Seduction

I was bored, stressed, and horny when a lavender-haired girl appeared in my private room and asked whether I wanted more than simple game chat.

Nadia had spent years alone, training so she wouldn’t have to think. Her nephew was the only one who looked at her as a woman, and that hungover afternoon they both stopped pretending.

I got home and she threw herself into my arms in front of everyone. No one suspected that the kiss on the cheek was hiding the desire we’d been holding back all week.

I asked for a foot massage almost as a joke. I never imagined that night, by the fire and with wine in me, my father and my cousin would stop holding back.

The steam came out with her wrapped in a tiny towel, and for the first time in months I felt like picking up a brush. What came next should never have happened.

I agreed to my husband’s fantasy on one condition: I chose how, where, and with whom. What he didn’t know is that I already had someone in mind.

With the house all to ourselves and him turned away among the rose bushes, I knew that afternoon I wouldn’t be satisfied with just watching him from the window.

For days I’d had my eyes covered and only recognized people by their perfume and their voice. That night, her hands were nothing like a nurse’s.

I put my finger where no father should ever touch and felt him tremble. He said no, that he was my father. But that night I learned what a man becomes when he denies what he wants most.

I saw his silhouette outlined against the refrigerator light, barefoot on the cold tile, and I knew I hadn’t come down that night for a glass of milk.

Her father watched her from the pool’s edge, and for the first time she wondered what hid behind that gaze that followed her with every stroke.

I went into his room like any mother. I came out knowing my own son desired me, and that a part of me had spent months waiting for exactly that.

When I saw her come down through the lobby at six in the morning, with a suitcase bigger than she was, I knew that summer would be unlike any other.

The creak of the mattress in her parents’ room was not sex: it was theft. Barefoot, Sabina followed it down the hall and pressed her eye to the crack in the door.

My mind told me never to go back. My body remembered those lips and wouldn’t let me sleep. On the third day, I dialed his number.

My uncle was driving in a rage, lost for the umpteenth time, and she used every bump and sharp turn to drive me crazy without him noticing a thing.

I heard the lock click behind me. When I turned around, she was smiling with the calm of someone who has planned every step from the very first glance at the table.

A little too much to drink and an empty apartment were enough for my sister-in-law’s daughter to stop being the little girl I remembered. What happened that night should not be told.

For six months, we had the house to ourselves, and the contract that bound us became a routine neither of us wanted to escape.

I waited at the bus stop with my heart racing, knowing that the moment his car appeared we’d stop being mother and son and become something else.