Seduction

I knew him when he was shy and fragile, when his name was Tomás. Ten years later he came back through the door in a miniskirt, with a smile that promised to ruin my summer.

She leaned over the railing to watch my uncle’s car disappear, and I came up barefoot behind her. I’d been looking at her like that for years. That morning I stopped just looking.

I went up to change into something more daring while they showered. By then I already knew that if I went downstairs to the kitchen, I wouldn’t be able to hold myself back.

Her mother saw us playing around in bed and, instead of yelling, smiled at me. That same night I understood that nothing in that house was innocent—and I didn’t want to be innocent either.

I asked her to put on the shortest shorts she owned. I wanted to see how the workers looked at her as she walked by, and how she endured the whole day in that outfit.

She wore a tiny black bikini, two triangles tied with strings, and looked at me over her shoulder as if she already knew what was about to happen between us.

We had always been the closest in the family. What I never imagined was that one weekend of wine would change everything between us.

It had been eight years since I last saw her. She came back as a woman with one idea in mind: to provoke me until I gave in.

I thought it would be a quiet afternoon in front of the TV, until my stepsister’s bare foot started climbing my thigh and one question changed everything.

He was more than twice her age and her mother’s man. But when they were left alone in the house, Carla understood he’d wanted exactly this for months.

By day the perfect daughter, by night my own mother’s lover. I learned to fake it in front of everyone, until my sister came back and I had to choose between them.

The first time I saw him naked it was only for a few seconds, but it was enough to ignite a forbidden curiosity I no longer knew how to extinguish.

I went down determined to confront him about his affair. I ended up on his lap, with my robe lifted and my body burning for something I should never have felt.

She was sipping her gin and tonic when two men sat beside her and told her about a film. By the time she finished her drink, she had already signed.

Six months of freedom ended with one call: the father was coming home. And under the same roof, they’d have to hide a fire they no longer knew how to put out.

We’d been talking every day for a year. On that fifth night in Seville, playing on her phone while sitting on her couch, I touched her hand by accident. Neither of us had ever been with a woman.

I had never seen my mother naked. The day her arm was broken, someone had to put her in the shower, and that someone was me.

When the plane jolted and she suddenly fell onto me, I felt her hips press against my body. Neither of us said a word, but something had changed.

I grew up hearing her through the wall, hating every man who passed through her bed. That dawn, with the house silent and the national team on TV, she was the one who closed the distance.

When everyone else went to sleep, she came to the sofa, looked me straight in the eye, and said something I never expected to hear from a friend.