstairs and get myself ready just for him. That night, at last, I was going to earn the other girls’ respect.

I sat in the passenger seat just out of curiosity, but that night I learned some decisions are made without thinking too much.

When I realized I didn’t have my wallet or my phone, the taxi was already too far. And the driver started looking at me differently through the mirror.

By day she humiliated me in front of her friends; by night she begged me to put her in her place. No one imagined what was happening inside that car.