Seduction

Her eyes behind those glasses had been chasing me from across the bar for years. The afternoon I brushed her wrist, I knew she was waiting for something too.

I’d spent twelve years pretending that what happened in her apartment that afternoon meant nothing. My own wedding’s open bar proved otherwise.

When I clung to his waist on the first curve, I knew I wasn’t going to behave like his father’s wife that night. He was ten years younger than him.

When she turned on the camera, she was already lying on the bed, waiting for me with a smile that was anything but innocent. And I knew I wouldn’t be sleeping alone that Saturday.

When I put on the mask in front of the mirror, I stopped being myself. What happened after in that garden I didn’t tell anyone until today.

Three months of writing to each other. One step across his threshold. What came next wasn’t what he promised: it was everything my body had been demanding for months.

Twenty-two years keeping her composure behind the hotel desk. One guest in red heels was enough to reveal what lay beneath her uniform.

When Ataq explained that Inuit hospitality included sharing wives, my wife and I looked at each other in silence. That night, the heat came from somewhere else.

We had spent our whole lives doing the right thing. Then suddenly it was three in the morning, and the three strangers were still in the house.

She had just had her first experience with another woman when two strangers appeared through the zipper, and she realized the night was only beginning.

I’d been married twenty years when a stranger looked at me at a dinner and I knew, without him saying a word, that that night I would let my guard down for the first time.

A peephole no bigger than a pea was enough to watch her ride naked on a white horse. Roderic made that hole—and could never close his eyes in peace again.

I wore a dress that was far too short and the look of someone who had already made up her mind. His door stood ajar, exactly as we had agreed.

Seven years of friendship pretending to feel nothing. That night, between two cars in an alley, we both stopped pretending.

I went down to the bar courtyard at two in the morning because I couldn’t breathe in my room. I never imagined I’d follow her to the little room out back.

Forty-three degrees, four in the afternoon, and her on the balcony with the camisole stuck to her body, knowing full well I was going to climb five floors.

I dressed for him in the twelfth-floor bathroom: blonde wig, impossible heels, and a corset that squeezed everything I’d hidden under my shirt for years.

They were my son’s friends. They were twenty years old and looked at me like I was the only thing they wanted in the world. I should have gone upstairs alone. I didn’t.

I barely passed the entrance exams and had never touched a girl. In four days I found out why two teachers keep secrets.

That Friday afternoon, with a second glass of wine in her hand, Valeria looked at me differently and began telling me what she did on weekends.