Seduction

...

We’d been married for twenty years, and then she started going to the gym, changing her clothes, checking her phone in the bathroom. Something was off. I decided to find out.

I’d wanted her since I was twenty. Five years, a marriage, and a child later, Elena showed up at my door.

I dressed to impress no one, or so I thought. Two guards stopped me with a smile that said they knew exactly who I was.

I saw her alone in the café for weeks: voluptuous, pretty, with a body her clothes couldn’t hide. When she confessed she’d gone months without sex, I knew something was about to happen.

At nineteen, after a lifetime in all-girls schools, that night I learned more than I could have imagined.

I had been preparing that day for months: the wig, the dress, the lubricant. I thought I was alone at the abandoned lookout. The guard disagreed.

He asked me for a light, and when I held out my lighter, his eyes dazzled me. Five minutes later, we were heading to his apartment, and I still had no idea what I’d gotten myself into.

They tried to pry a secret out of me. What I didn’t know was that they were hiding something much bigger—and that afternoon would change our family forever.

I knew exactly what would happen when I entered that room with him. I knew it, and still I closed the door. My husband was away, and there was too much tequila in my veins.

We were sworn enemies since we were five. No one would ever guess that the girl who made my nose bleed would also be my first woman.

The teachers’ lounge seemed empty at that hour. I pushed the door open without knocking and there she was on the sofa, completely lost in herself.

When I reviewed the footage from the cameras she didn’t know existed, I saw my wife with him. In our bed. And instead of getting furious, I felt something dark I hadn’t expected.

Rodrigo opened the door and found his neighbor in the hallway, teary-eyed, her dress tight. What she asked him for minutes later had no name.

Adrián offered to drive me home with my guitar. I should have said no. But there was something in the way he looked at me that wouldn’t let me answer.

The August heat crushed the apartment courtyard, and Adrián couldn’t take his eyes off the window opposite. Mrs. Valverde had no idea she was being watched.

He entered the cave thinking of war. The seer awaited him with his queen’s face, her gown barely covering her body, and a promise in her eyes that was more than a vision.

When I lock the door, I open the drawer, take out the perfume he chose for me, and become who I really am. Only he knows.

To the world we were two friends at the bar. Only I knew I had a black thong under my joggers, and that he knew it too.