Strangers

When the smuggler told us the price, we all looked at one another. It wasn’t jewelry or money. It was us, our bodies, twelve hours a day in front of his cameras.

I went down to the hotel lobby in my pajamas to pick up a package and found him there: a huge man with hands the size of my head and a smile that wasn’t entirely innocent.

The door opened in the middle of the storm and the woman looked us over before making her offer. It was direct: five hundred for everything, paid in advance.

Weeks earlier, we’d made a bet over a card game. The loser would have to fulfill the other’s darkest fantasy. He lost—and I was ready to collect.

I crossed the bar with trembling legs, took his face in my hands, and kissed him without saying a word. What came after can’t be told in daylight.

I’d gone months without anyone touching me. That night I started the car with no destination, but my body already knew exactly where it was going.

When the first moans crossed room 412’s door, she was still holding the champagne bucket with both hands. Ten minutes later, she wasn’t thinking about the hotel anymore.

I’d been watching him in the locker room for months without daring to act. That afternoon, when he asked if I wanted to go up to his place, I knew it was now or never.

I’d been ignoring his looks for weeks. That night at the hotel, after the pool and dancing with strangers, I couldn’t keep doing it.

That afternoon four men came to visit me. None knew about the others. I was the only one who had the full picture, and I felt no guilt at all.

There were nights when I didn’t look at the face of whoever came in. I counted the money and waited for it to be over. But once, everything was completely different.

I hadn’t come to Málaga looking for anything. And yet Mateo showed up with his twenty-eight years and those eyes that make you feel the world owes you something.

When Diego stopped the car in front of the motel, I knew that late-night conversation about my most secret fantasy had changed everything.

She wore knee-high boots and the kind of look women have when they already know exactly what they want. I got up to give her my card before the moment slipped away.

We were four forty-year-olds who’d never broken a plate. Raquel said we had to do something we couldn’t tell anyone about.

He’d come in looking for the bathroom and stayed standing in the doorway, staring at me. Twenty years old, nervous as hell, and asking me something I hadn’t expected.

She chose the man. I arranged the meetings. Neither of us knew exactly how that spring night in Barcelona would end.

They grabbed me from behind before I saw it coming. In seconds I was on my knees in broad daylight, with the whole park watching.

We put on quiet music, turned off the lights, and promised that whatever was said that night would stay there. The hardest promise to keep.

He smelled of tobacco and the countryside. He wasn’t handsome, but from the moment I first saw him, something in me stopped working normally.