Seduction

My boyfriend introduced me as his friend to his entire family. His uncle noticed and slipped me a note with his number and one word written on it: «later».

That October Sunday we came down from mass soaked by the rain. We went into her kitchen to dry off. And there, against the wall, I kissed her the way I’d wanted to kiss her all my life.

At three in the morning, two men knocked on the door. What neither of them knew was that Camila had been asking me for that night for weeks.

Diego always turned me on and I avoided him because of my boyfriend. Until that afternoon he took me to the gym sauna and I realized I couldn't keep lying to myself.

That afternoon on the beach, all I wanted was to switch off. When the blonde woman in the bikini came over asking for a light, I knew my plans for solitude had just changed.

I thought it was a secret date with my girlfriend’s cousin. What I didn’t know was that the phone beside the bed was streaming everything live.

Don Salvador had been in the building for a month when I caught him hiding his phone. I didn’t see what he was looking at, but from the way he stammered, I imagined it right away.

I had barely dragged her into the courtyard when she started bleeding. But the wound wasn’t the strangest secret that woman kept beneath my roof.

I met him at an awards show neither of us wanted to be at. I gave him a light in the back hallway and, without knowing it, I gave him everything else too.

I opened the door without making a sound. Three sleeping men in the same room and her in red panties, on the bed, wearing a shirt that wasn’t mine.

That afternoon I didn’t go to play soccer. I went to lose something I had already decided to lose, never imagining my mother would arrive too soon.

She said she couldn’t fasten her seat belt. When I leaned over to help, her hand went somewhere else—and everything changed course.

My friend finished his last drink, looked at me from the armchair, and began to tell me why he had left his wife one June morning without warning.

When Camila whispered that the girl was already in the house and watching us from the hallway, I thought she would stop. She did the exact opposite.

Lucía was the most proper girl in the school crowd. That night I saw her walk into the birthday party in a miniskirt and realized the Sunday-Mass girl was gone.

I was twenty-two, with a curiosity kept under lock and key and the address of a hotel where no one would ask awkward questions. Antonella was waiting with a book in her hand.

I got out of the car with numb legs and saw her waiting in the doorway, barefoot, biting her lip the way she did when she couldn’t take it anymore.

He was twenty years, two months and fourteen days old when he filled the tank, rode up into the sierra, and pushed open the door of the only open butcher shop in Risca Alta.

When I asked my ex for a favor, he thought I wanted sex. What I asked was much worse: help me destroy my best friend’s marriage.

I entered that room thinking I was in control. I left knowing exactly who I owed my silence to.