Strangers

By day I was the invisible wife I had always been. By night I wrote what I was too afraid to ask for. Then someone read it and decided to give it to me.

That giant of a man was eating a sandwich at the bar. One look was enough to know I’d be back at the nightclub door that night looking for him.

I went out to ask for a drink and came back with two men glued to me. Marcos watched from a distance, without intervening. Not until I said stop.

I left the curtain slightly open on purpose. She knew it and never stopped looking. That’s how it began: watching each other from afar before distance stopped mattering.

Under his jacket, something was moving. I should have left. Instead, I slipped my hand in, and what happened next changed that summer forever.

The flyer promised an orgy, couples, strippers. What happened at that motel was something else: he stripped me in front of thirty strangers.

I accepted without thinking. I read everything he posted. I never liked a single post. Three years later, I still don’t dare write to him, but I think of him every night.

Two separated women, an apartment too orderly, and a deck of cards no one should have found that night.

It had been a month since I couldn’t get that corner of Industria out of my head. That night I decided to go back, but this time I wouldn’t be alone.

I was walking alone when Ernesto leaned out of the bus window and called me by name. I should have kept going, but something in his voice stopped me.

I was wandering aimlessly when he lifted his head from a second-floor window and held my gaze as if he knew, before I did, that we’d end up tangled in his sheets.