Seduction

She came over to ask about the printer and ended up staring at the screen with a question on her lips that changed everything between us.

I climbed up to steady the ladder without imagining what I’d find when I looked up. That afternoon, in the back room, I learned who was really in charge.

I told him everything would be upfront. He smiled, transferred half, and met me in an apartment where no one would ask questions. I went up ready to collect every minute.

My tits were always my secret weapon, and that Friday with the office empty I decided to use them to get from him what I really wanted.

We had climbed over the fence into an empty property. He set the pace with his hand on my neck, and I let myself go without thinking of anything else.

I’d watched him for days from the terrace, pretending I wasn’t. That hot afternoon I decided to stop pretending and went down with a glass of lemonade in my hand.

It was six in the morning, I was still in my wedding dress, and my husband was snoring unconscious upstairs. The waiter hadn’t left yet, and I was no longer thinking about sleep.

I get up early so I can have the gym to myself. But for the past three weeks, there’s been a much better reason to arrive before anyone else: him, and that scandalous smile.

At forty-nine I thought I’d seen it all, until that soaked stranger took off his shirt in my patio and I knew the afternoon wouldn’t end with gardening.

He was twenty-seven, had a girlfriend, and led an orderly life. Then a neighbor looked at him on the bus as if he knew what Tobías dared not name.

I arrived at her place an hour before dinner and found her naked in front of the mirror, torn between two dresses and about to change everything.

He asked me to hold some tools while squatting down. I knew perfectly well what he was doing, and still I didn’t get up.

I cut the engine in the darkest corner of the service area, touched up my lips in the rearview mirror, and knew I wasn’t leaving alone that night.

She caught me looking at her while she leafed through a Cortázar. She held my gaze for three seconds, smiled crookedly, and I knew that afternoon in the bookstore wasn’t ending among books.

In the dark, a few meters from my building, his cock shone under the only streetlamp on the street. And I already knew I was going to lower my head again.

It didn’t matter that he was thirty years older than me. With the sway of the road, his hand found my hip in the dark and I stopped pretending I didn’t like it.

I was late to dinner, but not because of traffic. It was because of the detour we took to that vacant lot fifty meters from the restaurant.

“Want to test it before you decide?” he asked, and Mariana understood that neither of them would spend that afternoon talking only about the projector.

When the breeze raised gooseflesh on her skin, she knew that full-moon night wouldn’t end on the shore. And she didn’t want it to.

I put on the smallest bikini I had and went down to the garden just to see his face. I knew exactly what I was doing, and I wasn’t going to stop.