Strangers

He barely reached my elbow when he took my hand. In six minutes, I discovered that my body didn’t understand the rules I had imposed on myself.

I woke up certain it had only been a steamy nightmare. Then I saw the box on the living-room table, just like in the dream, and the coffee slipped from my hands.

She arrives at ten-thirty, leans against the shelter, and crosses her legs. She doesn’t know it, but in my head we’ve already done everything we’d never dare.

My friend thought we were just out for fresh air. I’d already chosen my prey: the dark-haired man playing with his son ten meters away.

When the train left without me, I thought the night was lost. Then I saw him at the other end of the platform, motionless, looking at me as if he’d always been waiting.

The paper robe barely covered me. When his hot hands slid down my back, I knew that session wasn’t going to end the way I’d imagined.

I left home in a sweater that showed everything, wearing nothing underneath. My boyfriend walked behind me as strangers’ eyes roamed over me.

I went into the bathroom wearing my thong and came out with it tangled in my hair. I never imagined the line into the theater would be the longest part of the night.

The steam erased faces and names. All that remained was the heat, his gaze fixed on mine, and the certainty that neither of us would 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 ordered me to spread my legs and put my hands behind my neck. 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 return every deceit. On Día de Muertos, an obsidian amulet gave her 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.

He wound an antique watch and, by dawn, his body was no longer his own. A week of stolen pleasure with a price collected only 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 was touching himself while thinking of Nadia when his desire opened a door sealed for eighteen hundred years. What crossed through was hungry, and the city would be its feast.