Seduction

I booked the empty time slot and wore the tightest T-shirt I owned. What I didn’t expect was to find two men waiting for me on the tatami.

When Tobías’s teacher gave me her personal number “in case anything urgent came up,” I knew it had nothing to do with my son’s grades.

We had exchanged hundreds of photos, but nothing had ever happened in person. Until that March afternoon when I picked her up and she already had a plan.

The first time he kissed me in that parking lot, I ran away. The second time, I didn’t make excuses: I let him corner me against the same block wall.

She reread the message four times, and her heart beat like it had when she was twenty. She was fifty-nine, and a stranger had just awakened something she thought was lost forever.

I was twenty-one, coming off a disastrous year, and desperate to be distracted. That June afternoon, one different message changed everything.

He offered him his hand in greeting and, before letting go, stroked his fingers with a slowness that could not have been an accident. Mateo knew that visit would change everything.

Mariana was nursing the baby by the fire, unaware that Catalina was watching from the other side of the cabin, a new heat rising under her skin.

He lived three doorways away from me and only wanted porn and mutual wanking. What I learned about him that afternoon changed everything between us.

My hands were sweaty and my heart was racing when he set down the controller, changed what was on the screen, and, without saying a word, looked at me as if waiting for me to make the first move.

Dawn found their naked bodies on the tangled sheets. Mateo opened his eyes and tried to reconstruct, hour by hour, how that stranger had ended up in his bed.

Midnight in the empty station. Iván leaned in to kiss me, and for a second the world was simple, until the ghost of the other voice returned to interfere.

I offered to massage her feet without knowing she’d place hers exactly where I didn’t dare ask for it, and that neither of us would say a word.

I spent a year cleaning his house without him ever looking me in the eye. The afternoon I took off my shoes by the pool, I discovered he’d been staring at my feet for months.

I’d spent months fantasizing about being with a trans girl. That night, in the passenger seat, she whispered in my ear that she’d noticed the way I was looking at her.

It took only slipping the heel off my heel for him to stop looking me in the eyes. And I discovered how much power could fit on the tip of one foot.

That afternoon she came home in black, painted her lips in the mirror, and left saying she was sleeping at a friend’s place. It took years to learn where she was really going.

At ten sharp I walk into the boardroom and, while the boss talks numbers, my head goes to a place where she and I don’t obey any rules.

She sits two chairs to my left and, while the family talks, my head already has her astride my lap. No one knows. Not even her. Not yet.

He only wanted a decent shirt. But then she looked up from behind the counter, and Andrés’s head started inventing what would never happen.