First Time

We’d barely had two beers when Valeria took off her sandals and told me it was time to fix the fact that I hadn’t stepped on sand in years. That night I learned a lot of things.

Three months after she dumped me, I saw her kissing someone else in that bar. That same night I walked into a gay bar and began sinking without knowing how far I'd go.

She arrived two hours before her flight, left her suitcase in the hallway, and before I could react, took off her sweatshirt in front of me.

I’d bought her perfume and a pendant as a farewell gift. She brought me something else. I was eighteen and had never touched anyone in my life.

He’d spent three days in Cartagena paying for encounters that ended with the same surprise, until she walked into the bar and everything changed.

I entered that restricted area on purpose. Something about those uniformed men had attracted me from the moment we arrived, and I knew exactly what I was looking for.

We’d spent weeks wanting each other, and that carnival night, with no condom and no bed, everything happened where we least expected it.

When he told me he was a virgin, I didn’t know whether to laugh or hug him. I chose the second. What came after was inevitable.

When I opened the bathroom door and saw Sandra in that little skirt and red-painted lips, I knew the original plan no longer existed.

He came to help me with my new television, with his defined arms and that gaze that avoided mine. He was twenty, and I already knew what was going to happen.

When Don Alberto looked at me that way for the first time, I knew something in me wasn’t what everyone thought. That afternoon confirmed it.

Eva asked me to meet her two hours before her flight to Boston. When she arrived, she brought a new perfume—and a very clear idea of how to say goodbye.

Andrés had spent months searching for a way out and found it where he least should have: in his own wife’s body.

Rodrigo had promised Valeria that this New Year's Eve would be different. She had no idea just how right he was.

The first time she told me, I thought she was joking. The second time, her hand was already on the back of my neck, pushing me toward where she wanted me to go.

When I went into his room that night, he was already waiting for me. There was something different in his gaze, something I had never seen in my son’s eyes before.

When I saw her at the bus stop, with her copper hair and that tight blouse, I knew something was going to happen. I had no idea that afternoon would change everything.

When I went up to his room to see why he hadn’t come down for lunch, my son asked me to close the door. He had something to show me on his cellphone.

When I took the glass jar out of my mother’s drawer, I already knew that afternoon I was going to cross a line I didn’t intend to come back from.

When the wooden door of my cell creaked open after midnight, I knew it was him. I closed my eyes. I didn’t come to the convent fleeing the world: I came fleeing what I felt for that man.