Beach

I went out to smoke in the dark and saw him: crouched behind the palm tree, eyes fixed on the window where she was undressing, unaware she was being watched by two.

The beer had made us affectionate and the terrace seemed empty. Until I saw the flash of binoculars trained on us from the hill.

When she asked me to find her men during the summer, I knew the trip to the coast would change us forever.

Marina had spent months being invisible to her husband. Her nephew looked at her the only way she needed to be looked at. That night, the cards made a decision.

I’d been filling her head with the idea for years, until the beach trip gave us the perfect setting. What I didn’t expect was the name she would say.

On the second day, the wind shook the cabin so hard that all we could do was watch movies. One of them should never have come out of that wet case.

I’d been glancing at him for half an hour when he spoke to me. Behind the rocks, neither of us had any intention of getting dressed again for the rest of the afternoon.

My wife whispered in my ear that she wanted that young body too. That night, on the living room sofa, everything forbidden stopped being forbidden.

He came back from his evening run and found her in the dunes. She wasn’t alone. She never had been.

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

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.

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 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.

We’d barely had two beers when Valeria took off her sandals and told me it was time to fix the fact that I hadn’t stepped on sand in years. That night I learned a lot of things.

When Roberto’s car disappeared around the bend, Sofía looked at Raquel. They had three hours, two men waiting, and a plan that seemed foolproof.

The sun burned our naked skin while Damián split me open without mercy, and in the water, a few meters away, my mother discovered that she was hungry too.

While they stayed in the water, he proposed what I’d been imagining for a year. I set my beer down on the counter and said yes before I could change my mind.

She burst out laughing, lowered her voice, and looked at me with that satisfied whore’s smile I already knew. I knew she was going to tell me everything she’d kept hidden.

Martín listened in silence while I told him what had happened with my mother’s husband. That night I didn’t sleep, thinking about doing it.

Carmen was sleeping naked in the sun while I made the worst and best decision of my life. When she woke and saw the state she was in, she didn’t react as I expected.