Seduction

I climbed onto the chair in front of the mirror, legs in the air for the photos my girlfriend asked for. I didn’t expect him to walk in, or what came after.

When she kissed me in front of the car, I knew it wasn’t the alcohol. It was everything she’d kept quiet for ten years finally spilling out of her mouth.

I thought the back row at the premiere would let me be alone with him. It took me a while to realize no one is really alone in a dark room.

His hands were no longer seeking the pain in my back. I knew it, he knew it, and still I said nothing when they traveled down the cleft to places they had never reached before.

The doorbell rang after midnight and I opened it expecting pizza. It was a stranger with a bottle in his hand and the truth about my wife on his lips.

I went to the bar to forget what I saw, and woke up naked in the bed of the girl who had despised me most in class. That same morning I’d be getting three million.

When she went into the bathroom, I didn’t expect her to kneel between my legs, or for her tongue to decide for me what I’d been avoiding asking for years.

When she came to sweep the empty house, I told her to go back to her town спокойно. Three hours later we were in my bed, and my wife still hadn’t landed.

I was her assistant. We worked twelve hours a day. That night, barefoot on her sofa, she looked at me like never before, and I knew something had changed forever.

Thirty-two years old, red nails, and a way of looking at women that seemed like a greeting and a question. I was a married woman. That is, until the night I forgot my keys.

I told the guys at the bar I liked men and, without meaning to, opened a door I couldn’t close. That same night, someone followed me into the bathroom.

When Mariela asked her to take off her panties too, Carla looked to her mother for the stop she expected. She found none—only a complicit smile.

When I offered to shower together to wash off the sweat, I thought it would be an innocent gesture. The way she looked at me from the bathroom door said otherwise.

The door opened just as Carolina crossed the hall naked, with another man behind her. That night I learned my silence would have a price I never imagined.

When I opened my eyes in that white room, my mother was standing naked in front of me, and nothing we had been taught about good and evil ever made sense again.

Every morning I picked her up for work. That dawn, out in the middle of the fields, I discovered she could no longer hide what she felt when she looked at me.

The two goons dragged me off to tour the machines while she stayed alone with the owner. When I came back, the desk was empty.

When I opened the door to the empty apartment, I wasn’t expecting to see him there with that smile. The client was running late, and the clock was silently marking our only chance.

The tide brought me notebooks and pencils the same day everything I thought was solid between Tomás and me began to crumble. I had no idea what I would use them for.

Adela had always avoided being touched. That January night, a translucent-skinned stranger sat on the edge of her bed and knew she could not send her away.