Seduction

I never said this out loud. This is one of those things: what my cousin planned with me that January, without my realizing it until it was too late.

I got off the bus with my head full of class and my body full of something else. Twenty minutes later I was in a stranger’s car, learning what I’d never dared to ask.

When I walked into the teachers’ lounge, hands wrapped around me from behind and lips slid down my neck. I recognized her perfume instantly.

The car was so packed there was only one seat left: on her son’s lap. Marisol never imagined five hours on the road would be enough to cross the one line she should never have crossed.

For days I had felt eyes fixed on the back of my neck while I played. That Friday I locked the doors and came down from the stage determined to find her.

He had a meeting and left me alone all afternoon. Bored, I opened a folder on his computer I had no business opening... and I couldn’t stop looking.

Bruna knelt in the shower in front of her cousin, and none of the women in the bathroom could look away. Not even the mother, who already had her hand under her dress.

I lowered the zipper of his trousers very slowly, afraid of waking him. That morning changed forever what I understood pleasure to be.

When I went down for a coffee in the hotel’s empty café, I had no idea he’d leave the party to follow me upstairs with a bottle and a very specific idea.

When I went into the empty classroom to change, the door opened behind me. It was her, the student council president, and she hadn’t come alone with words.

It took only a fraction of a second —a towel slipping, her wet skin under the balcony light— to understand I’d never be able to look at her the same way again.

I’d been drafting the ad in my head for months; it took me twelve minutes to write it, and half an hour later I already had seven replies. His was the fifth.

Under that loose, demure clothing, you could sense a woman with her desire intact. I only had to wait for her to stop pretending in front of her husband.

Lucía came to the mirror naked and called me by the name only she uses. That night, with our parents away, we stopped being just brother and sister.

We invited him thinking he’d back out when he saw us in person. We didn’t count on that short guy, almost our age, taking control the moment he walked through the door.

I locked the door and turned off the lights in the study room. All I wanted that afternoon was to comfort her; all she wanted was to forget her boyfriend.

Three hours reading stories on my phone were enough to make me accept Iván’s proposal. The next day, that hidden camera changed my whole life.

I heard her in the shower that first morning and, for no reason I could name, I froze in the doorway. When she turned and looked at me, I didn’t look away.

She came in wearing her white uniform and her usual smile. What neither of them saw coming was that the other woman was on the sofa, three meters from the game.

An hour before dinner, the kids were watching cartoons in the living room and I crossed the garden looking for my wife. The laundry room door was ajar.