First Time

Lying in the sun after what had just happened, we heard them laughing at him for not daring to come over. And that was exactly what made us get up.

“Be careful what you wish for,” they say. I wanted it so badly that one night, in the darkness of an empty theater, a stranger showed me what I’d pretended for years not to want.

When she moved into the apartment across from mine, I never imagined that one afternoon, while her son slept, her hand would climb up my thigh and I’d spread my legs without thinking.

Every morning she watched her come out of the kitchen in a nightgown clinging to her body and settled for crumbs. Until the coffee grove left them alone all day.

I never thought a woman’s hands could touch me like that. When my boss offered me a massage, I had no idea she was opening a door I would never want to close.

When she took her feet in her hands and started massaging them, she knew that night, with enough wine, her uncle’s wife would end up surrendering to her.

I was soaping myself when the curtain opened and there she was, smiling, not a stitch on, determined not to leave even when I told her to.

Mariana had never kissed another woman until that night. She came home trembling with desire, never imagining her stepsister was watching her in the dark.

I could hear their laughter through the wall. I went to the half-open door and what I saw took my breath away: my two best friends, half-naked, staring at each other.

They left her standing at the altar, and she swore never to love a man again. What she didn’t know was that behind the convent walls, something very different was waiting for her.

She came to wait for my mother and ended up standing in the doorway watching me sleep. I had no idea that afternoon would end the girl who’d never been with a woman.

I had just moved in and didn’t know anyone. Bruna was the first to talk to me; I never imagined she and her partner had a plan for me that night.

It was two in the morning, the bottle was nearly empty, and she was still laughing on my sofa. I knew that was the moment I had been waiting for.

“Relax, let go,” she told me at the door, and I knew that night I was going to learn something no man had ever shown me.

I was in my forties, married, with two children, and I had never once looked at another woman. That night, leaning on the bar in a pub, everything I thought I knew about myself came undone.

She sat down across from me in a nearly empty bar, took my hands, and told me I looked sad. Three hours later I was naked in her bed, and I didn’t want to leave.

I went to get my jacket so I could leave without interrupting. Then I saw Daniela’s hand buried under Paula’s clothes, and my feet refused to move from that doorway.

She arrived on my friend’s arm, with that mouth and those full lips, and I knew right away that on my birthday she was going to be mine, even if she was another man’s girlfriend.

For months I’d noticed her searching for me in the crowd during the sermon. That Sunday I decided to follow her home and find out what that look was hiding.

Marina knew exactly where to touch to make Lucía’s body stop obeying her. That night, in the hotel’s dim light, she decided to find out how far her curiosity went.