Beach

My mother opened the changing room door without warning. What she found on the other side changed everything between us, even if neither of us could name it that afternoon.

We arrived at the hotel as mother and son, pretending to be lovers. By Sunday, there was no pretending left.

I saw him for the first time across the pool while Marcos signed papers. Something in the way he looked at me told me that night would not end like the others.

He sat off to the side, looking at the water with resignation. He was shy, he was a virgin, and he was perfect for what my friend and I had been thinking about all afternoon.

We went from client and prostitute to something with no name. On that beach vacation, she broke the taboos she had carried all her life.

I went in to get my phone and found him there, silent, looking at me in that way that said he knew exactly what it meant.

I’d carried that nameless curiosity for years. When Diego appeared in the cove, alone and with time to spare, something changed before the day was over.

She was 59, blonde, with curves that made no apologies. I was her favorite nephew, and for days I’d been glancing at her sideways, unable to stop.

I knew them from when I dated their daughter. Years later I ran into them on the coast, and something in Valeria’s eyes told me that summer would be different.

I saw him come out of the bathroom with the towel at his waist, and everything changed in an instant: I stopped seeing him as my son and started planning how to make him want me.

I arrived at the Cancún hotel a day before my sister. Nearly two days alone with her husband: the nudist beach, the lingerie fitting room, the tequila. Something was going to happen.

The last time I saw her we were twelve. Now she was dancing pressed against me in a red skirt and with a look that wasn’t a cousin’s.

When she clung to me in the water and I felt her breathing change, I knew the summer we turned eighteen would be unlike any other.

When I woke on the wet stone and saw her slipping off her swimsuit, I knew that blow to the head had taken me somewhere I’d never come back from the same.

When Marcos closed the apartment door and asked whether they were going to sleep with their “new partner,” the four of them fell silent and said everything.

At two in the morning I went downstairs barefoot for a glass of water and heard them arguing in low voices about me, with that married-couple tone.

When Lucía came out of the water and looked at them from the shore, they both knew that afternoon wasn’t going to end in their sun loungers.

Valen rested her hand on my thigh halfway down the highway. We’d been driving forty minutes and both of us already knew how the day would end.

Laura carried her anger in her skin, and I knew exactly how to help her let it go. That night in the apartment was unlike any other.

For months I’d been fantasizing about seeing her with another man. When I suggested the trip to Valeria, all three of us knew something was about to change forever.