First Time

When the apartment was empty, I’d open my mother’s drawer and become 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 in the middle of the morning, and the apartment fell silent. It was just him and me—and what the night before had awakened could no longer be ignored.

We always slept in the same bed and told each other everything. That night, with a drink too many, Renata took my face in her hands 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 a head full of arguments against that woman. An hour later, she no longer knew whether she hated or desired 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.

When I opened the door wrapped in a towel, she came in without letting me speak. She wasn’t the guy my friend was expecting, or the plan my head had imagined.

I thought I had only gone to open the door, but that night she came into my room with me and whispered that she was going to make me lose my mind.

I heard their moans through the wall and lay still, imagining. I didn’t know that curiosity would end with me between the two of them.

We grew up together, studied together, and kept the same secret for years. The night we buried their parents, we finally said everything out loud.