Oral

While the others kept drinking, I already had Andrés cornered in the alley. I'd spent hours unable to take my eyes off him.

I’d been counting the hours for seven days. When I saw him come through the airport doors, I barely cared that I was on my period: that night, I wasn’t waiting for anything.

Natalia only wanted to get waxed before going to the beach. She didn’t expect the hotel beautician to be so striking, or what she’d find under her robe.

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.

...

We’d been married for twenty years, and then she started going to the gym, changing her clothes, checking her phone in the bathroom. Something was off. I decided to find out.

The girls had left, the room was silent, and Rodrigo made a joke that we both knew wasn’t really a joke.

There was something about the way he looked at me from the platform. It wasn’t just any look. I knew that if I went with him, I’d never be the same.

I’d wanted her since I was twenty. Five years, a marriage, and a child later, Elena showed up at my door.

They were both standing in the doorway of my room, watching me sleep. She was touching herself. So was he. And when I opened my eyes, neither of them stopped.

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.

The first time I put on her lingerie and looked at myself in the mirror, I didn’t know whether what I felt was shame or something completely different.

I saw her alone in the café for weeks: voluptuous, pretty, with a body her clothes couldn’t hide. When she confessed she’d gone months without sex, I knew something was about to happen.

They were an uncle and his nephew, two gym beasts who had been watching me for weeks. That Sunday, something in the air changed forever.

The paper contained only a cellphone number. What I found when I arrived at my in-laws’ house that Tuesday erased my idea of who they were forever.

I had been preparing that day for months: the wig, the dress, the lubricant. I thought I was alone at the abandoned lookout. The guard disagreed.

He asked me for a light, and when I held out my lighter, his eyes dazzled me. Five minutes later, we were heading to his apartment, and I still had no idea what I’d gotten myself into.

I’d been keeping that curiosity to myself for years. In the dark, with him a meter away, I felt that if I didn’t ask then, I never would.

They tried to pry a secret out of me. What I didn’t know was that they were hiding something much bigger—and that afternoon would change our family forever.