College

My heart was racing and my legs were tight. I didn’t want to look, didn’t want to think; I only wanted him to keep going and finally discover what I’d imagined so many times.

I signed up at the last minute for a countryside party where no one had a partner and one rule ruled everything: what happened that night stayed there. I had no idea how far it would go.

We’d been brushing against each other in the hallways for weeks without daring to do anything. That night I got tired of waiting, took off my sweatshirt in front of his door, and told him what I wanted.

We both wanted him from the very first class, but we never imagined he’d be the one to ask us to choose between forgetting him or moving into his house.

We came out of the showers wrapped in short towels, shaking with cold. In the jacuzzi, two strangers were waiting for us, smiling like they had just found dinner.

I climbed the stairs behind him, breathing in his cologne, not knowing his roommates would come back two hours earlier than expected.

The key turned in the lock at two in the morning and I was still beneath him, with no intention of covering myself. Four pairs of eyes watched me from the doorway.

It was almost nine at night, the campus was empty, and a forgotten backpack sat in the bathrooms. I only opened it to find its owner. What was at the bottom changed everything.

The headboard of his bed was hitting the wall at a steady rhythm, and I, awake in the dark, could no longer pretend that it didn’t affect me.

For weeks I’d been pretending not to notice his looks, his legs spread on the sofa, the bulges he made so obvious. That night I came home early and stopped pretending.

We were alone in the weights room when he took off his shirt and told me to touch. I never imagined how far we’d go after closing the locker room door.

He offered him a drink with a mischievous smile and a wink, and in that instant the professor knew the distance between them was about to disappear.

They had spent their whole lives inseparable, but that afternoon, alone on the sofa, neither of them wanted to pretend that kiss had been an accident.

His hand rose from my knee to my thigh without hurry, as if he already knew I wasn’t going to stop it. And I didn’t.

For months I’d been pretending not to look when he came out of the bathroom in his underwear. That Christmas, alone in the flat, I opened the bag of his dirty laundry.

Ten minutes off, a soccer video game, and a ridiculous bet were enough to unravel everything Bruno thought he knew about his friend in one afternoon.

One look from her after catching me on my knees by her bed was enough to break our friendship and begin something else: obeying every whim without protest.

When she grabbed my arm on the way out, I understood she wasn’t looking for an apology. She was looking for a slave, and I was already on my knees before she asked.

For weeks I’d been admiring her feet from the back row. The day she slipped off her sandals and pinned me with her gaze, I knew there was no turning back.

It took me three months of patience to get to Mariana’s sofa, slowly take off her sneakers, and find out whether she really minded that I couldn’t stop looking at her feet.