Seduction

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 just one word: “Play me.” It was two in the morning, and curiosity beat out the night’s accumulated 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 luck choose our game. Neither of us imagined it would leave her naked, bound, 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.

She lowered her dress's zipper in front of the entryway mirror and, seeing herself surrounded by his arms, knew there was no going back that night.

From below, while she pushed the guide line at the top of the ladder, her T-shirt parted from her body and Adrián realized that summer was not going to 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 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.

My husband had spent two decades waiting for me to cross that line. I never imagined I’d do it on an ordinary afternoon, against the wall of my own office.

When I felt his gaze pinned to my back from the window across the way, I knew that afternoon I wasn’t going to buy bread—I was going to give him something much better.

I got out of the car ready to defend him and ended up seeing him with a stranger on his lap. What I did next wasn’t planned: I simply stopped being afraid.

She cried drunkenly on my shoulder saying nobody wanted her anymore. She had no idea that the very same night, out on the sand, I was going to prove exactly the opposite.

I let my dress fall on the balcony knowing he was watching from the other side of the glass. And I knew my husband had planned everything.

When she stepped off the plane in those shorts and with that smile, I knew the rule about never touching a friend’s sister would cost me dearly.

I was married, I was straight, and I was sure of who I was. That dawn, in a car parked by the beach, I stopped being so sure.