Seduction

When Mariana asked for my help, I knew the secret I’d hidden for years was about to come to light in front of three people I barely knew.

She always said my body betrayed me before my voice did. That afternoon, after running into an old friend, she was going to prove it in the rawest way possible.

The first time I went to his place alone, my heart was pounding when I rang the bell. I didn’t know what to say. He opened the door in a wet robe and smiled.

She had a boyfriend. She said she was straight. And yet that afternoon at the hotel pool, her foot found mine under the water and I didn’t pull away.

When he asked me to remove my compression shorts and cover myself with the towel, I thought it was just another session. His hands on my adductor proved otherwise.

We’d spent years avoiding those childhood games, until one winter afternoon I asked him to take me on his bike and my hand landed where it shouldn’t.

I spent six months waiting for him on the same corner. One night in an empty house was enough for him to stop waiting for me.

I went to the clinic for a simple backache, never suspecting that the company doctor had a kind of treatment that appears in no medical manual.

For twenty years I thought I knew my own desires. It took ten minutes in an elevator with a nervous twenty-something to realize I knew nothing.

I’d spent years filling her head with the idea, until a trip to the beach gave us the perfect setting. What I didn’t expect was the name she would say.

I never imagined that crossing the threshold of a discreet bar in my wife's underwear would end with me in a hotel room with a stranger.

I thought I was just going to meet an older woman. When I understood what they really wanted from me, I was already naked in her room and there was no turning back.

On the second day, the wind shook the cabin so hard that all we could do was watch movies. One of them should never have come out of that wet case.

I put down my suitcase without knowing that one of the wardrobe drawers held something that would change the course of that weekend at my partner’s family home.

On the trip to the apartment, the driver handed me his phone with some videos. What happened next wasn’t in my plans, and I had never done it with another man.

When Damián offered me the body of his model, I knew the bill was coming due. And it came, on his bed, with my wrists cuffed behind my back.

My boss introduced him with a laugh, like it was an inside joke. Seven days later, that man had me bent over my own desk.

He was the neighborhood kid who came on as a substitute when someone was missing. It took me a whole year to realize he was looking at me too.

Every morning I purposely hike my skirt up one finger’s width more, hoping some older woman will look at me with that mix of disapproval and desire that appears in all my fantasies.

I hadn’t seen Mateo, Diego’s father, in years. When we ran into each other that afternoon, I never imagined I’d end up on his sofa with borrowed red swim trunks and my breath coming fast.