Lesbian

When she pulled me into the dark alley and kissed me against the wall, I knew the trip I’d won at the office wasn’t going to be what I expected.

I fell asleep in my underwear thinking how fun the party had been. Renata got under the sheets, and her hand didn’t seek my waist: it sought something else.

We’d been meeting for six years to do the same thing: tell each other things and touch ourselves shamelessly. That night Camila promised a surprise and opened the adjoining room door.

I stepped off the steamer with a soaked blouse and my head full of other people’s bodies. None of the women on the dock prepared me for what happened that night at the hotel.

She reread the message four times, and her heart beat like it had when she was twenty. She was fifty-nine, and a stranger had just awakened something she thought was lost forever.

Mariana was nursing the baby by the fire, unaware that Catalina was watching from the other side of the cabin, a new heat rising under her skin.

She locked the door, filled the enema bag, and stared at me. “Don’t make me get rough with you,” she said. And I knew that night everything was about to change.

“I want to see something new,” He said from the armchair. And I already knew exactly how I would surprise Him, even if it meant dragging Vera into it with me.

When the widow undid her bodice to nurse her son, Aurora stopped breathing. What burned through her body that night had no name, but it would never let her sleep again.

When I opened my Epiphany gift and saw a voucher for a massage with Pilar, I laughed. I had no idea my wife had spent months planning exactly what would happen.

It started with private jokes and ended with screenshots neither of us should ever have shown the other. She liked girls; I liked her audacity.

One random dawn I turned on the camera and, without knowing it, opened the door to the only woman who learned how to make me tremble from six hundred kilometers away.

When I held her fever-hot against my chest, I remembered the nights her mouth knew mine as if she’d been learning me for years.

The shutter was half lowered and the key turned twice behind me. I came without my ring and with twelve years of silence on my tongue.

Twenty years married, and each hid a secret of their own: him in strangers’ bathrooms, me not yet knowing what the yoga woman was about to awaken in me.

When she comes down for breakfast in a T-shirt and panties, I melt inside and know this weekend at the country house will be my last chance to stay silent.

My niece climbed into my bed with an indecent proposal, and I never imagined my son would be spying on us from the hallway door.

That afternoon, while Sofía tried on lingerie in front of the mirror, my husband and I discovered we had gone months without looking at each other like that.

She woke with her back to me and my teeth marks on her shoulder. I told her the bathroom was mine, and she obeyed without question.

Esperanza had never imagined looking at another woman that way, until Marisol held her by the fire and their lips brushed by accident. By accident at first. Not afterward.