Seduction

The elevator panel died between two floors. She smiled, stepped toward me, and said quietly that she knew exactly what was on my mind.

When he told me to lower my pants and lie face down, I could hear in his voice that this exam wasn’t going to be routine.

She told me a thousand times that she liked me; that night she came down with wine, turned off the TV, and said what she’d been wanting to tell me for two years.

I thought she was just flirting with me, until she took me to her apartment without asking and I understood the night would not end with one drink.

When I put my hand on his chest and didn’t take it away, I knew that afternoon wouldn’t end like the others. He was twice my age and smelled of cold beer.

That folder was never supposed to exist. But I opened it—and among hundreds of photos of me asleep and naked, I found something worse: the email where he shared them.

For months I kept running into him in the elevator, knowing he was out of my reach. That night I found a yellow sign with a phone number and a binding spell.

The door had been left ajar. When I sat up on the table, I saw my little brother staring from the hallway. He didn’t dare come in.

At eighteen I thought I’d seen everything, until my cousin pulled the blinds, put on that movie, and started touching herself without taking her eyes off me.

I turned on the phone, cracked the curtains open just enough, and waited for his shadow to cross the window while I stayed naked in front of the mirror.

She had been married for fifteen years and had never looked at another man. Until Lorenzo offered to show her his workshop at seven in the morning and locked the door.

When I looked through the keyhole and saw her on her knees in front of him, I knew lust had defeated pride long before that night.

I had the house to myself, four drinks in me, and the certainty that four men were watching me from the scaffolding. I wasn't going to waste the morning.

When he tied the black mask over my eyes and opened the private-room door, I never imagined that one of those masks hid someone I’d known since childhood.

I heard it through the ajar door: the laborer was fucking the secretary in the storeroom. That afternoon I went back to the office for more than documents.

We were having a perfect day when she came to sit on my lap. I never imagined that one touch, one curiosity, and one mistake of mine would erase the line between father and daughter.

I’d spent half my life with the same woman when that stranger in leopard print sat beside me and looked at me the way no one had in years.

I started the diary because nothing was happening in my life and closed it because everything began to happen. Between signed hospital shifts and a boy who knew how to wait, I was never the same.

I thought nothing could be worse than letting him drive me home. Until he shut the apartment door and I put my bag on the couch.