Voyeur

I thought the spa was empty until I heard the laughter. Five young voices, five gazes that never left the wet white bikini against my skin.

I pulled the curtain aside in fear, thinking they were burglars. What I saw in the patio left me breathless and trembling between my legs.

When he pulled down his boxer briefs without asking me to leave the room, I knew the afternoon had stopped being about sportswear.

I went downstairs in the middle of the night for a glass of water. The back bedroom door was half open, and from inside came a faint light and two conspiratorial laughs.

I had told her about my fixation on trans women, but I never thought she’d agree to sit there on that sofa and watch another woman put me on my knees.

That afternoon I turned the telescope expecting nothing new, and I saw her: kneeling on the chair, oblivious to the fact that a stranger thirty meters away was watching her in silence.

Every time my friend came through the door, she changed her clothes. One afternoon I made up an excuse, drove around the block, and slipped in through the back patio in silence.

I went down to the garden looking for her and found her behind the glass, seated in the chair, with her assistant kissing her eyelids as if I didn’t exist.

We went downstairs following moans and found them. That night I learned by watching what the next day I’d dare to try.

I knocked a thousand times and nobody opened. When reception let me in, I found suitcases that weren’t mine under the bed and an unmistakable smell.

I went out to get some air while he slept. The lights in the apartment across the way were still on, and then I heard a moan that wasn’t mine and knew I was going to keep watching.

The first time I aimed my sons’ old telescope toward the window across the street, I knew I had become something my husband would never imagine.

He spent years with his ear pressed to the walls of cheap motels. One night he found a forum promising more: booths with a view of other people’s pleasure.

It was the first time I saw her in person. I meant to tell her about the pool and the lifeguard, but her hand on my thigh changed the conversation before I finished the sentence.

I climbed the tree behind the dormitory to confirm what I already knew. I never imagined seeing her with him on the balcony would awaken something between rage and desire I’d never felt.

Three hours reading stories on my phone were enough to make me accept Iván’s proposal. The next day, that hidden camera changed my whole life.

She came in wearing her white uniform and her usual smile. What neither of them saw coming was that the other woman was on the sofa, three meters from the game.

When she gave me the keys to her apartment and left for work, I already knew that night we were going to debut much more than the bottle of wine I had packed in my suitcase.

I wanted strangers to imagine her from afar. I didn’t expect her to stage the scene herself, or for my screen-side accomplice to show up with a flashlight in hand.

When she whispered that she was wet and apologized, I realized the fantasy had gone too far. And the stranger still hadn’t done his worst.