Seduction

Every gesture is calculated: the brush of stockings, the heel dangling from my toes, the smile that makes them feel guilty. Today I woke up wanting to play.

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.

She said it laughing, almost as a game: that she liked a friend of ours. I never imagined the three of us would end up in the same room.

He let his hand slide down his abdomen in the darkness and allowed the scene to form: him in the middle of the couch, his wife on one side, her friend on the other, an impossible kiss.

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 mind began inventing what was never going to happen.

When my husband got up to go to the bathroom, I knew the man at the next table would come over. I still hadn’t told him I was afraid to go back to something like that.

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.

I could have changed in thirty seconds. Instead, I walked to the door in heels, knowing perfectly well what he was about to see.

She came to pose as queen of the underworld. I fired the flash again and again, professional as ever, until she spread her legs and I understood the session was something else.

All it took was a firm hand on her neck for her to understand that I set the rules that night. The rest depended on whether she dared to stay.

When the widow undid her bodice to nurse her son, Aurora stopped breathing. What burned through her body that night had no name, but it would never let her sleep again.

When he told me, “Take off your blouse in the parking lot,” I thought it was a joke. Ten minutes later, his wife was watching us from her bed on a video call.

“I make the rules, and you follow them,” she said, and none of the four of us dared contradict her. Months of isolation 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 inside. 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.

I’d spent years dressing in secret, but that night I put on the boots, the fishnets, and the velvet dress, and walked out the door as her.