Seduction

I wrapped my legs around his waist just as he came. It wasn’t an accident: I knew exactly what I was doing, and I wanted it.

We both had partners, and we both knew it. Even so, I took off my sweater in the passenger seat and let him look at me the way he’d wanted to for weeks.

I saw her when I boarded and knew I wouldn’t sleep. I never imagined I’d spy from the shadows as another man took her against the window.

I had been unemployed for months when I started working at his warehouse. I never imagined that my best friend’s serious, broad-handed father would undo me with a single look.

Her husband spent months at sea and she was climbing the walls. I only went to move some furniture, but that afternoon the house was empty and the door was open.

For almost a year I lived two lives: the perfect wife at the family dinner table and the woman who waited for Monday to meet him at that hotel on the outskirts.

I arrived at the temple half dead, convinced my body was a curse. That same night the priest whispered that I was actually the chosen one.

All her life they’d looked at her like an object. That afternoon, in the stone house at the end of the street, she decided to look first.

I walked into that club convinced I was the one in control. Three hours later, a stranger had completely undone me and I was begging him not to stop.

I never planned for it to end like this, but when he opened the door and saw us, I knew that night I would choose with my body, not my head.

For years no man had looked at me the way he did from the next balcony, and that afternoon I discovered I didn’t want to stop being watched either.

I had two options: stop everything and push her away from him, or give him free rein to take what I wanted most. I chose the worse one.

My mother thought I was still in class. She didn’t know the closet door was ajar and that I saw everything from inside her room that afternoon.

He had saved my course without asking for anything in return. That afternoon, I decided to thank him in a way neither of us would ever forget.

It was eight-thirty, half an hour before the client’s call, and I already knew exactly how I wanted us to spend the wait.

Sonia was waiting for me at the restaurant door in a dress so short that every time she breathed it told a secret. And I had come ready to tell mine.

I had spent months becoming someone else in front of the mirror. That night, in a stranger’s bed, I discovered how far my new skin could take me.

“I want us to masturbate while we watch each other,” she told me in the car. I hadn’t expected it, but watching her without touching her turned me on instantly.

For years she had written orgasms for faceless strangers. That dawn, for the first time, someone on the other side of the screen wanted to know her real name.

He arrived without warning, with that smile of someone who always gets what he wants, and in one week he turned my mother’s life, mine, and the whole neighborhood upside down.