Seduction

Each excuse she gave my fiancé was more elaborate than the last. I left that office trembling, aching, and with a smile I couldn’t hide.

—I need you to sleep with my fiancée —he told me, as calmly as if he were asking the time. And I still didn’t know the trip would change me more than it changed them.

I climbed the fourteen stairs with the cold stuck to my clothes and the secret stuck to my skin: no one in the building imagined what was happening one floor below.

Marisol sat on the armchair in her robe. She had just filmed her revenge with the man her husband despised most, and there was no turning back.

Ten years of marriage collapsed over a gold earring left on the passenger seat. Carla decided divorce wouldn’t be the end, but only the beginning.

I had promised Daniel I would never look at another man. And yet, when he closed the door to that room, I was the one who took the first step.

I agreed to therapy to understand my body before marriage. No one warned me I’d end up begging the wrong man not to stop.

While he puts away his dominoes and heads to the club, she is already burning inside at the thought of what awaits her in that student apartment.

I opened the door half-dressed, my hair a mess and the bed still warm. He looked at the basket of my lingerie before he looked at me, and I didn’t bother to cover myself up.

I kept telling myself it was only part of the therapy, that it was nothing personal. But with another man’s cum running down my thighs, I didn’t believe a single word of it anymore.

When Diego came out of the shower with his towel barely tied, Lucía knew that week was going to be very hard to endure in silence.

My body was still burning from the weekend with him. I never imagined that same night I’d hear, through a door, the conversation that would break me apart.

She had carried her pent-up desire for twenty-four hours. When the young man in the blue uniform came in with the package, Renata knew she wouldn’t go without that morning.

That hot afternoon, Lucía sat beside him on the couch and confessed something no brother-in-law should ever hear. Damián knew he was lost before he answered.

She dissected other people’s minds for a living; so did he. Sharing a table was enough for them both to stop pretending they only wanted conversation.

She climbed the stairs knowing that, once she crossed that door, the naive woman she had been until then would cease to exist forever.

I went up the mountain alone under a red alert, running from my husband. I wasn’t looking for shelter: I was looking for impact, for something to finally crack the glass I lived trapped inside.

After that Sunday at the beach, none of my coworkers could look at me the same way. And my wife knew it: she was the one pulling every string.

He sat on the sofa, a handspan from me, with that repentant-boy face that worked so well for him. And I, after weeks without sleep, knew I was going to forgive him again.

That morning she looked at her hands and no longer recognized them: they had signed a commitment and betrayed everything for him.