Lydia was always the last to get ready. Everyone would already be waiting in the car by the time she finally stepped out of the house. She’d retouch her lipstick with meticulous care and give herself one last glance in the mirror. The moment her husband heard the sharp click of her heels approaching, he’d start the engine. In the rearview mirror, he would see her walking toward the car—graceful, composed, irresistible. Their daughter would whine from the backseat, and Lydia, unbothered, would shut the door and they’d be on their way.
The routine with Lydia’s family and her friend Stephanie’s family was always the same: every weekend either they went to a gathering or hosted one. The tradition had continued for years—without a single pause—ever since they had randomly run into each other after so long, since their university days when they had lived together. Lydia had been crossing the street with her little girl’s hand in hers when she saw Stephanie, trying desperately to keep her wild, energetic boys from running into the road.
After that chance reunion, there was hardly a week they didn’t see each other—with the kids or without them.
Just two years ago, Lydia couldn’t stand these weekend get-togethers.
“It’s boring,” she used to say. “A person needs their weekends to be alone, to breathe. Why should we see the same people every week?” She would mumble it to herself or occasionally to her husband.
But things had changed.
Everything looked different through Lydia’s eyes now. No weekend gathering was skipped—neither by Lydia nor by José, Stephanie’s husband.
José spoke with a kind of fire—witty, warm, full of stories—and he’d have the whole table laughing. Lydia, who had forgotten how to smile, slowly found herself leaning forward with her wine glass, laughing uncontrollably at something he said, letting the wine loosen her, letting herself loosen. Everyone assumed it was the alcohol. Lydia did too… until she realized it was something else entirely. Something that frightened her and pulled her in all at once—something she wanted to understand, to taste, to follow.
On the other side of that pull was José: effortlessly himself. Chaotic, passionate, the kind of man women can’t help reacting to. A man that women—especially those married to quiet, predictable, well-mannered men—find impossible to ignore. Men who go through life without trouble, doing everything right, returning home exhausted each night.
Women—Lydia thought—marry righteous men, but their hearts sometimes long for the men who are trouble; the ones with edges, stories, and shadows.
It had been a long time since Lydia had laughed like that. A long time since a glass of wine made her light instead of lonely. Sometimes life numbs you; you forget what sparks your joy, what wakes your skin, what lights fires once under your breath and against your body.
But Lydia was returning to herself—her brighter, fuller self from before the monotony and the quiet despair. With every glance, every small brush of José’s hand, he awakened parts of her that had gone silent. Lydia began imagining how she might look in the eyes of a lover again.
In the privacy of her mirror, she rehearsed possibilities. She examined herself through José’s imagined gaze:
How would he see me if I walked like this?
If I bent down to tie the kids’ shoes, what would he notice?
What would he think of the way my blouse falls?
José was a man of details—details he noticed and, when the moment was right, praised softly in a way only Lydia understood. Slowly, he deciphered every careful touch Lydia offered her appearance, and he voiced it in those offhand, intimate remarks that were meant only for her.
And what is more beautiful to a woman than being decoded by the eyes of a man who truly sees her?
Lydia was like a poem José read with devotion; and the more he read, the more Lydia craved being read. In her quiet moments, she imagined what sweet, secret phrase he might whisper in her ear next time—while everyone else sat around the dinner table unaware. She imagined the warmth of his breath grazing her ear, the thrill that would rush through her, the yearning to be somewhere alone with him—somewhere with no one else, in a home with no other woman, in a room prepared for her, where José could boldly, freely recite the song of her body.
Lydia felt like someone discovering love for the first time.
On the edge of forty, her hunger had returned—the hunger she had buried under years of routine, work, motherhood, marriage, and the quiet sorrow that had settled over her life. She was awakening again. It was as if Jose was blowing away Lydia's indifference and lack of enthusiasm for life and bringing her back to her good days. Lydia loved her life and her family. Everything was good, and sometimes everything made life monotonous. Lydia was looking for a pair of ears that would hear her hidden temptations that she had not told anyone, and provide them without any judgment. The ones that she had in her privacy and that she nurtured in her mind when she was alone until they turned into deep, unbridled orgasmic pleasure and, at the height of pleasure, into violent tremors between her legs. Lydia had never told her husband that she liked to be eaten with a man's lips and tongue, and to have her most private holes licked with lust and taste in his mouth. She had never told anyone that she liked her navel licked in the most sensual way by a man and licked under her armpits. But Jose knew everything now. Now he didn't need that toy to put on her clitoris and increase its vibration and to fantasize about that man in his mind while his wife was fast asleep. Now with Jose, all those dreams had given way to reality and this was the first night that Lydia was going to her friend's house after that secret date that Lydia and Jose had together at a hotel in Laguna Beach. Women are good actors for each other, but can Jose keep that secret from the woman who has been Lydia's friend for years?
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