Seduction

I’d gone weeks without anyone touching me. When the driver looked at me through the rearview mirror with that half-smile, I knew I wasn’t going home alone that night.

The director looked me over when I signed the form. I’d been with that company twelve years, and I knew exactly what I had to do to win.

When I went downstairs to the kitchen it was three in the morning. He was sitting there with a cup in his hand, bare-chested, looking at me as if he’d been waiting for me.

She told me to put my hands on the wall and look at myself in the mirror. Outside, people were walking by. Inside, only her fingers moving under my skirt.

I climbed the metal stairs with my skirt clutched in one hand and four pairs of eyes trying to look between my legs. The man waiting upstairs wasn’t Raúl.

Put your foot beside mine, he said. Then your arm. Then your hand. And then I understood we weren’t comparing anything.

Valentina had been looking at her differently all day. When the last guest left, the three of them went up to the suite and the silence said it all.

I’d spent the whole week rehearsing how to tell him what I needed that night. When he walked through the apartment door, I knew words would no longer be necessary.

I was taking a deep breath in front of the bedroom door when his hands wrapped around my waist from behind. I wasn’t ready for what came next.

It had been five years since I’d seen her. The woman who stepped into the backyard that afternoon had nothing to do with the teenage cousin I remembered.

I promised myself I wouldn’t fall again. But when he opened the door and looked at me like that, I knew all my rules would break before dawn.

He smelled of tobacco and the countryside, not expensive perfume. When I went down to the kitchen for water at three in the morning, I knew he’d be there, smoking under the moon.

Heat, the sea, and two couples who are far too comfortable with each other. When the two men went off to buy beers, none of them imagined what they’d end up talking about.

I’d spent weeks telling myself it was the right thing: put distance between us, catch that plane, and never look back. But when I opened the door and saw him, everything went to hell.