Strangers

I went out to smoke in the dark and saw him: crouched behind the palm tree, eyes fixed on the window where she was undressing, unaware she was being watched by two.

The burgundy curtain separated me from the empty street. Mara leaned in to fasten the bodysuit’s clasps for me and, without warning, her fingers lingered a little too long.

The towel barely covered me when I knocked on my neighbor’s door on the seventh floor. He agreed to help me open my apartment only if I let the last thing I had on fall away.

When the first one approached the car, my wife already had her skirt raised and her blouse open. What came next, I watched from an armchair, drink in hand, hardly breathing.

At two in the morning, in that room with red lights, I stopped pretending I was only there to keep my husband company. I was watching. And I was liking it far too much.

Our eyes met in the service-area café. I knew he’d follow me into the bathroom, and I knew I wasn’t coming out the same man who went in.

There were five empty seats on the bus and she still chose mine. She smiled, settled the shawl over her lap, and I knew something was about to begin before we even left.

She’d been watching me for weeks from her corner table, with that calm that unsettled something inside me. When she sat across from me during my break, she wasn’t alone.

That morning I decided to go out with nothing under my skirt. I didn’t want to be touched, only watched. And in the second-floor ice cream shop, someone noticed.

When he took off his shirt to change clothes, I knew I wouldn’t be able to focus on anything he said about screws and shelves.

I thought the dark of the movie theater would distract me from how badly things had gone with her. I didn’t count on that same man who’d surprised us months earlier washing his hands beside me.

I saw the bus driver watching us in the rearview mirror and, instead of covering up, I let him pull down my top. At three in the morning, my ex and I were a free show.

I’d spent months with the app open without writing. When I finally replied, a discreet hotel and a man named Iván were waiting.

The shop was empty at three in the afternoon. When he pulled the shutter down and led me to the fitting room, I knew that siesta wouldn’t be like any other.

When I looked up from the grass, two headlights went out thirty meters away. Inside the car, a motionless shadow kept watching us.

I had never really noticed another man until his eyes met mine in that bar. Three drinks later I was in his apartment, not knowing what to do with my hands.

I’d waited all summer for the cove to empty. It was deserted, yes—but moans behind the dunes drew me in, and I couldn’t help becoming a voyeur.

When I bent down to pick up a magazine from the lowest shelf, I felt the cold air rush between my legs. Three pairs of eyes rose at once. I didn’t pull down my skirt.

Whenever I enter a fitting room, I leave the curtain slightly open. The woman watching never knows I’m looking for her—and almost always, one of them plays along.

I went in naked and walked among bodies without knowing what I was looking for. When I climbed into the hammock with a glass of wine, a forty-year-old man settled beside me and asked if I minded.