Strangers

I gave him a sleeping pill, put on my shortest skirt, and went down to the hotel bar to find what he no longer knew how to give me.

I never imagined a vacation with my best friend would end like this: the four of us in a room that wasn’t ours, and neither of us wanting to leave.

I saw him fidgeting on a campus bench, waiting for someone, and my radar switched on. I never imagined that shy boy would make me lose track of the hours.

That night I didn’t want to wait for anyone. I wanted the guard who had undressed me with his eyes all afternoon, even though he didn’t know what I was hiding.

We exchanged a single glance between the clothing racks, and I knew I wouldn’t go home that afternoon the same woman. Neither did he know it yet.

Three nights sleeping beside him in that tiny cab, until one early morning his huge hand began roaming over me as if I already belonged to him.

I returned to the countryside after years in the city and, looking for my father among the corn, found my mother on her knees before one of his farmhands.

In front of the mirror, adjusting my garter and blonde wig, I allow myself the most dangerous luxury of all: imagining someone who stays afterward.

I peered around the waterfall expecting an empty cave. What I found inside changed my entire afternoon.

I texted him, “Door ajar, if you dare,” and turned off almost all the lights. When he came up the stairs, I knew there was no turning back.

I saw her when I boarded and knew I wouldn’t sleep. I never imagined I’d spy from the shadows as another man took her against the window.

I walked into that club convinced I was the one in control. Three hours later, a stranger had completely undone me and I was begging him not to stop.

I started dancing just to entertain my husband, but the nervous look on the young man across from us made it clear that night wasn’t going to end with a dance.

I met him while collecting the mail. A week later I was on my knees in the meter room, wondering how I’d lost control so fast.

I mapped a jungle where no one spoke my language, yet among clay-painted bodies, I finally stopped feeling like a ghost.

The idea was his: to look for a stranger who would do to me what he didn't dare. What he didn't calculate was that I'd never look at him the same way again.

Sonia was waiting for me at the restaurant door in a dress so short that every time she breathed it told a secret. And I had come ready to tell mine.

I had spent months becoming someone else in front of the mirror. That night, in a stranger’s bed, I discovered how far my new skin could take me.

“I want us to masturbate while we watch each other,” she told me in the car. I hadn’t expected it, but watching her without touching her turned me on instantly.

For years I’d wanted to go to a nude beach, but none of my partners would come with me. That morning I went alone, not knowing how it would end.