Seduction

I was masturbating thinking about her when she pushed the door open without warning, fresh from the shower and not a stitch of clothes on. What happened next shouldn’t be told.

I left the keys on the table without making a sound. Faint light came from my brother’s room and, before I even looked in, I knew that night was going to change everything between the three of us.

When he told her to scrub the floor on her knees, she hadn’t done anything wrong. That was the test: obey without punishment, prove that his hand was the only measure.

My husband had whispered it to me so many times in bed that it no longer sounded like a fantasy. That night, the professor walked through the door and it all became real.

When the camera came on that afternoon, Camila was sitting in her office in a very short skirt, hiding a secret that had no business fitting in that room.

When she knocked on my door at midnight, I thought she needed something. What I didn’t expect was for her to take off her nightgown and slip under my sheets with that smile.

It wasn’t the first time I’d thought about crossing that hallway, but it was the first time my feet moved before my head did. The whole house was asleep and I wasn’t.

When my son went upstairs to sleep, he got up from the sofa and looked at me as if he had spent the whole night waiting for us to be alone.

I was naked on the balcony, smoking in front of the sea, when I saw the stranger on the bench across the street. And instead of covering up, I let him watch.

She arrived at my apartment with her cheek still bruised. That same night she stepped into the bathroom wrapped in a towel and dropped it when she saw me.

That night, while I was stroking him in bed, he stopped me and asked me to tell him what the other man was like. I never imagined my confession would change our bed.

The robe barely covered her legs when she approached the sofa. Tobías was no longer pretending to sleep, and everything I’d been keeping quiet for months was showing.

Nora’s flowers arrived at Carla’s office every Monday. I told myself it was admiration. The night we invited her to dinner, I stopped lying to myself.

When I whispered in his ear what I’d been imagining for months, his silence lasted seconds. Then he smiled. And I knew that night we were crossing every line.

The living-room sofa had already seen too much, but nothing like the slow smile with which my sister-in-law waited for me that afternoon while my father-in-law pretended not to notice.

When Carolina came out of the bathroom, her mother still had my hand under her skirt. She didn’t take hers away. She just closed her eyes and looked at me from somewhere much darker.

My mother tried on three outfits in front of me and, before choosing one, casually dropped the black thong question like it was the most natural thing in the world.

At five in the morning, heels in hand and her dress sliding off her shoulders, Renata got into the car with me and made me a proposal I shouldn’t have accepted.

I only wanted something temporary while I finished high school. I never expected those late-night voices in a virtual world to teach me so much about desire.

We’d been hiding our affair for years behind fake relationships, until the girl who was my cover told me she loved me and everything went sideways.