Seduction

I spotted her in the back of the bar and my heart lurched: it was her, the teacher who stole my sleep when I was just a kid. And this time I was no longer that child.

I asked for a bar job at a roadside club. Three weeks later I was serving drinks in a thong, heels, and a new name: Adriana.

I paid the entry fee, picked the stall at the back, and thought it would take a minute. Then I heard that deep voice ask if anyone was on the other side of the wall.

I said yes to the game for one night only: a dress, a wig, and a name that wasn’t mine. I never imagined the girl in the mirror would look back as if she’d been waiting for me.

Marcos thought he was in charge of the game. His wife looked at me over her shoulder, let the towel fall, and I understood that she set the only rule.

I told him he’d left a T-shirt behind just to get him to my table. What he discovered that night looked nothing like the wife he’d left.

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 hold the ladder without imagining what I’d find when I looked down. 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 breasts 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 of an empty estate. He set the pace with his hand on my neck, and I let myself go without thinking of anything else.

I had 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 yard and I knew the afternoon wouldn’t end with gardening.

He was twenty-seven, had a girlfriend, and a tidy life. Then that neighbor looked at him on the bus as if he knew something Tobías had not yet dared to 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 wouldn’t be 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.