Peeping

Marina returned from university a grown woman, and amid laughter and games in the water, Adrián understood they were no longer the children who swam there every summer.

Forty minutes earlier my hands were shaking. Now I’m holding the harness, and for the first time in eighteen years, I’m the one deciding what happens in this room.

Rubén filled the coffee maker while, on the other side of the window, our women stopped pretending. Neither of us looked away, and then his hand found mine.

I was left alone with him, pretending to be sick when I wasn’t. I knew what would happen as soon as my sister passed through the gate and left me alone with her husband.

I’d never let so many eyes run over me all at once. And the worst —or the best— part is that my husband enjoyed every second from the bar.

That afternoon, sitting across from me, Mariela stopped talking about her problems and began unbuttoning her blouse with a calm that froze my breath.

My father taught me that monsters stay in the closet if you don’t open the door. What I never told him is how badly I want mine to dare to come out.

I came home from the hospital with my arm in a cast and a thought I couldn’t shake. That night I went to the bathroom, and my mother appeared in the doorway just when I thought I was alone.

I opened my eyes in the middle of the pleasure and saw her leaning against the doorframe, watching us. She said nothing. She just slid a hand inside her shorts.

In the dressing room, Daniela chose the red dress that allowed no underwear. She didn’t know it would make her the obsession of the entire channel.

“Here we can do whatever we want. Nobody knows us, nobody judges us.” She said it with a glass in her hand, and I knew summer was going to change everything.

When I texted her “do your thing,” she knew exactly what to do with the stranger who would knock on the door at six-thirty that evening.

I woke thirsty that night and found the door ajar. What I saw across the hallway left me frozen, afraid even to breathe.

They thought the cove was empty. I stayed behind the rock, holding my breath, watching her move on top of him as the sky turned orange.

“It’s only a handjob,” he promised her. But her husband was coming home that very night and the two of them were still tangled in the sheets, unable and unwilling to stop.

Marina stretched her hand toward him from the sofa, palm open, an invitation that said nothing and everything. Tomás set down the glass and rose from the armchair.

I put the proof back where I’d found it, washed my hands, and went down to the kitchen as if I knew nothing. That night, the dirtiest game of our marriage began.

I’d never done it with anyone. And the first person who entered me wasn’t my boyfriend, but his father, one afternoon when the house was empty and I couldn’t say no.