Voyeur

The two wineglasses on the coffee table and the dim bedroom light told me I was about to see something I should never have seen.

Lucía never wanted anything to do with a man. Camila was a bombshell who drove the guests crazy. I only had one question I couldn’t keep to myself.

When I went down the stairs naked, my sister-in-law still didn't know what kind of surprise my father-in-law had prepared for her that night.

My wife went out with her “friends,” and I went to Mauricio’s. One camera, two couples, and the question of who would be the better slut that night.

My wife whispered in my ear that she wanted that young body too. That night, on the living room sofa, everything forbidden stopped being forbidden.

When her bikini shifted on the shore and the men on the beach started staring, she didn’t fix it. She just kept walking slower.

Years later I still remember her panties in the breeze, her hand between her legs, and the kiss she blew me from the sidewalk before disappearing. We never said a single word.

Sandra took off her thong in the bar bathroom and put it in my hand. Wet, warm. I knew then there would be no turning back.

We hired Valeria to care for my father-in-law, the man who had insulted me for years. No one imagined what would happen that morning in the bathroom.

When I pressed her doorbell with her dog beside me, I never imagined that this wary-eyed stranger would take me upstairs that very afternoon.

I’d come home early from the bar. The hallway was dark and his bedroom door was half open. I stopped for just a second. That second changed everything.

I’d had that drawer locked for years. That morning I found it open, and inside was a black disc with Sofía’s name written on it in marker.

The TV was on, the lights were off, a blanket covering the three of us. No one said a word. It was my friend who moved his hand first, slowly, as if he’d been waiting for that moment for a long time.

I found her dancing with a stranger when she was supposed to be with her friends. I followed her, hid, and what I saw behind that curtain changed everything.

Marcos was a voyeur and had spent years wanting to see her with another man. The afternoon they tried it for the first time, two strangers in a restaurant changed everything.

When Roberto pointed out that I was the husband, Mr. Kanamoto smiled for the first time. I understood then that my role that afternoon would not be husband but witness.

It was the night I got furthest on my own and with not a stitch on. Dogs, men, motorcycles, and the main park: I saw it all in my naked skin.

I couldn’t tell whether what I felt was jealousy or arousal. Probably both at once, and that frightened me more than anything else.

When he pointed the camera for the first time, he told himself it was the last. Six weeks later, he was still filming. And Laura was still smiling on the other side of the lens.

After years of keeping the secret, I blurted it out: my wife slept with other men, and I knew. What I saw in my uncle’s eyes wasn’t judgment, but something darker.