Seduction

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.

The wedding ring appeared at the bottom of a glass of Baileys, and Damián was smiling as if he knew exactly how much it cost her to ask him to leave before her husband got home.

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.

I thought of him as just a mate and nothing more. Until that dawn he grabbed me by the neck outside the club entrance and everything I thought I knew about myself fell apart.

What was supposed to be an ordinary lunch with a stranger from the internet ended with me biting the pillow to keep from screaming.

Whenever he closed his eyes in that armchair, he returned to the harbor loft, to the hands of the only man before whom he stopped pretending to be someone else.

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.

We’d been flirting between monitors for a month when she took me to the back seat of my car. What I discovered weeks later changed everything, and not in the way I feared.

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.

He offered me money if I’d let him kneel. What he didn’t know was that once he was on the floor, I’d decide exactly how much each inch would cost him.

When she opened the door and saw him standing there, she knew no one had ever looked at him the way she was about to. And he meant to prove them all wrong.

“Don’t move from there,” she ordered in a low voice, pressing her heel against me. And I, a stranger, obeyed without a second thought.

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.

Her feet were swollen from the match and she had a smile that knew everything. I only wanted to kneel and show her how far I was willing to go.