Seduction

For weeks I’d been pretending everything was fine, until that night a man looked at me the way my husband had stopped looking at me, and I chose not to resist.

I boarded the train resigned to spending my birthday alone. When she sat across from me and lit a cigarette, I had no idea what would happen next.

The dress hugged my body, the stockings brushed me with every step, and when that man held out his hand to dance, I knew I wouldn’t return home the same.

When he opened his shirt and I felt his cologne fill the kitchen, I knew that breakfast with my nephew wasn’t going to end with a quiet coffee.

I only knew Beatriz because she was my wife’s friend. One night she came down to the kitchen with an unexpected proposal.

My wife agreed to pay an expert to massage me in front of her, but she didn’t expect to discover how much pleasure it gave her to watch another woman make me moan.

I arrived thinking we’d drink beer and celebrate his promotion. Carla opened the door in a tiny skirt and a sheer blouse. Damián still hadn’t arrived.

I was running late, sweaty, and packed against other bodies when she leaned in to whisper in my ear. I never noticed when I stopped thinking about my meeting.

I thought I’d lost the bag containing my most intimate photos. When the doctor messaged me that night, I knew he’d already seen exactly who I was.

I crossed the living room to get a glass of water, forgetting the curtains were still open. On the other side of the glass, his eyes had already found me.

I went in looking for lingerie to please another man and came out discovering that a woman’s hands can make tremble what I had never felt tremble with myself.

My boyfriend was snoring like a log in the back room when she came up to me. Her southern accent and those black eyes told me everything before her hands did.

We’d been talking for five months by chat. When she opened the hotel door barefaced, in a black shirt, I knew no screen would ever be enough.

I looked at myself in the mirror wearing my wig and translucent dress, and knew that night I would let a stranger do everything I’d imagined for weeks.

I was forty-four, had two daughters, and a recent divorce when the girl from across the street looked at me differently and said what I didn’t dare think.

I ordered a whiskey to forget the day and got served a pair of green eyes with my drink. Forty minutes later, the barmaid’s fingers covered my eyes from behind.

Carolina said she was bored of men. But when I dropped my pants beside her pool, her eyes never left me for a second.

When he got into the car and smiled at me, I knew we weren’t going to make it anywhere decent that night. It had to be ours, even if it was only on a dirt road among almond trees.

When I ran into him on that beach after three years without seeing each other, he was no longer the boy who used to throw sand in my hair. Something in his look told me this wasn’t going to end well.