Female Friends

She smelled of clean skin and expensive perfume. My tongue moved before my mind did, and when she turned and looked at me, I knew there was no turning back.

I thought the vodka had clouded my head, but when she closed the hotel room door I knew she’d been waiting for that exact moment for years.

It was our first sleepover with her parents away. When she turned out the light, her hand found mine beneath the sheets, and I understood she’d waited years for that gesture.

At forty-eight, in a Miami bar, my best friend grabbed me by the neck and kissed me. It was my first time with a woman, and I knew I could never go back.

When Camila put the second tequila in my hand, I knew something was going to break that night. I just didn’t know it would be everything I believed about the two of us.

I thought the party was over when I closed the door. But she was still barefoot on my sofa, glass on her knee and another box in her hands.

We were alone in front of the mirror. I was fixing my lipstick; she was staring at me with an intensity that was no longer friendship. And then she came closer.

That October Sunday we came down from mass soaked by the rain. We went into her kitchen to dry off. And there, against the wall, I kissed her the way I’d wanted to kiss her all my life.

Lucía was the most proper girl in the school crowd. That night I saw her walk into the birthday party in a miniskirt and realized the Sunday-Mass girl was gone.

When I asked my ex for a favor, he thought I wanted sex. What I asked was much worse: help me destroy my best friend’s marriage.

On the curve where the trees formed a tunnel of light, I reached out and laid my hand over hers. No words were needed to say yes, that I wanted to try.

I opened the wrong drawer by mistake and discovered my best friend was hiding things I didn’t even know how to name. That afternoon, she decided to explain them to me one by one.

Mateo nodded toward me and went upstairs. I followed without thinking, knowing his girlfriend was my best friend and that nothing could stop us anymore.

I had forty-seven messages from her when I came back to the game, and they all ended with the same screenshot: her avatar on the empty bench, waiting for me at different hours.

I went into the booth thinking it was just another routine afternoon. I came out a different woman, with the taste of a kiss that should never have happened.

I used to go downstairs to comfort her when she cried. What I didn’t know was that her tears would lead me to her neck, her skin, and the realization that I wanted her differently.

Years had passed since I’d last seen her. When she sat across from me at that bar and placed her hand on my thigh, I knew the night wouldn’t end as my cousin imagined.

Camila was waiting for me seated on the edge of the bed, and I didn’t know where to put my hands. I only knew that night I was going to learn something no man had ever taught me.

When she kissed me in front of the car, I knew it wasn’t the alcohol. It was everything she’d kept quiet for ten years finally spilling out of her mouth.