Strangers

His hands were no longer seeking the pain in my back. I knew it, he knew it, and still I said nothing when they traveled down the cleft to places they had never reached before.

When she went into the bathroom, I didn’t expect her to kneel between my legs, or for her tongue to decide for me what I’d been avoiding asking for years.

When we got there that night, my wife was already wearing the plug. What we didn’t expect was to run into a nineteen-year-old who would change the routine.

We’d sworn the playroom would be oral sex only. We hadn’t counted on the man next to us watching—or on his wife’s hands on my back.

We talked for weeks without sending each other a single photo, until she told me she wanted to be the first to do it to me, in person, in her bed.

For days I hid among the bushes, watching her ride another man every night. When he was laid up with a fever, I took his place.

I wanted people to watch her. To devour her with their eyes. What I didn’t expect was that one of the strangers in the back would dare to chase her into the showers.

That folder was never supposed to exist. But I opened it—and among hundreds of photos of me asleep and naked, I found something worse: the email where he shared them.

She had been married for fifteen years and had never looked at another man. Until Lorenzo offered to show her his workshop at seven in the morning and locked the door.

I had the house to myself, four drinks in me, and the certainty that four men were watching me from the scaffolding. I wasn't going to waste the morning.

I closed my eyes in the empty locker room and let the fantasy carry me farther than I’d imagined. When I opened them, there was no going back.

When he tied the black mask over my eyes and opened the private-room door, I never imagined that one of those masks hid someone I’d known since childhood.

I’d spent half my life with the same woman when that stranger in leopard print sat beside me and looked at me the way no one had in years.

The doorbell rang at seven-thirty, and I knew my marriage had changed forever. She came downstairs braless, looked at them, and smiled.

When I opened the door, he wasn’t alone: behind him, wearing that practiced rent-boy smile, he had brought a man I had never seen in the neighborhood in my life.

When the downpour left us soaked, she ordered me to take off my wet clothes and started undressing without shame. I tried to hide the tremble in my hands.

When his hand settled on my hip and he whispered “Hi, baby,” I thought he meant one of my friends. When I turned around, I knew the night wouldn’t end as expected.

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.