Strangers

Four women, nine men, and a cabin with a pool. I got in the van knowing something was going to happen, but not that I’d give myself to all of them without thinking twice.

When the Marshal’s shot rang out, I knew it would be our last night. What I never imagined was what the party would become once the lights went out.

I went down to the kitchen practically naked, with three strangers kneeling in my living room and my partner on the other side of the wall. What I didn’t know was that he was recording everything.

I’d known her since we were children: sweet, quiet, the perfect wife. Until I walked into that club in the city and saw her stretched out on the table, surrounded by men.

I’d been turning the idea over in my mind for weeks, but nothing prepared me for what I felt when the first unknown hands traced my skin in the dark.

—Just watching, —she whispered at the club’s door. But strangers’ hands were already searching for her skin, and I couldn’t look away or stop it.

For years I'd been chasing something harder than one man. That weekend, at my mountain house, thirty of them were waiting by the pool.

She told her husband she’d sleep at a friend’s house. In reality, she was naked in the bed of a truck, listening to the line forming outside.

When the van pulled up behind me in the dead of night, I knew that night wasn’t going to end like any other. And to my surprise, I didn’t want it to.

Lying in the sun after what had just happened, we heard them laughing at him for not daring to come over. And that was exactly what made us get up.

When he blindfolded me in the doorway, all I felt was a drop slowly running between my thighs and my heart about to burst out of my chest.

I thought I’d just have something typical to eat before bed. I never imagined those two guys from the bar would lead me into the most uninhibited night of my life.

I went downstairs naked, smiled at them, and only set one rule: come up without clothes. There were eleven, sweaty and needy; I’d been widowed far too long.

When Mariela took the microphone and said the bar was closed for just the women there, I knew none of us was going home the same.

I thought the steam room was mine alone, along with my toys. Then the door opened and a very tall stranger looked at me without any hurry to cover herself.

She had spent years going to that club alone, waiting for a glance that would stay on her. That night, unknown fingers took her hand and dragged her into the dark.

She sat down across from me in a nearly empty bar, took my hands, and told me I looked sad. Three hours later I was naked in her bed, and I didn’t want to leave.

I only wanted a phone to call a tow truck. I ended up between two strangers who decided that quiet night included me.

She arrived on my friend’s arm, with that mouth and those full lips, and I knew right away that on my birthday she was going to be mine, even if she was another man’s girlfriend.

She accepted the invitation to pay her cheating boyfriend back in kind and chose the fine-featured zombie, not imagining what she would discover when she took off the costume.