17 Forbidden Loves

There are moments when desire does not arrive with noise. It arrives in silence. In a minimal gesture. In a glance held a second longer than necessary. In the decision not to pull away when the body has already begun to betray us.
This book gathers stories born of those instants.
Some take place in everyday spaces: a mechanic’s workshop, a library in the late hours of the night, an almost empty supermarket, an elevator stopped between two floors. Others unfold in more distant or stranger territories: a valley where the river never quite decides whether it is river or sea, a boarding house facing the ocean, a night train cutting through the rain, a room where the past refuses to stay dead. In all of them, however, the same question pulses: what happens when two people stop pretending they do not desire each other?
You will not find here stories built solely to provoke. You will find, rather, the friction between attraction and fear, between what is felt and what one dares to name. There is hatred that transforms into hunger. There are silences more eloquent than any confession. There are bodies that recognize each other before reason has time to understand.
Each story is a closed world, with its own atmosphere and its own rhythm. Some are intense and urgent. Others are slow and contained. All of them, however, share the certainty that true desire is rarely clean or simple. Almost always it arrives loaded with history, with reluctance, with something that resists being spoken aloud.
This book does not pretend to offer answers. It only invites you to pause at that threshold—the precise instant when someone decides, at last, to cross the distance—and to observe what happens when the step is taken.