Peeping

When Renata pulled the thong from her pocket and laid it on the table, I knew that afternoon wouldn’t end with coffee.

That swimsuit barely covered them, and each day the pool showed a little more skin. No one suspected how far the neighbors would go when the last garment fell.

I dropped her two streets from the meeting point, and when she got into the car, she introduced herself as if I were just another passenger. None of us knew what was coming.

I was the one who encouraged her to accept her lover’s proposal. I never imagined she’d come back that dawn surrounded by the memory of strangers.

When the moans from the closed room reached the garden, Andrés knew he had to see with his own eyes what was happening behind that door.

Damián slid into the wrong bed that night and knew neither couple would ever look at each other the same way again.

My husband didn’t even look at me when I left in that tight skirt that night. He didn’t know I was going to a hotel to watch, from an armchair, what I’d wanted for years.

When Renata went barefoot into the kitchen at dawn, she never imagined her husband would watch from the doorway, or that morning would change everything between all four of them.

I went back to the chalet thinking it was all over, and found the pool full of bodies, cups on the ground, and the panther waiting for me in the water with a smile that said it all.

At the café, they dared each other over laughs: each would pick a man that very afternoon. Neither imagined the bet would end in the same bed.

The taxi dropped me in front of a huge gate and a guard was waiting for me. I still had no idea that night would turn me from a guest into the game.

Lucía put the tequila bottle in the center of the rug and smiled: whoever failed the dare drank. None of us imagined how far we were willing to go that night.

I’d known her since we were children: sweet, quiet, the perfect wife. Until I walked into that club in the city and saw her stretched out on the table, surrounded by men.

I’d gone a week without hearing from him when he waited for me after class, took me to a secluded corner, and let three strangers watch everything.

I had never had a massage just on my breasts, much less with my four friends watching from the pool’s edge, waiting their turn.

We went out to sunbathe with no tan lines and no one around. What we didn’t imagine was how many would be on top of us before we got back in the water.

I was in my forties, married, with two children, and I had never once looked at another woman. That night, leaning on the bar in a pub, everything I thought I knew about myself came undone.

I opened my eyes in the middle of the action and saw her leaning in the doorway, one hand inside her shorts. She wasn’t angry. She was looking at me.

She caught me with my hand inside my pants, staring at her through the crack in the door. Instead of shouting, she smiled and told me she had a lot to teach me.

Every night she came to that door to listen. What she never imagined was that soon she would be on the other side, utterly surrendered.