Peeping

The guest bathroom was occupied, so I walked into the bedroom without thinking. Damián was there, alone, looking at me like someone who’d been waiting for that moment for weeks.

After the fourth gin and tonic, my wife got up from the sofa, crossed the living room, and started undressing in front of our friend. I could only watch and want it.

While I spread on the sunscreen, she moved her hips slowly against the sand. I could only think about how to convince her to cross into the other hotel.

We had been going naked to the same beach with Rubén and Elena for years. A conversation between men lit the fuse: we wanted to explore what we had never seen in each other.

Lucía came back from class with another couple’s name saved on her phone. That night we knew Saturday would no longer be an ordinary Saturday.

She expected shouting, perhaps the end of everything. Instead, he offered her a glass of wine and asked her to tell him everything, without leaving out a single detail.

For months I’d whispered the same fantasy in her ear. That afternoon, in a deserted cove, I stopped imagining it and watched it come true in front of me.

Her husband came home exhausted and fell asleep in front of the television. Her boss, on the other hand, looked at her as though he knew exactly what she imagined in the shower.

When the guard called her number, the laughter died at once and a hundred eyes fixed on her: the only untouched beauty in a yard of concrete, sweat, and barbed wire.

He climbed those five floors to confront his girlfriend’s mother. He had no idea her husband was home, or what proposal would come out of his mouth that afternoon.

We had been each other’s first love. Ten years later she returned to the village, and I still didn’t know that night I’d learn to hate my best friend’s easy smile.

The emergency door was locked and my wife was trapped on the other side with him. Only a plaster wall separated us. Then I started hearing.

Take down the photos, hide my clothes, conceal the webcam, and hide in the ironing room: that night my wife would bring home a stranger and I’d be the only witness.

He came to inspect the boiler and, between sips of coffee, made a proposition neither of them had dared say aloud.

When Diego pulled over beneath the neon lights, I knew our bet over laughter and kalimotxo would become the night my wife and I had secretly imagined for months.

At the wedding everyone was looking at her in a way I never had. That night she came up to get me and I passed out drunk. What happened after that I only found out at dawn.

She treated the workers like trash. They decided to teach her, against the sink in her immaculate kitchen, exactly where she belonged that afternoon.

I never dared tell her. But that afternoon, while she was having coffee with her friends, I typed the two words that set everything in motion: “but accept.”

I had classified her as unattainable: the haughty director holding up my mortgage. Until I saw her enter a swingers’ club on her husband’s arm, ready for anything.

When Diego came out of the shower with his towel barely tied, Lucía knew that week was going to be very hard to endure in silence.