Peeping

He climbed those five floors to confront his girlfriend’s mother. He had no idea her husband was home, or what proposal 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.

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

He came to inspect the boiler and, between sips of coffee, made a proposition neither of them had dared say aloud.

When Diego pulled over beneath the neon lights, I knew our bet over laughter and kalimotxo would become the night my wife and I had secretly imagined 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, against the sink in her immaculate kitchen, 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: “but accept.”

I had classified her as unattainable: the haughty director holding up my mortgage. Until I saw her enter a swingers’ club on her husband’s arm, ready for anything.

When Diego came out of the shower with his towel barely tied, Lucía knew that week was going to be very hard to endure in silence.

I never imagined I’d be the one pushing my wife toward another man, but there I was, reading every email with a racing pulse and a dry mouth.

They had spent ten years visiting nudist beaches without anything happening. That afternoon, a man sat down in front of them—and she did what her husband had only dared imagine for years.

When I opened the laptop Gonzalo had “forgotten” in my car, I realized the two husbands had spent months preparing me as the centerpiece of their darkest fantasy.

I was always certain of her faithfulness. So when she lowered her gaze and began to talk about that night, I felt the ground shift beneath my feet.

She went down the stairs with her heart racing and her dress clinging to her naked skin. She knew he was watching from the window, and that tonight the game could no longer be undone.

I went down to the loneliest cove to enjoy the sun, but behind that umbrella lying on its side there was something I wasn’t supposed to see. And an idea came to me.

For years I pretended not to understand why she lingered when passing that shop. The afternoon I followed her inside, I understood my mother had already stopped belonging only to my father.

I’d spent years cheating on my husband without guilt, but I never imagined a work trip to a remote farm would end with me on my knees before a stranger.

I never answer the phone at three in the morning, but that night I knew it was him—and what he had to confess about my wife and the old man couldn’t wait until dawn.