Female Friends

When Mariela took the microphone and said the bar was closed for just the women there, I knew none of us was going home the same.

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.

I could hear their laughter through the wall. I went to the half-open door and what I saw took my breath away: my two best friends, half-naked, staring at each other.

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 locked the door and slipped the key into her pocket. “From now on you do what I say,” she whispered, and part of me, tired of deciding, wanted to obey.

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.

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.

When I pinned her head between my thighs, I expected her to resist. Instead, I felt her hot breath against my panties and heard a low moan.

I didn’t know anyone at that girls’ dinner, until she walked through the door and our eyes got stuck on each other over the plates.

The club closed at two and none of us wanted to go home. We booked a jacuzzi room, got two more bottles, and threw out an idea that changed everything.

She thought I was still asleep while she touched herself on the floor beside my bed. I didn’t move. I didn’t want her to stop, not yet.

I went into the bar bathroom looking for a moment of calm and found her there, eyes closed and legs open, with no intention of stopping when she saw me.

When she started crying on my shoulder and confessed that her husband no longer touched her, I knew that afternoon’s massage was going to end very differently.

For months we’d had breakfast together after dropping the kids off. That morning she seemed different, and what she texted me changed everything between us.

It had been more than ten years since I’d seen her. I found her by the dildo shelf and, without thinking, gave her my number.

I was wearing a too-tight red dress and had just turned forty-two when that blonde woman put her hand on my waist and pulled me against her.

She laughed and said she loved spooning, pressed her body against mine, and in the borrowed bedroom’s darkness I understood it was no game.

They shared the same class three days a week and stole glances at each other. Until one of them decided she was done pretending nothing was happening.