Strangers

I’ve spent thirty years pretending to be the modest wife my husband thinks he set free. What he doesn’t know is that on this cruise, I’m the one pulling the strings.

When she told me what really turned her on, I knew we were opening a door we’d never be able to close again. And I didn’t want to close it.

When I opened the door, I was expecting a paper bag and a “good morning.” I wasn’t expecting him to keep looking inside and ask me, in a low voice, whether I lived alone.

I had never felt so much from a simple brush of hips. When she settled behind me on the crowded bus, I knew that ride wouldn’t end like the others.

I turned on the system from the office just to keep an eye on the tools. What came up on the screen was my wife taking off her bikini in front of him.

—Marina, you won’t believe this: I went in to clean the room and there was a couple in the bed. And I just stood there watching from the doorway, unable to move.

She descended from the plane of pleasure into a Ruzafa apartment, and when the street’s desire brushed her skin, she knew no loose clothing could contain her.

I took my time handing her coat over, enjoying the way men looked at her. I never imagined one would dare that much in front of me.

You didn’t know us from Adam, but you spent the whole afternoon with your hand in your swimsuit, watching us play. And we knew it from the start.

She cried drunkenly on my shoulder saying nobody wanted her anymore. She had no idea that the very same night, out on the sand, I was going to prove exactly the opposite.

I never thought that seeing another man look at my naked girlfriend, legs spread open on the sand, would be the most arousing thing I’d ever feel.

We’d fantasized about it for months. As she went upstairs behind the waitress, I knew I was going to watch everything from the room next door.

I had just come out of the shower when I saw her message on the screen. She wasn’t what I was looking for, but her photo changed my plans that very afternoon.

I thought the spa was empty until I heard the laughter. Five young voices, five gazes that never left the wet white bikini against my skin.

I stopped at the traffic light out of curiosity. An hour later I was on my back, asking her to take it slow, discovering a side of me I'd spent years pretending didn't exist.

I went downstairs in the middle of the night for a glass of water. The back bedroom door was half open, and from inside came a faint light and two conspiratorial laughs.

My ad was for men, always. But that afternoon, when I read her message, I knew I was about to break my own rule and complicate my life.

The gym stud who humiliated me in front of half the gym wrote me from a dating app fifty meters from my place. Fifteen minutes later, he was ringing my doorbell.

It was almost eleven when the elevator dropped me at the empty parking garage. I had no idea those keys would cost me so much, and so little, at the same time.

That afternoon I turned the telescope without expecting anything new, and I saw her: kneeling on the chair, oblivious to the fact that a stranger thirty meters away was watching in silence.