Seduction

I thought she was telling me those stories to make me jealous. It took me a while to understand that what was turning me on was something far darker and harder to admit.

When I went down to the lobby looking to escape the corporate party, I never expected the bartender who would look at me like he knew exactly what I needed that night.

A firm hand on her nape was enough for her to understand that tonight I made the rules. The rest depended on whether she dared to stay.

“I set the rules, and you follow them,” she said, and none of the four dared contradict her. Three months of confinement had left us at her mercy.

For years his wife called me “the mistress.” But I never was. I was his sex worker, and this is the truth she never wanted to hear.

I asked Damián to come with me and wait in the waiting room. The doctor invited him in. I said nothing. That silence changed everything.

When I opened my Epiphany gift and saw a voucher for a massage with Pilar, I laughed. I had no idea my wife had spent months planning exactly what would happen.

For twelve years I’d been fading in silence. That night I put on the dress he hated, left without saying a word, and came back changed.

Marina had spent months pretending not to look at him. That night, trapped between the cold glass and her boss’s heat, she stopped pretending.

Every time I walked into the garage, he looked up before he even heard the door. That afternoon, with the shutter half down, I stopped pretending.

When I felt my sleeping son’s body pressed against my back that dawn, I did not move away. Something older than me chose for me, and I knew I no longer wanted to stop it.

What we had lived in the shadows, hidden from everyone. It took me eleven months to understand that, for him, I had never been anything more than a game between friends.

In front of the bedroom mirror, she discovered her body still knew how to ask. What she did not expect was for someone to be willing to listen that very night.

On the first afternoon, she stepped onto the terrace with the towel hanging by two fingers. Below, there were people. Above, neighboring balconies. And she lit a cigarette without rushing.

She didn’t call me by my name the first time. She looked at me whole, without sleaze and without pity, as if my body were not a problem she had to solve.

I thought I had the whole house to myself. When I heard that deep voice behind me, I knew my secret had just been discovered.

He had been sleeping pressed against her back for a week to soothe the baby. A week of pretending not to notice what was happening between them in the dark.

The light stayed red, his latest photo stayed on my screen, and my hands had already stopped asking permission. I just had to get home. Or not.

Marcos let me go in first, like a gentleman with a crooked smile. Inside, on some planks, two strangers were looking at me, their hands already at their zippers.

I only dress up when I have a date, always in a hotel room, and that night the stranger waiting for me had no idea what he’d find under my dress.