First Time

I was doing homework when the heat between my legs distracted me. What I did next with that glass of ice changed the way I saw myself.

By thirty, no one had ever kissed me. The night I spied on my roommate through the crack in his door, something inside me finally woke up.

It took forty-eight hours to arrive. Forty-eight hours in which every brush of fabric against my skin reminded me what was on its way.

The box hidden under the tree wasn’t for me. It was for her, and when she asked me to teach her how to use it, I knew the night would be nothing like we planned.

The whole house silent, the keys still in my hand, and an idea crossing my mind as I looked at the fruit bowl on the kitchen table.

I’m naked on the rug, facing the mirror, still trembling from the last orgasm. And then I decide to play back what I just filmed of myself.

I had the house to myself, two toys in the drawer, and an idea that had been haunting me for weeks. That night I was finally going to dare.

In the school showers I always looked on the sly. That afternoon, on my way back from training, Mateo asked me the question I’d been waiting for for years.

My mind told me never to go back. My body remembered those lips and wouldn’t let me sleep. On the third day I dialed his number.

Her mother saw us playing around in bed and, instead of yelling, smiled at me. That same night I understood that nothing in that house was innocent—and I didn’t want to be innocent either.

I thought it would be a quiet afternoon in front of the TV, until my stepsister’s bare foot started climbing my thigh and one question changed everything.

For years I practiced with my fingers and toys, but none of it prepared me for the first time I felt another man breathing on my neck and pushing in patiently.

The first time I saw him naked, it was only for a few seconds, but it was enough to awaken a forbidden curiosity I no longer knew how to extinguish.

We’d been talking every day for a year. On that fifth night in Seville, playing on her phone while sitting on her couch, I touched her hand by accident. Neither of us had ever been with a woman.

When everyone else went to sleep, she came to the sofa, looked me straight in the eyes, and said something I never expected to hear from a friend.

When I opened the door wearing the dress and my hair freshly done, he was left speechless. That night I stopped hiding and gave myself completely.

I built the pool for the family, not for this: for my son’s girlfriend to spy on me from the window while I pretended not to notice her trembling hands.

We bought the harness saying it was to practice so we could teach them. What we didn’t expect was to end up trembling against each other.

At ten years old, my mother understood before I did who I was. Twenty years later, I look in the mirror and finally recognize the woman I always was.

I reached the entrance not knowing if I’d have the courage to go up. My name is Esteban, I’m 48, and upstairs a couple I only knew by messages was waiting for me.