Strangers

I wore the red dress with nothing underneath. He walked behind me with his phone on, and every stare that lingered on me ended up saved in his gallery.

That night I heard a low noise in the hall and pressed myself to a badly drawn curtain. What I didn’t know was that someone barefoot in the garden had been watching me for six minutes.

My husband had been away all week and I was still carrying the guilt from the last time. Then that man in line smiled at me like he knew everything.

When he slipped his bare foot beneath the tablecloth and brushed my thigh, I knew the boy I’d been ignoring for weeks was going to get what he’d been asking for.

I handed him the folded note and a condom without saying a word. He read it, looked me over, and only said: come with me. I wasn’t thinking clearly again for hours.

I sent a photo of my open pussy from the café bathroom. What happened next, in front of that picture window, still makes my legs shake.

I wore my cowgirl hat with no intention of going home alone. I never imagined a stranger would suggest something I’d never dared to try.

At forty-four I thought nothing could surprise me anymore, until a man with grease-stained hands looked at me like no one had in years.

She wrote saying she wanted to be my model, my muse. She had no idea that afternoon would teach her desire and the camera are the same thing.

For twenty years I pretended I was satisfied. The night I stopped, I discovered that an experienced woman can be far more frightening than a young girl.

When I saw the bills my sister had hidden in the drawer, I knew our life at that bus stop was about to change forever—and that nothing between us would ever be innocent again.

I went downstairs thinking I was in control. Three hours later, I was just a spectator to something that no longer belonged to me.

When the lockdown ended, I had been holding back for too long. I went out determined to find what I needed, never imagining it would be three men at once.

Some ask for photos before hello. Others call me things they never got permission to say. Here are the gems from my inbox, with the names changed.

I climbed the stairs with my heart pounding like a teenager’s. She was waiting upstairs, and I still didn’t know it would be the night she left me with nothing.

I was twenty and had a boyfriend waiting for me at home. That hot afternoon by the pool, I discovered how fiercely the body can burn when you let go.

Llevaba semanas con una sola idea fija en la cabeza, y aquel domingo en las gradas del campo de rugby encontré por fin la manera de cumplirla.

He crouched to show me his bracelets, and his gaze dropped to my breasts. In that instant, I knew I wouldn’t leave that beach the same woman.

There are things a woman never tells anyone. This is the one I kept for years, the one that still makes me tremble when I pass that cinema.

For weeks I had been masturbating every night, imagining what she was living in her own body. Until one Thursday I stood before the mirror and decided to stop imagining it.