Peeping

He texted me to ask where I was. Twenty minutes later I was in the back of his tram car, biting my lips to keep quiet.

I’d only gone downstairs for a glass of water. What I heard on the ground floor left me frozen on the last step, holding my breath so they wouldn’t hear me.

I sat between them in the car and, when my friend got out at her house, I was left alone with her father and a tension neither of us dared name.

The moment I caught his eyes across the glass, I knew I’d turn that afternoon into something neither of us would forget.

I saw him open the door a crack while I was on my knees. I could have stopped. Instead, I winked and let him keep watching.

I left the curtain half-open on purpose. That afternoon wasn’t just for Adrián and me: someone else was waiting for the show from across the street.

She had been married for more than forty years and had never looked at another man. That morning she opened the door to an empty house, unaware that nothing would ever be the same again.

I crossed half of Spain to leave that afternoon by the pool behind, but music and a stranger dragged me into repeating what I swore I’d never feel again.

From the darkness I watched them through the fence of plants. He was small and quiet, but what he was hiding under his pants took my breath away that night.

I had watched her through the peephole at exactly 7:15 every morning. What I didn’t know was that she counted my footsteps behind hers whenever she went downstairs.

Marcos thought he was in charge of the game. His wife looked at me over her shoulder, let the towel fall, and I understood that she set the only rule.

I grew up understanding naturism as something natural, but nothing prepared me for the day my mother’s boyfriend stopped covering himself in front of me.

She came home every morning smelling of American tobacco and new perfume. I kept silent and hid my suspicions—until the night I followed her.

He asked me to hold some tools while squatting down. I knew perfectly well what he was doing, and still I didn’t get up.

We thought we were sneaking around in the sand, until a stranger came over and confessed he’d been watching us for hours. And he had a proposition.

The apartment walls were paper-thin, and my girlfriend’s best friend slept just on the other side. That first morning, we pretended not to remember she was there.

I took off my bikini in the jacuzzi, knowing he was watching me from the roof. What I came to forget became the only thing I remember about the trip.

I never imagined that the elegant, composed woman who raised me was hiding someone entirely different on the living-room armchair at two in the morning.

There were twenty photos and a video hidden in a folder with a single letter. I opened it expecting anything but what I was about to see.

Every time I lazed around, I paid for it with nettles, lashes, and her muddy boots. And worst of all, part of me was already waiting for the next punishment.