Seduction

For fifteen years I’d greeted him on the beach without imagining what that man saw each night through the bathroom glass while I thought I was alone.

That afternoon the massage left me burning. I never imagined I’d end up on my knees in front of a stranger in my own living room, or who would catch me there.

I’d spent weeks avoiding her, convinced what we had was over. Then the phone rang and her voice was enough to tell me I’d fall again.

I was sweaty and breathless when his voice reached me from behind. He didn’t want to take me to dinner: he wanted to buy my whole night, and I wanted to be bought.

At eighteen I entered medical school with the country’s highest score. At twenty-four I still didn’t know what an orgasm was. This is my story.

She slipped into bed naked except for her thong and whispered in my ear: don’t turn around, don’t say anything, just listen. Then she started telling me about that night.

When she slipped her hand under my desk, I knew that morning wasn’t going to solve a single incident. I could only think of her and what she had just left me.

He kept saying it was wrong, that he shouldn’t touch me. But his hand was already seeking my waist, and we both knew nothing would stop us for those five days.

She was old enough to be my mother and married to a man who barely looked at her. I only wanted to return to that kitchen every afternoon.

I was nineteen and impossibly horny. He noticed it the moment he opened his apartment door, and there was no way to hide what we both wanted.

We had spent three years living by one rule between partners. That cold night, in her green dress and the dark office, we knew we were about to break it.

She was her father’s wife, but that dawn, sitting in the sand and pressed to his chest, I stopped knowing where affection ended and something else began.

I agreed to go up to a room with twelve mattresses on the floor, never imagining that by morning I’d leave with more than one man marked on my skin.

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 by the entrance without daring to go in. The night we crossed that door, I discovered how far I could go with him watching me.

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 me, in a low voice, whether 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.