Anal

No one had touched her in months. That January afternoon, with the locker room empty and the three guys still sweaty, she stopped thinking and gave in to what came next.

I wasn’t wearing anything under my skirt when I knocked on that rusted railcar door. I only wanted one man. I had no idea the foreman would show up to lay down his rules.

They used me as a mule and I ended up locked up over a suitcase I didn’t even know I was carrying. Inside, I learned the only currency that mattered was my own body.

For thirty years we’d kept crossing paths by chance. That rainy afternoon, in the pharmacy queue, she looked at me differently. And I did too.

On the outside I was the perfect girlfriend, the one who turns off the light and moans softly. That morning I came home fired up from the dance floor and decided I was done pretending.

They arrived at the ranch looking for a mattress to spend the night. What they didn’t expect was the story the two brothers had kept for years, or how eagerly they’d tell it.

She had never been in a sex shop, she told me. We went into a booth together, and amid the moans on the screen, she asked me for something I never imagined hearing from her lips.

Mateo had just thrown his wife out of the restaurant when someone knocked on the office door. It was the tattooed waitress, and she hadn’t come to talk about the day’s accounts.

I thought it was just a game of late-night messages until one afternoon he shut my office door, turned off the light, and stopped asking permission.

The rustle of the sheet woke me, and when I turned my head I found her asleep beside me. I remembered nothing from the night before, but my body did.

I hadn’t been touched by anyone in two years. My daughter knew it, and that afternoon she showed up in my room with a thong two sizes too small and an idea in her head.

I met her in a dive bar, and at thirty I thought I knew everything about sex. That woman proved in a single night that I knew nothing.

I looked toward the window opposite and understood that night, among parked trucks, nobody was going to draw the curtains.

I arrived alone at a freshly moved-into floor, wearing tight leggings and a thin sweater. The mover looked at me differently when he closed the door, and I knew I wouldn’t be leaving unsatisfied.

She boarded the carriage after midnight, sat opposite me, and began telling me things no one should confess to a stranger in the dark.

I go out to the bus stop without underwear, not to go anywhere, but to find someone who will look at me the way he looked at me that Thursday in March.

I went into that hotel just to dry my clothes. I left hours later with weak knees and a secret I’ve been carrying ever since.

I never thought the skinny kid I remembered would become the man who made me tremble in front of the mirror. And it all started with a name.

Damián arrived every Friday with wine and the smile of an exemplary husband. Tomás slept happily on the other side of the wall, unaware those noises were the only truth they had left.

I never saw her face. Only her brown back breathing hard while my hands went lower than a massage therapist should ever dare.