First Time

There was something about the way he looked at me from the platform. It wasn’t just any look. I knew that if I went with him, I’d never be the same.

They were both standing in the doorway of my room, watching me sleep. She was touching herself. So was he. And when I opened my eyes, neither of them stopped.

The first time I put on her lingerie and looked at myself in the mirror, I didn’t know whether what I felt was shame or something completely different.

They were an uncle and his nephew, two gym beasts who had been watching me for weeks. That Sunday, something in the air changed forever.

At nineteen, after a lifetime in all-girls schools, that night I learned more than I could have imagined.

I had been preparing that day for months: the wig, the dress, the lubricant. I thought I was alone at the abandoned lookout. The guard disagreed.

I’d been keeping that curiosity to myself for years. In the dark, with him a meter away, I felt that if I didn’t ask then, I never would.

We were sworn enemies since we were five. No one would ever guess that the girl who made my nose bleed would also be my first woman.

Adrián offered to drive me home with my guitar. I should have said no. But there was something in the way he looked at me that wouldn’t let me answer.

To the world we were two friends at the bar. Only I knew I had a black thong under my joggers, and that he knew it too.

I’d spent years watching other people do it on screen. The first time I touched a real girl, I understood no video prepares you for that feeling.

We had been studying for hours when the cold became unbearable. Sofía invited me into her bed to warm up. Neither of us expected what came next.

We were two women in the same bed, my husband was sleeping on the floor, and I’d spent years wondering what it would feel like to touch another woman’s skin.

He’d been waiting for me for years and I didn’t know it until it was already too late. When he confessed at the end, I understood why everything had felt so different.

I spent twenty minutes on my makeup, put on the chestnut wig, and opened the hotel door when he knocked. I had been waiting for that moment for years without knowing it.

It was two in the morning, it was the anniversary of my dead marriage, and I was crying on the couch. Marcos wrapped his arms around me and said he wasn’t going anywhere.

I had spent months exchanging messages with him, unsure whether I would dare. Then the day came, and I climbed into the taxi with trembling hands and stockings in my backpack.

Twenty years old, zero experience, and a cousin who looked at him as if she knew exactly what was on his mind. The summer was going to be long.

I was eighteen and had no experience. She had a husband, a daughter in my class, and the skill to keep me from sleeping since the first day.

When she confessed it to me, we were already alone in the room. Her sister had asked me to watch her for the day. No one imagined what would happen between us.