Desire

The lock thrown, the light off, and one single finger enough to take me where no boy my age ever knew how to lead me.

Marina turned off the television to sleep. Then the sounds above her head began, and she knew that night she wouldn’t be getting any rest for a very different reason.

I watched her legs cross the stage and knew I wouldn’t make it through the day. Desire led me to the last bathroom stall, alone with my own need.

They thought I was asleep. From the hallway I heard every word, every low laugh, everything they said about me. And instead of being outraged, I stayed still, listening.

The wall was thin, my bed creaked against it, and one morning I found a note slipped under my door. Someone had been listening to everything.

I closed my eyes to imagine a stranger, but when I opened them I found half the site watching me from the scaffolding. And I didn’t want to stop.

I was hanging the laundry in the middle of the night, cold and bored, when something in the silence of the patio lit me up inside and I couldn’t stop.

I was doing homework when the heat between my legs distracted me. What I did next with that glass of ice changed the way I saw myself.

I closed my eyes looking for sleep and what I found were unknown hands holding me in the dark and not letting me escape.

The video came without warning: him in his car, the light red and one hand not on the wheel. I knew I wouldn’t make it home in time.

She had never masturbated at work. But that morning, with her phone full of pictures of her neighbor and the door unlocked, she discovered how much risk turned her on.

I knew nobody could see me in that dark storeroom. Only the naked mannequin in the corner witnessed what I did while thinking of her, the seamstress in the shortest skirt.

I stripped off because of the heat, closed my eyes, and suddenly there she was, in black lace lingerie, straddling me in my empty bed.

It’s been five weeks since you showed up, and tonight, with the house all to myself, I decided I wasn’t going to wait any longer to finish what you left half-done.

That afternoon I didn’t need a video. I only had to close my eyes to drift to a balcony where someone watched me come, and everything else stopped mattering.

“Lock the door and take off your clothes,” was the first thing you heard from my voice that night. The rest depended on how much you were willing to obey me.

It took forty-eight hours to arrive. Forty-eight hours in which every brush of fabric against my skin reminded me what was on its way.

“Put on the song I told you to and start undressing slowly. Don’t rush: tonight I’m in charge, even if we’re hundreds of kilometers apart.”

It took me years to understand what my body was asking for. And when I finally did, there was no going back or settling for less.