Female Friends

Everyone called her the easy girl at the university. I just wanted her to explain, without beating around the bush or feeling ashamed, how to take that step with my boyfriend without getting hurt.

I agreed to help them with the faculty contest. I never imagined that in front of that mirror, made up and in that tight dress, I would stop recognizing myself.

When she lowered her voice to tell me they had slept together, everything I thought I knew about my marriage shattered on the hallway floor.

When I saw the truck driving away down the road, my body started beating differently. I knew exactly what was going to happen as soon as he and I were left alone in that house.

At the New Year’s dawn, Camila asked for a kiss. What looked like a drunken game ended with a vibrator and a confession kept for twenty years.

When Carla asked if I wanted to do it again, I already knew my answer before she finished the sentence. What I didn’t know was how far I was willing to go that night.

I was curious and a little disgusted, but she kept insisting until I heard myself say yes. What happened that afternoon at her house still makes me smile.

When she opened the hidden folder on her phone and turned the screen toward me, I realized the shy girl had finally dared to tell it all.

When she came into the bathroom to leave me a clean towel, I knew something was about to happen. What I didn’t expect was for me to be the one to make the first move that night.

We left the party at four in the morning thinking the night was over. In reality, in that huge house it was only just beginning.

I’d spent months hiding what I felt for her. Then she asked me for a kiss in front of her fiancé, not knowing it would spark something far more dangerous between us.

As a teenager I used to lock myself away and imagine her breasts and jet-black hair. Thirty years later, her voice on the phone lit me up just like before.

I thought it would be a little innocent peck, just to laugh. But her mouth stayed on mine longer than it should have, and I knew that night we weren’t going to sleep as friends.

She arrived at dinner thinking it would be a quiet evening among friends. She had no idea that night would teach her, in a stranger’s arms, everything her body had kept silent for years.

She had never imagined what it would be like to be with a woman. That afternoon, with her blouse half open, she stopped wondering.

Bayron put the necklace on my bare skin, and I knew that work visit wasn’t ending in the office—it was ending in his room.

We’d been meeting for six years to do the same thing: tell each other things and touch ourselves shamelessly. That night Camila promised a surprise and opened the adjoining room door.

When the doorbell rang, I thought my friends had ordered dessert. Four men walked into my living room, and for the first time in years, I stopped thinking about my ex.

He let his hand slide down his abdomen in the darkness and allowed the scene to form: him in the middle of the couch, his wife on one side, her friend on the other, an impossible kiss.

When I moved Sebastián’s laptop mouse and saw my best friend’s name on the screen, I knew nothing would ever be the same.