Seduction

We’d been talking online for months before we met in person. When I saw him at the theater entrance, I knew that night wasn’t going to end the way I’d planned.

Every time she squeezed my hand, I understood it: she was crossing and uncrossing her legs so he could see everything.

When I realized someone was watching me naked from the building across the way, I didn’t feel afraid. I felt a tingling I could no longer ignore.

When my son-in-law walked in that afternoon and saw who I was with, I knew my life would change. I had no idea he would come back three weeks later to collect my silence in my own bed.

I saw him come out of the bathroom with the towel at his waist, and everything changed in an instant: I stopped seeing him as my son and started planning how to make him want me.

That morning Mateo told me something was wrong down there, and without knowing it, he began the quietest and hardest week of my adult life.

The living room camera switched on just as she crossed her legs on the sofa. I only had to watch and wait for my turn.

She came home from the hospital with both arms in plaster up to the elbows. And I discovered, watching how she depended on me, how little I knew how to look at my own mother.

I arrived at the Cancún hotel a day before my sister. Nearly two days alone with her husband: the nudist beach, the lingerie fitting room, the tequila. Something was going to happen.

When the flight attendant dimmed the cabin lights and left the thickest blanket over them, Lorena turned to her son and knew no one would sleep that night.

For years I’d imagined her without knowing she was thinking about me too. That Saturday she came down to the living room with a magazine and a question that changed everything.

I walked with my legs apart, loaded with a pain I didn’t know how to ease. When she came into my room and asked what was wrong, I knew there was no turning back.

The last time I saw her we were twelve. Now she was dancing pressed against me in a red skirt and with a look that wasn’t a cousin’s.

That afternoon I found one of his movies. That night he came back drunk, opened my bedroom door, and I knew something was going to break forever.

I found him on my bed with one of my panties in his hand and a wad of bills on the spread. What came next wasn’t about the money.

When the power went out, her foot was still in my lap. I felt her move it slowly, pretending it was an accident, knowing damn well it wasn’t.

We got to the ninth floor almost out of patience, she drunk on desire and me ready for anything. What I didn’t expect was to find her mother awake, with the screen lit up.

I dialed his number with trembling hands. Three rings. When he answered, I knew there was no turning back, even if I hung up before speaking.

When he saw Camila leaning against the fridge with that half smile, he understood that this summer at his father’s house was going to get a lot more complicated than he’d expected.

He was my son; he’d come back the night before. At seven in the morning I walked into the bathroom without thinking and found him in front of the mirror, wearing nothing.