Strangers

The steam erased faces and names. Only the heat remained, his fixed gaze on mine, and the certainty that neither of us was going to stop.

I placed my hands on the cold wall, took a deep breath, and understood that on the other side someone was waiting for the invisible permission to start touching me.

He told me to spread my legs and put my hands behind my head. What he thought was a routine pat-down was really the start of my game.

I saw her among hundreds of people and knew I was going to look for her. What happened next, by the sea, was the most vivid dream I’ve ever had.

We’d been together fifteen years and I thought I knew everything about him. Then, one ordinary night, he whispered something in my ear that changed everything.

For a year she dreamed of the day she could give back every lie. On Día de Muertos, an obsidian amulet offered exactly that.

Since Tomás’s death, I embraced my lust without restraint, but the package wrapped in black velvet that arrived that night hid something my fantasies never imagined.

I’d spent three weeks swallowing dust and loneliness when the driver looked at me fixedly, without smiling, and said: “Come, my house.” It wasn’t an invitation: it was an order, and I followed him.

They wound an antique watch, and by dawn his body was no longer his. A week of stolen pleasure with a price that only gets collected on the last night.

She grabbed my arm in the middle of the street and whispered that if I let her go, she might disappear. I had no idea how far that night would go or what price I’d pay for following her.

He only had to come too close for the heat we had denied for months to give us both away. That night there was no way to keep pretending.

Diego touched himself thinking of Nadia when his desire opened a door that had been sealed for eighteen hundred years. What came through was hungry, and the city would be its feast.

If we ordered beer, we’d say goodbye. If we ordered wine, we’d stay. I never imagined where that glass she chose without hesitation would take us.

I went upstairs to lock myself away, thinking no one had seen me. I had my fingers between my legs and my eyes closed when I felt the door give way slowly behind me.

A stranger’s hand brushed my waist just before I left the bar. One question in my ear was enough to make me forget my friends and follow that couple home.

I never told my partner. But when I close my eyes, I’m not the one who decides: someone comes in, holds me down, and my body stops obeying me.

No one knew why I always parked on the same deserted stretch. That afternoon, a runner turned his head toward my window and realized everything.

I knew exactly what I was doing when I put on the gown the wrong way. What I didn’t know was how far that stranger would let himself explore me that afternoon.

I was pregnant, alone, and hotter than I’d ever been; when those two men offered to walk me home, I already knew what I was going to let happen between the three of us.

Sitting in the armchair, the key dangling between her breasts, I knew that night I’d finally watch her give herself to another man while I stayed locked up.