Seduction

I left my father’s villa for my grandparents’ house in the village. I had no idea my aunt, the most devout woman in town, would end up naked in my bed for an envelope full of bills.

Her mother called me a dreamer, her father humiliated me by the car. When it was all over, Helena came down the stairs, took my hand, and led me to her room.

He sent me the photo while my husband was driving beside him. I didn’t reply, but that image stayed in my head all day.

Marina returned from university a grown woman, and amid laughter and games in the water, Adrián understood they were no longer the children who swam there every summer.

I had tried it before and felt nothing but pain. That night, in a hotel room with a stranger, I discovered how wrong I had been.

When I held her fever-hot against my chest, I remembered the nights her mouth knew mine as if she’d been learning me for years.

I liked being watched, desired, chosen above everyone else. That night, a country man took me from the dance floor to a place there was no turning back from.

He had never seen a man like Lamine, and from the first day he knew he would do anything to get back into his home.

I lay naked on the table on purpose, not covering myself, just to see what he’d do when he came in with the hot oil.

I'd smoked since I was eighteen, and nothing had ever made me stop. Until my wife found that doctor with impossible heels and a predator's smile.

He wore an expensive suit and had a stare that intimidated everyone at the table, but he couldn’t stop looking at my feet. And I knew exactly what I was going to do with that.

She wore a size 36, they were white and perfect, and that sangria-soaked afternoon I decided I needed them in my mouth even if everyone was watching.

He’d been sneaking looks at my feet from the bus stop for ten minutes. What he didn’t know was that I planned to bring him upstairs and put him on his knees before nightfall.

The shutter was half lowered and the key turned twice behind me. I came without my ring and with twelve years of silence on my tongue.

I followed her out into the street convinced it would be just another night. I had no idea what she was hiding under that tight dress or how far she would take me.

I asked him to imagine my hand on his thigh. I didn’t expect to feel his trembling under mine, or for the trance to become mine too.

Twenty years married, and each hid a secret of their own: him in strangers’ bathrooms, me not yet knowing what the yoga woman was about to awaken in me.

I went up to the fifth floor expecting coffee and an explanation. She still had a report unfinished. I had no idea her lover was watching everything from the next office.

I opened the door wearing almost nothing but a robe. When I saw him on the landing, I knew that Saturday in February would be memorable for a very different reason than the heat.