Seduction

When I went up to his room to see why he hadn’t come down for lunch, my son asked me to close the door. He had something to show me on his cellphone.

I promised him I wouldn’t mind hearing about his dirtiest memory. I lied. By the time he finished, I already had mine ready.

When she closed her fingers around the card, she whispered that I had twenty minutes to decide whether I was going up to her apartment or staying a journalist.

When I opened the door for him, I felt his eyes lock onto the black strap peeking over my jeans. He smiled before pushing me inside.

We had been married for years when she confessed that her greatest fantasy wasn’t with another man. It was me and another woman—and she had the perfect candidate waiting.

When Carla took off her shirt and sat on my husband, I knew the game had crossed a line none of the four of us wanted to come back from.

I handed my husband the laptop with the folder open. Twenty-odd emails from men who never imagined their director would send them something like that.

When Ricardo explained what he wanted to do with me and his five friends at the country house, I should have said no. I thought about it for six days before saying yes.

When Doña Hilda opened the door and looked us up and down, I knew that night by the fire would cost us far more than a dry roof.

I thought everyone was asleep when I got naked in the pool. Then I heard the kitchen door and saw her silhouette approaching, not hurrying to look away.

We’d been in a comfortable rut for months. That afternoon in the pine grove, with another couple three meters away, my girlfriend decided she was done waiting for me to do everything.

I had gone three days without sleeping properly, replaying every detail of that night with him in my head. That morning, with my coffee growing cold, I picked up the phone.

I was only going to try on some jeans. She was on the other side of the curtain, with a smile unlike the one she gave any ordinary customer.

That Saturday he came over to correct my posture without being asked. By Monday, we already had a silent arrangement and I had chosen the right thong.

I went to the terminal to meet one lover. Two hours later, I left with my body burning from another man who didn’t even know my name.

She climbed three floors to a door with no sign, thinking she knew what she was there for. What she found in that room wasn’t in any ad.

I sipped my coffee, pretending to focus on my phone, but I was watching them both. If they knew I’d already had every inch of their bodies separately, we’d all have left together already.

I was thirty-two and still had never let myself think about another woman without feeling ashamed. That night I turned off the light, breathed deeply, and stopped running.

I pulled a dildo from the drawer that still smelled of her and found her with her gaze lowered, biting her lip as if I’d caught her in something more intimate than a secret.