Voyeur

I turned on the system from the office just to keep an eye on the tools. What came up on the screen was my wife taking off her bikini in front of him.

—Marina, you won’t believe this: I went in to clean the room and there was a couple in the bed. And I just stood there watching from the doorway, unable to move.

You didn’t know us from Adam, but you spent the whole afternoon with your hand in your swimsuit, watching us play. And we knew it from the start.

When I felt his gaze pinned to my back from the window across the way, I knew that afternoon I wasn’t going to buy bread—I was going to give him something much better.

I never thought that seeing another man look at my naked girlfriend, legs spread open on the sand, would be the most arousing thing I’d ever feel.

We’d fantasized about it for months. As she went upstairs behind the waitress, I knew I was going to watch everything from the room next door.

I’d been imagining it for weeks. That dawn I opened the gate, stepped onto the asphalt, and knew I wouldn’t stop until someone saw me.

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 boxers 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 without expecting anything new, and I saw her: kneeling on the chair, oblivious to the fact that a stranger thirty meters away was watching in silence.

Every time my friend came through the door, she changed 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 followed the moans down to the kitchen and found them. That night, I learned by watching what I would dare to try the next day.

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