Peeping

When Lucía crossed the room and sat on his lap without looking at me, I knew that night I would only watch, and that it was exactly what we both wanted.

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, maybe the end of everything. Instead, he handed 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 tired and fell asleep in front of the TV. Her boss, on the other hand, looked at her as if he knew exactly what she imagined in the shower.

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

He went up those five floors to argue with his girlfriend’s mother. He had no idea her husband was home, or the proposal that 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.

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

He came to check the boiler and, between sips of coffee, made a proposal neither of them dared say out loud.

When Diego stopped in front of the neon lights, I knew that dare, fueled by laughter and kalimotxo, would become the night my wife and I had been secretly imagining 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, bent over the immaculate kitchen sink, 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: “then accept.”

She was filed away as inaccessible: the haughty bank director who kept freezing my mortgage. Until I saw her enter a couples’ club on her husband’s arm, ready for anything.