Oral

“Come at five. We need to talk about Saturday. Alone.” I wrote that to her in the morning, and since then I thought of nothing but hearing her come down the stairs.

I shut the storeroom door, change my clothes, and turn into someone else. No one on my street suspects what I’m about to do tonight, and that’s exactly what I like most.

I sat on the edge of the dock looking for nothing, but his gaze—like a man who knows what he wants—undid me before I said a single word.

We always played at being girlfriends in front of everyone, until heat, the river, and a few beers blurred the line between the game and what we really wanted.

I was drying my back when the door flew open. She saw me completely, apologized, and ran out. I never imagined I’d cross paths with her again that same morning.

He had only done his job as a doctor. She walked in unannounced, closed the door, and told him that tonight she hadn’t come to talk about her sick son.

I saw him open the door a crack while I was on my knees. I could have stopped. Instead, I winked and let him keep watching.

We agreed to meet early, before anyone else arrived. What began as another of our texting games became something I couldn’t get out of my head all day.

She’d been married for twenty years to a man who prayed before every meal. That afternoon, under the park tree, she confessed who she truly missed.

I was alone at the bar, bored and two drinks in, when he sat beside me and looked at me as if he already knew everything we'd do that night.

At three in the morning she was still awake, her head on my arm, waiting for the exact moment I opened my eyes to begin.

In the mirror, with my lips painted and my heels on, I saw no one in disguise: I saw the woman I always wanted to be when I let go.

I walked through the bar door in new heels and with my heart in my throat. I had no idea that night someone from my past would walk in.

The first afternoon, I still hadn’t unpacked, and I already knew no one there would take their eyes off us. And the worst part was this: I was starting to like it.

She knocked on their door soaked by the rain, without pride and with nothing to offer but her body. They looked at her, looked at each other, and she knew it was all beginning again.

I knew Professor Aníbal watched my body every time I said goodbye. That afternoon I walked into his classroom ready to use that look to my advantage, whatever it took.

She came into the maintenance room without warning and caught me shirtless. That shameless laugh of hers was the beginning of something I took years to confess.

The divorce didn’t break me: it gave me back my breath. That night, with a button-front dress and a poured drink, I let a much younger stranger make me feel alive.

I’d been sleeping with men for five years, and kneeling there again, I did the exact math of how many had gone through my mouth. That night I realized something had broken.

There was one boundary Marisa never crossed, and I’d learned to respect it. Until one morning, over breakfast, I figured out how to get around it without making her suffer.