Voyeur

The office door was left ajar, and without meaning to, I became a witness to something I shouldn’t have seen or heard, but couldn’t look away from.

When Matías and I came back from the corner store with cigarettes, Camila and Renata were already too close on the sofa, whispering in each other’s ears.

I recognized the moans behind that door. I knew every cadence. But the woman at the desk had something my wife swore she would never have.

She wore a miniskirt, black stockings, and sunglasses that kept me from knowing when she’d caught me watching. Until she stopped pretending and started playing with me.

The receptionist winked at him when he handed over the towel. That gesture was only the beginning: in every room, a different body and a new turn-on waited for him.

She was my assistant at the office, an impossible beauty who kept stealing my gaze. One night, over chat, I discovered everything her tight clothes had been hiding from me for weeks.

It was eleven in the morning and the cove was empty, except for a guy pretending not to watch me. My husband was swimming and I could feel his eyes fixed on every inch of my skin.

The Polaroid hung from my neck when she appeared under the threshold, barefoot and smiling, escorted by two men I didn’t know at all.

The first time was an accident. After that, every night he had company, I moved the armchair to the window and let my hand drift down on its own.

My husband doesn’t need to touch me first. He needs to see how other men look at me without permission, how they falter when I pass. Then he comes, and desire no longer fits in the bed.

Three in the morning. A short nightgown. Nothing underneath. And the feeling that every park lamp was a curious eye, waiting for me to go one step too far.

At three in the morning, two men knocked on the door. What neither of them knew was that Camila had been asking me for that night for weeks.

I thought it was a secret date with my girlfriend’s cousin. What I didn’t know was that the phone beside the bed was streaming everything live.

I opened the door without making a sound. Three sleeping men in the same room and her in red panties, on the bed, wearing a shirt that wasn’t mine.

When Camila whispered that the girl was already in the house and watching us from the hallway, I thought she would stop. She did the exact opposite.

I came down wearing nothing but a towel, and on the next-to-last step I discovered the room was full of people who had already seen me completely on the screen.

Lucía was the most proper girl in the school crowd. That night I saw her walk into the birthday party in a miniskirt and realized the Sunday-Mass girl was gone.

I stepped out of the car with my coat open, wearing nothing underneath, and from across the street they started pointing at me. My husband watched from far away, waiting to see which one I’d choose.

No one in the family imagined what happened between Lucía and me when the lights went out and we disappeared for a weekend in some downtown hotel.