Seduction

When I saw them on the roof terrace, everything changed. My cousin was looking at me from the dark and asked me something I hadn’t expected to hear that night.

Rodrigo had arranged everything in secret: the suite, the candles, Marcos waiting on the sofa. He only asked if I was ready before opening the door.

When Dimitri called me over to watch my mother service him on her knees, something in me broke forever. Or maybe it was born.

I’d been telling him no for months. When I saw that phone in the display case, I knew exactly what I could offer him in exchange for it.

When Laura read my message, she canceled all her plans. I didn’t need to say much more: two words were enough to set everything between us on fire.

It wasn’t that I lacked anything. It was that I never realized what I wanted until that boy looked at me like I was the only thing in the world.

When Arturo asked me to turn around, I understood what he wanted. The most disturbing thing was realizing I couldn’t say no either.

He was the protective father, the faithful husband, the kind of man who rejected anything outside the norm. Until that night at the country house.

When the two neighbors from downstairs knocked on my door with a bottle of wine, I’d been alone in the house for ten days with a body in a state that was anything but calm.

The invitation was for dinner. What no one said out loud is that the three of us wanted the night to end in something more.

He knew exactly what he was doing beneath that blanket. And I chose not to pull away. What came after changed our dynamic forever.

She came into the office in an old T-shirt with nothing underneath, biting an olive and looking at me like she’d spent months waiting for me to give in first.

I went into the confessional with shame and came out knowing that what my son felt for me was not so different from what I was beginning to feel for him.

She didn’t teach me out of love. She taught me because no one else was going to, and because, deep down, it was what we both needed.

When he hugged me from behind and I felt his body against mine, we both knew it had a name no one dared to say aloud.

Valeria was twenty-five, my father’s wife, and she looked at me as if she didn’t know whether to hate me or devour me. I didn’t know either.

She showed him the photos with a nervous smile. It took him three seconds to understand what he was looking at, and three more to decide he wasn’t going to stop.

I came home from university exhausted and flopped onto the bed without even taking off my shoes. I don’t know how long I slept. When I opened my eyes, he was already sitting beside me.

Nadia arrived that morning with a bag of soft drinks and very short jeans. We hadn’t been alone together in years. I didn’t know that was about to change.

We lived in the same apartment, naked, unable to touch each other. He looked at me as if he meant to devour me. A month of abstinence before he earned it.