Seduction

When the candle went out, I thought it was my husband touching me. When the light came back, I realized it had all been planned long before that night.

The candle burned out. The darkness was absolute. And then I felt a hand moving up my thigh that wasn't my husband's. It was only a second, but it changed everything.

He was nineteen, his hands were shaking, and he asked me to teach him. I was thirty-eight, wearing a silk robe, and had the whole night ahead of me.

As soon as we left the parking lot, she slipped her hand down and closed her eyes. I looked for a dead-end road. We’d spent a whole week unable to touch each other.

Her glasses hid something I took years to decipher. When I finally found her alone at the bar, I knew the staring had only been the beginning.

As soon as we left the parking lot, she undid her trouser button and whispered: find an empty lot, an alley, anything. I can’t get home like this.

I had been ignoring their looks for months. That night, for some reason I still don’t quite understand, I decided not to keep walking.

The day Clara entered my house unannounced, I realized the only clean space I had left no longer belonged to me.

We were sitting across from each other in the most discreet corner of the restaurant. No one could have imagined what I was doing with my feet beneath that table.

We’d been seeing each other on camera for four months. That December night, at last, she was in front of me in the flesh, inside a room that smelled like what was about to happen.

I woke in the middle of the night with my body on fire and went out to the park in a camisole, nothing underneath. Every breeze was a caress. Every streetlamp, a silent witness.

I’d wanted her in silence for months, reading her private messages, following her every move. When I met her at the hotel wearing a mask, she had no idea it was me.

He called me a little slut the first time he saw me. The second time he begged me not to stop.

What began as a farewell toast ended with four pairs of hands on me and a night I’ll never forget.

One look from the window was enough for me to know that boy would do anything I asked. I just needed the right moment.

Sergio left and Marcos took me to the pool. There was something in his look that wasn’t for Sofía. It was for me, and I shouldn’t have let it be that way.

Rain beat on the cabin roof and the fireplace burned when I realized Camila hadn’t come to drink wine with us that night.