Young

I thought the house next door was empty. When I looked up from my book and saw him on the balcony, I knew exactly what I was going to do with him.

The three of them went away alone, with suitcases full of tiny bikinis and a single intention. My wife said she’d tell me when she got back. And she certainly did.

I had spent years faking it in my husband’s bed. That night, a man half my age whispered a bolero in my ear, and everything I thought was asleep inside me suddenly woke up.

By day she checked rooms and schedules with a friendly smile. By night, that same smile meant something very different to anyone who opened the door.

I always hid my body beneath loose clothing, until the early morning when my friend’s dad opened the bathroom door and stared at me a second too long.

I asked him not to come back. But when I saw him again on my porch, I knew I would be the one setting the rules for the game we shouldn’t be playing.

I kissed him in the car as if I had wanted him all my life, and only then did I realize that the boy I had watched grow up was no longer a child.

I asked him to come upstairs just as he was, his shirt hanging from his shoulder and the smell of work on his skin. I never told him he was the one I would miss most.

From my balcony I could see her bed. That night I went out for air as usual, never imagining she’d turn on the light and strip in front of me.

When I went down to the kitchen at three in the morning, she was already there waiting for me, wearing a nightgown so thin it left nothing to the imagination.

I heard every filthy word they said about my body, convinced I couldn’t understand them. When I spoke to them in their own language, their faces turned red.

He was the age of my older daughter and stretched up to look down my cleavage while I signed papers. I said nothing. The next day I chose the dress with him in mind.

I turned off the light, convinced he wasn’t coming. Then the doorbell rang twice, and I knew I wouldn’t be sleeping that night.

I walked into that club convinced I was the one in control. Three hours later, a stranger had completely undone me and I was begging him not to stop.

For years she had written orgasms for faceless strangers. That dawn, for the first time, someone on the other side of the screen wanted to know her real name.

When he got out of the van with that smile, I knew the broken boiler would be the best excuse fate had given me in years.

At midnight I went to the bathroom and the half-open door revealed something I never imagined: my mother, whom I thought was asleep, wasn’t alone in the shower.

When I came back to my daughter’s house still trembling, I knew the days I had left alone with her husband would change everything.

I crossed half the city thinking we were going to eat. When I opened the wardrobe in room ten, she stepped out with a lit cake and an anything-but-innocent smile.

When he took off his trousers in the fitting room, she had to step away from the curtain so he wouldn’t hear her hold her breath.