Peeping

When I saw her come down through the building entrance at six in the morning, with a suitcase bigger than she was, I knew that summer wouldn’t be like any other.

The mattress creak in her parents’ room wasn’t sex: it was theft. Sabina padded down the hall barefoot until she pressed her eye to the crack in the door.

I thought it would be a fifteen-minute scolding. I didn’t count on the bag Bárbara brought, or on the woman that furious mother would become.

I closed my eyes to imagine him watching me. When hands grabbed my waist from behind, I thought I knew whose they were. I was completely wrong.

She wore a tiny black bikini, two triangles tied with strings, and looked at me over her shoulder as if she already knew what was about to happen between us.

I cornered her against the oak door without imagining that, through the crack in the drawing room, a pair of green eyes could no longer look away from us.

I thought the whole house was mine that night. Then the lock turned, he looked at me from the doorway, and I was still naked on the sofa.

I walked barefoot down the hallway thinking I’d find a movie. What I saw behind that half-open door changed everything between the three of us.

When Greta opened the bathroom door and found us like that, I knew the lockdown was only just beginning to drag all our secrets into the light.

I built the pool for the family, not for this: for my son’s girlfriend to spy on me from the window while I pretended not to notice her trembling hands.

She stood still against the mirror, breathing through her nose, letting me do as I pleased in silence while the rest of the building rode up without suspecting a thing.

I crossed half of Spain with a fever to hide out at my grandmother’s house. I never imagined that country woman would look at me naked the way she did that first night.

The silence at the table said it all before the words did: my father had a debt, and this time it wouldn’t be paid with money.

Hidden among the trees, they heard them gasping, and back at the table the woman whispered to her son an idea she never thought he’d dare carry out.

It was my daughter’s wedding, but it was him I searched for in the crowd. A ballad, sand underfoot, and suddenly he was no longer just my son.

The first thing I remember about that summer is the caretaker’s cracked hands and the girl with the bangs. The last, what I saw among the trees before dawn.

The key was still warming my pocket from the night before. I knew she’d be awake, waiting for me, with her robe open and the coffee maker on the stove.

Two hours before the vows, I wanted to steal one last kiss as fiancés and crossed the woods to his cabin. The back window showed me something I would never forget.

For my whole life I’d seen her in heels and stockings, but until that night on the sofa I never imagined what her feet could make me feel.

It was three in the morning when I heard the key in the lock. I hid behind the curtain, never imagining what my mother would let them do a meter away from me.