Seduction

I left the curtains open on purpose and pretended not to see him. He, standing on his rooftop, didn’t miss a single detail of my naked body.

She lied to me about everything: her name, her job, the reason she came close to me. The only truth was how she trembled when I touched her again.

Every week we stared at the photos at the entrance without daring to go in. The night we crossed the threshold, I discovered how far I could go with him watching.

I accepted the dare without thinking: kiss whoever was to my right for five seconds. And to my right was her, the woman who had spent a year pretending not to want me.

“I want you to give her what my mother never had,” she said with a smile. And when I saw that mature woman, I knew I wasn’t going to say no.

When I opened the door, I was expecting a paper bag and a “good morning.” I wasn’t expecting him to keep looking inside and ask, in a low voice, if I lived alone.

I’d gone almost two years without touching anyone when I saw her step off the minibus with that smile. I promised myself that before I flew home, that mouth would be mine.

Everyone at the university knew what I was like, and the guard at the gate only needed a smile to understand that that afternoon, after cleaning up, I wouldn’t be leaving so fast.

A yellow Post-it on the little box said a single word: “Play me.” It was two in the morning, and curiosity won out over exhaustion.

I turned fifty, I’ve been married for thirty years, and I’ve never been faithful. These are the secret getaways that kept my marriage alive.

I had never felt so much from a simple brush of hips. When she settled behind me on the crowded bus, I knew that ride wouldn’t end like the others.

It was raining, so we went up to my place and let chance choose our game. Neither of us imagined it would end with her naked and begging in my ropes.

I turned on the system from the office just to keep an eye on the tools. What came up on the screen was my wife taking off her bikini in front of him.

I stopped my bike in front of Andrés’s house not knowing his mother was waiting for me in the doorway, and that that empty afternoon would change everything between us.

I’d been a widow for fifteen years and sexually asleep. Then that man, nearly twenty years younger, looked at my lips and I knew the morning wouldn’t end in notes.

He unzipped her dress in front of the entryway mirror, and when she saw herself wrapped in his arms, she knew there was no going back that night.

From below, while she pushed the guide wire at the top of the ladder, her top lifted from her body and Adrián realized that summer would not be like the others.

I took my time handing her coat over, enjoying the way men looked at her. I never imagined one would dare that much in front of me.

I asked her to dress to provoke, and on the fourth day she came home with a trembling voice and a story she couldn’t tell me with her clothes on.

I learned very early that my body was worth more than any degree. What none of them knew is that I never felt a thing while they paid me.