Female Friends

Since I was fifteen, I’d kept quiet about how badly I wanted to kiss her. Now, sitting across from me with that same smile, I wasn’t going to let the chance slip away again.

I felt a hand on my hip and a mouth in my ear: “You smell incredible.” When I turned around, it was her—the girl my friend had come to flirt with.

We three met on the last Thursday in December, under the pretext of seeing the year out. None of us said aloud what we were really going to do.

Carla couldn’t take her eyes off her while she worked out. Every drop of sweat on her back ignited something she’d never felt for another woman.

I followed her on social media to get revenge on my ex, but ended up wanting her instead. Months later I saw her in the crowd and knew I wouldn't let her go.

Six years pretending nothing was happening every time they brushed against each other. That night, with the city asleep, neither of them wanted to keep pretending.

Renata was spreading tanning lotion over my breasts when she asked me whether I’d ever had a lover. I blushed like a little girl. I said no.

I’d never thought about Nora that way—until she brushed against me in the bar and I understood, from her smile, that she’d been thinking about it for a long time.

Mara covered her friend’s eyes and asked for silence. What she did next with her tongue crossed the line forever.

When she confessed the favor she wanted to ask me, I thought she was kidding. Her best friend was broken, and Lorena had decided I was the cure.

Carla slowly circled the table, stopped behind Marina, and rested her hands on her shoulders. No one at that dinner planned to end the night the way it began.

We were tousled and makeup-free when Daniela reminded me of that time. I didn’t imagine that, before nightfall, they’d be watching us from the half-open door.

I told my husband we were only going out for drinks with another couple. What I’d really been planning all week was what ended up happening in that apartment.

I had three tubes of aloe vera and not a centimeter of unburned skin when my flatmate’s boyfriend came in with her keys and found me naked on the sofa.

We were alone in the sand, naked and turned on, when I discovered two young men spying on us from the rocks. Romina just asked if I wanted to keep going.

I went down to the pool in my underwear just to tease him. I never imagined that same night I’d end up begging him not to stop inside me.

What started as a paid massage in a small-town hotel turned into something my friend and I swore we’d never tell a soul.

A sad old ballad comes on the radio and I stop hearing the lyrics. I start seeing something else, a scene I shouldn’t tell, but I confess it anyway.

Daniela had spent years hiding what she felt for her best friend. That night on the terrace, one word — dare — gave her the excuse she’d never dared seek.

I walked out of the shower thinking no one had seen us. That same night I found on his phone that someone had recorded every moan from the next cubicle.