Desire

When she told me she’d been on her period for three days, I didn’t pull my hand away: I drew her closer, because her honesty was the beginning of everything that came after.

“Be careful what you wish for,” they say. I wished for it so hard that one night, in the darkness of an empty theater, a stranger showed me what I’d been pretending not to want for years.

When she moved into the apartment across from mine, I never imagined that one afternoon, while her son slept, her hand would climb up my thigh and I’d spread my legs without thinking.

Every morning she watched her come out of the kitchen in a nightgown clinging to her body and settled for crumbs. Until the coffee grove left them alone all day.

She had spent years going to that club alone, waiting for a glance that would stay on her. That night, unknown fingers took her hand and dragged her into the dark.

When she took her feet in her hands and started massaging them, she knew that night, with enough wine, her uncle’s wife would end up surrendering to her.

I was soaping myself when the curtain opened and there she was, smiling, not a stitch on, determined not to leave even when I told her to.

“Normally now you’d have to kneel and wait in silence,” she said as she fastened the collar on me. She didn’t know I’d be the one ending up in charge.

We queued for the slides all morning, but it was in the water, with her hand sliding over my waist, that I understood what she really wanted from me.

She came to wait for my mother and ended up standing in the doorway watching me sleep. I had no idea that afternoon would end the girl who’d never been with a woman.

It was her first coven gathering and the youngest in the circle. All of them wanted to touch her, but she only had eyes for the blonde watching her from across the fire.

“Relax, let go,” she told me at the door, and I knew that night I was going to learn something no man had ever shown me.

I rested my feet on her lap without thinking, like so many other nights. But that time Daniela looked at me differently, and I knew there was no turning back.

I was in my forties, married, with two children, and I had never once looked at another woman. That night, leaning on the bar in a pub, everything I thought I knew about myself came undone.

We got turned on in class and couldn’t wait until we got home. The vacant lot behind the college was the first of many places where we shouldn’t have touched each other.

She sat down across from me in a nearly empty bar, took my hands, and told me I looked sad. Three hours later I was naked in her bed, and I didn’t want to leave.

She left me flushed in front of the mirror, half-dressed, with a promise hanging in the air: this wasn’t going to stay like this.

I only wanted a phone to call a tow truck. I ended up between two strangers who decided that quiet night included me.

I went to get my jacket so I could leave without interrupting. Then I saw Daniela’s hand buried under Paula’s clothes, and my feet refused to move from that doorway.

I remember her in the doorway of her bookstore, with her nearly white hair and those impossible eyes. Ten years passed before I had her close again, and this time I wasn’t going to let her go.