Gay

I was wearing the wig and heels when I saw someone waiting at the door. It was Germán’s nephew. I froze half a block away, not knowing whether to keep going.

Diego looked at me before turning off the engine. We both knew what it meant if I invited him up. Even so, I opened the car door.

The first time I went to his place alone, my heart was pounding when I rang the bell. I didn’t know what to say. He opened the door in a wet robe and smiled.

When he asked me to remove my compression shorts and cover myself with the towel, I thought it was just another session. His hands on my adductor proved otherwise.

We’d spent years avoiding those childhood games, until one winter afternoon I asked him to take me on his bike and my hand landed where it shouldn’t.

I spent six months waiting for him on the same corner. One night in an empty house was enough for him to stop waiting for me.

I went to the clinic for a simple backache, never suspecting that the company doctor had a kind of treatment that appears in no medical manual.

All I meant to do that night was eat light and sleep. Then he came in with the tray, looked at my underwear, and said the line that changed everything.

We pulled down our pants in front of the other four and, when he bent over me, I knew I wasn’t leaving that classroom the same man.

I never imagined that crossing the threshold of a discreet bar in my wife's underwear would end with me in a hotel room with a stranger.

On the trip to the apartment, the driver handed me his phone with some videos. What happened next wasn’t in my plans, and I had never done it with another man.

My boss introduced him with a laugh, like it was an inside joke. Seven days later, that man had me bent over my own desk.

He was the neighborhood kid who came on as a substitute when someone was missing. It took me a whole year to realize he was looking at me too.

I went to the shoeshine stand to have my shoes polished and read comics. Neither of us imagined what he would end up keeping in his shirt pocket—or how far we’d go.

I got to the room first, with a cap and sunglasses, and sat on the edge of the bed not knowing what I’d do when that stranger knocked on the door.

The two wineglasses on the coffee table and the dim bedroom light told me I was about to see something I should never have seen.

I hadn’t seen Mateo, Diego’s father, in years. When we ran into each other that afternoon, I never imagined I’d end up on his sofa with borrowed red swim trunks and my breath coming fast.

We shared a room to save money. I was married, a father of two. Then came that night at the hotel when he decided we were going to be something else.

I went into the doctor's office because of abdominal pain. I left with a number saved in my phone and a question I'd avoided answering for years.

I'd gone a month without touching anyone when he appeared across the hall in sweatpants that left very little to the imagination. And I was in my boxer briefs.