Young

We were late to the academy every morning, but we never skipped that ritual between the sheets. Today, for the first time in weeks, he was the one spreading my legs.

I knew his schedule, the sound of his boots, the exact moment he took off his shirt because of the heat. What I didn’t know was how far that obsession would take me.

She left them by the mat, still warm from her bare feet. It only took my daughter being distracted for a moment for me to commit the madness.

The neighbors’ complaints didn’t scare her; they turned her on. In that elevator it smelled of beer and dirty man, and she was already on her knees before reaching the top floor.

I’d kept that secret for years. It took one bottle of vodka and an old white flip-flop for her to take control and put me on my knees.

I learned to count the hours until she fell asleep. Only then, in the darkness of the bunk bed, were her sandals mine and no one could see what I did with them.

I went to her house for a school assignment and found her in flip-flops. From that moment on, I could never look at her without thinking of her feet.

Many people ask me where my fetish for rubber gloves comes from. Almost nobody knows the answer. It started one Friday, in my aunt’s room, with the door locked.

The moment he got behind the wheel, Carmen knew who was in charge: no kiss or caress would come when she wanted, only when he decided.

That night, as I drove home, I knew that behind her wicked smile there was a new idea. And that I wasn’t going to be able to get it out of my head.

I went down to the reservoir to escape the heat and ended up lying on the shore, unable to move, while a stranger’s toes decided the pace of my surrender.

Carla appeared barefoot among the shadows of the garden, with that good-girl face that hid the most perverse girl I had ever known.

She put her feet on my legs, ordered me to unbuckle the straps of her sandals, and with a smile that was anything but innocent, told me that would be the price of her silence.

I walked into the room blindfolded, nearly naked under my coat, not knowing who was waiting for me on the other side of the music. Only my husband’s voice guided me.

I knelt in front of the window, never imagining that one of them had already gone around the house and was watching me in silence from the back door.

We shared a hallway, an elevator and a coffeemaker, but never a real word. Only what each of us imagined when the other turned away.

They humiliated him every day at school until an unmarked bottle promised him strength. What he took that night turned him into someone unrecognizable.

No one knew why I always parked on the same deserted stretch. That afternoon, a runner turned his head toward my window and realized everything.

I arrived at the farm with my branded T-shirts and my city attitude. They had calloused hands, a sharp knife, and every intention of putting me in my place.

I opened the wrong door and found her in front of the mirror, with two fingers where they didn’t belong. She didn’t scream. She smiled like someone who had just chosen her prey.