Seduction

They said they were going to celebrate a birthday. What they didn’t say was that the gift was me, up on that dark bus, surrounded by men twice my age.

I traveled alone seeking temples and ended up on a terrace over the river, surrounded by hands that weren’t mine and mouths that knew exactly where to find me.

She burst out laughing, lowered her voice, and looked at me with that satisfied whore’s smile I already knew. I knew she was going to tell me everything she’d kept hidden.

When Lucía whispered her birthday fantasy to me, I knew there was no turning back: she wanted to be auctioned among our closest friends for one whole night.

When Damián whispered that he could have me, something changed in Mateo's eyes. His shyness vanished, and I stopped being the one in control of the game.

When he opened the wrong door and saw me fresh from the shower, his eyes never looked anywhere else again. What happened that night wasn’t in anyone’s plan.

I didn’t need to touch her. Just to be there, half a meter from her back, breathing the same air. And to see, once again, that she wasn’t going to turn around.

I crossed the park with my pulse racing, knowing that tonight the bully wouldn't settle for my panties—or the money I no longer had.

I’ve spent months thinking about it. Three different people fell in a single week at a roadside truck stop. The last was me, and I still can’t explain it.

For two years I ignored my boss’s stares and his wife’s silent insults. That afternoon, when the last employee turned off the lights, I stopped ignoring everything.

You’ve been swallowing midnight sighs for years. That night someone was watching you from the doorway, and your body knew before you did.

I was lying on the sofa waiting for sleep when I heard the door. I never imagined that night would be my first time—with the last person on earth I expected.

She arrived looking at the floor, buttoned to the neck. It was she who gave the instructions as soon as they closed the door to room six.

Three years without seeing him, and the second he stepped back into the house I knew I couldn’t keep pretending what I felt was just sisterly love.

When we reached the harbor and she got off the bike, her hands were still on my waist. Neither of us pulled away right away.

Six years ago, I went into my older brother’s room one August night. I didn’t go to talk. I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

I arrived at the hotel convinced it would be just photos. When the door opened and his older brother appeared, I knew there’d be no turning back that night.

I’d gone two years without anyone looking at me that way. And when Miguel did, I knew something in me wasn’t as asleep as I’d thought.

She found the phone forgotten on the nightstand and entered the PIN without thinking. What she read was not what she expected, nor what she expected to feel.

Three days away, the house trashed after a party, and him in my bed, naked as if it were his. I should have thrown him out.