First Time

I slept in his bed when I was scared. The night I found him crying because of me, I knew what I felt for my brother was beyond turning back.

The bathtub was ready, I closed my eyes, and when I opened them she was already naked in the doorway, offering me a massage that didn’t end at my shoulders.

We had been running for four days when they caught us. My grandmother stripped naked in the mud and the dark, and I knew that madness was our only way out alive.

I got off the train with one idea in my head, and when I crossed the door of his apartment I knew neither of us was going to pretend this was a family visit.

When the apartment was empty, I opened my mother’s drawer and became someone else. That afternoon, a shadow in the window changed everything.

I’d spent years looking after her, paying for everything, putting up with her screaming. That dawn, in front of the empty alleyway, I decided that for once she was going to give me something in return.

All I wanted was to work in peace. But then she sat in front of me, tucked her legs beneath her nightgown, and said she hadn’t slept in two nights.

When I looked up and saw her sweeping the living room, I knew my cousin was the only one who could save me. I never imagined how far we’d go that afternoon.

At eighteen, I had never been with a woman. The last thing I expected was for my first time to come with the housekeeper who walked into my room to clean.

For years I kept making the same joke to my wife in bed. What I didn’t know was that she had been keeping score of every word — and that our getaway to the coast had a plan.

When he told me there was no rush, I knew that night was going to change everything. Mauricio looked at me like a lion looks at a gazelle that has already stopped running.

We arrived at the motel as always, but this time there was something different in her eyes and a hidden promise I never imagined she was ready to fulfill that afternoon.

I drove toward the cliff determined to end everything. What I found in the lagoon’s icy water gave me back my will to live, and something I never imagined.

She left at midmorning and the apartment fell silent. Only he and I remained, and what had been awakened the night before could no longer be ignored.

We always slept in the same bed and told each other everything. That night, with a little too much wine, Renata took my face and kissed me like never before.

I looked down and saw her hand resting on my thigh. We’d been friends for five years, but that night, after the second glass of vodka, everything changed in an instant.

She wore the tightest yellow dress in her closet and her head was full of arguments against that woman. An hour later, she didn’t know if she hated her or wanted her.

I went up to her apartment convinced the most imposing woman I’d ever seen was waiting for me. I had no idea the night had only just begun—or who else was sleeping at the end of the hall.

Every time I got up for the lighter he caught me looking, and my boyfriend smiled like he already knew how that night was going to end.

Ramiro texted me that he’d decide in the moment whether he wanted the happy ending. Neither of us imagined how far we’d go that Thursday afternoon.