Seduction

We had been each other’s first love. Ten years later she returned to the village, and I still didn’t know that night I’d learn to hate my best friend’s easy smile.

I went out to clear my head with a bottle of tequila still in my hand. I had no idea that crossing paths with him in the hallway would change everything that night.

When he brushed her forearm as he left the restaurant, Marina knew it hadn’t ended at the table. He was her husband’s best friend.

She crosses the street, thighs clenched, careful not to lose a single drop of what he asked her to bring home. Her husband waits awake.

She came down from the empty stands in a red dress that left nothing to the imagination. The coach still didn’t know that afternoon would change everything.

She put on the maid’s apron just to silence him, never imagining that the gesture would awaken something she’d spent years pretending not to feel.

When Diego left me the car and went home with the child, I never imagined I’d end the night against a bathroom wall with another man’s mouth on my neck.

There was a week left before my wedding when I sat in the middle of the room and let a stranger convince me to go into that bedroom.

I went down to the pool thinking I was only looking for the gym and some sun. I had no idea they’d already decided what they’d do with me once the husbands closed their eyes.

I came out of the shower dripping, thinking it was my mother at the door. But when I opened it, there she was—the only woman I could never get out of my head.

Hide the photos, hide my clothes, hide the webcam, and lock myself in the ironing room: that night my wife would bring home a stranger and I’d be the only witness.

My wife noticed how the waiter looked at her while serving tea, and I came up with the most forbidden idea of the whole trip: inviting him up.

“I started thinking and came up with a few ideas,” he wrote. Three hours later, a stranger was ringing our doorbell.

When the dressing room door opened, I knew it wasn’t my assistant. It was him, and he had that look that made me choose between desire and guilt.

At the wedding everyone was looking at her in a way I never had. That night she came up to get me and I passed out drunk. What happened after that I only found out at dawn.

Bruno’s curiosity awakened something in me I could no longer control: I wanted my trainer to touch me for real, not just in my words.

She perched on the edge of the desk, opened her jacket, and said in a hoarse voice: “Now you can clear up your doubts.” And I knew that afternoon wasn’t ending in the office.

He held my gaze at the bar for ten seconds, and I knew I would follow him to the bathroom. That morning I stopped being the perfect wife.

She only wanted to understand her body before getting married. She never imagined that therapy group would lead her to betray everything she believed about herself.

Three days without thinking about anything except the smell of hot rubber and his hands on me. And my husband, without knowing it, gave me the perfect excuse to go back.