Strangers

I dialed the number with a trembling hand. A South American voice told me to go up to the third floor, that it wouldn’t hurt, that tonight I’d learn to ask for more.

That morning I opened the curtains intending to watch the maids. I never imagined a stranger in the opposite window would be the one who couldn’t take her eyes off me.

Three mornings a week she cleaned the corridor right on the other side of my desk. And three mornings a week I learned not to look away from the glass.

I whispered my fantasy in her ear in the middle of the packed train car. She was startled, then bit my lip, and I knew that night we were heading to a hotel.

I asked my husband for a photo of himself and got one of another man: a perfect stranger. That night I had no idea how far that image would take me in my sleep.

I hadn’t written to him in a year. That afternoon I opened the email, typed his name, and before I thought it through, I was already telling him exactly what I wanted him to do to me.

There was still more than an hour to go, the seat next to me was empty, and that tingling between my legs was the only thing on my mind.

I’d been turned on for days with not a single minute alone. That Friday I booked a room, took the vibrator out of the box, and decided the night was mine.

She had red hair, painted lips, and a body that stopped traffic. What I didn’t imagine was what I’d find when I slipped my hand under her dress.

She had never been with someone fifteen years older. That night, in the hotel room, she discovered that intelligence can be seductive too.

I warned her that if I didn’t like it, I’d let her out at the next corner. She smiled, reclined my seat, and told me to close my eyes for a second.

When they put me in that cell, I never imagined two strangers would turn it into the scene where I learned what it meant to surrender to desire and pleasure.

The drawer was jammed by a handwritten notebook. Inside were the most intimate pages of a stranger and his eight-year lover.

When I knelt in the sand with the sun beating on my back, I never imagined someone was watching every move from the other side of the crag.

Every morning is the same: I open my eyes with my body on fire and the bed in disarray, knowing no pillow can soothe what I truly crave.

I ordered a piña colada at the beach bar and the waiter brought it with a smile. By day two, I knew his service went far beyond the bar.

The first customer asked for something that wasn’t in my contract. When I got back to the room, Salvador was breathing like he’d been awake for hours.

Her boyfriend played with his phone a meter away while she left the fitting-room curtain half open and, every time she undressed, checked that I was still there.