Seduction

I recognized him on the platform after twenty years, and we boarded the same carriage. By the time we reached the third station, his hand was already where it shouldn’t be.

Some people collect stamps or travel souvenirs. I collect nights, mouths, and hands I’ve already forgotten, and I still don’t understand why I should be ashamed of that.

I offered my husband’s old clothes as an excuse. The truth is I’d been fantasizing for months about what would happen if I ever had him close, inside my house.

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.

They had spent weeks trying to meet. When they finally closed the car door, the parking lot faded away and there were no more excuses to pretend they were only friends.

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.

When I moved Sebastián’s laptop mouse and saw my best friend’s name on the screen, I knew nothing would ever be the same.

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.

I thought selling a few photos would be harmless. But that night, phone in hand, I discovered how badly I wanted someone who was only my friend.

One random dawn I turned on the camera and, without knowing it, opened the door to the only woman who learned how to make me tremble from six hundred kilometers away.

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’ve got the face of a slut and everyone can tell. In the last carriage, pressed against bodies I don’t know, I let my hands do what my mind has already decided.

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.

We hadn’t spoken in six years when his message lit up my screen. That tent, that shared blanket, still makes me tremble.

She came downstairs with a smile that was no longer the same and one hand hidden behind her back. “Guess what I’ve brought,” she said. That night I understood what she was becoming.