Lesbian

When Daniela asked if she could sleep with me that night, I knew neither of us would wake up in the morning as the same woman who had arrived at the estate.

Daniela had disappeared without leaving me a number. I was still counting the days when I saw her at the café, smiling at him the way she never smiled at me.

The gym showers have no doors. That morning I discovered the detail wasn’t a problem, but exactly what I’d been looking for without knowing it for years.

I walked in looking for a corner where no one would look at me. I looked up from my book when I heard her laugh, and I knew I wouldn’t leave there the same.

When I walked into the bar and saw her at the back, I knew I wasn’t sleeping that night. Three months without her hands weighed more than I was willing to admit.

When the other students left and the evening light came through the windows, she locked the door and asked me to play for her—just for her.

When Matías and I came back from the corner store with cigarettes, Camila and Renata were already too close on the sofa, whispering in each other’s ears.

She smelled of clean skin and expensive perfume. My tongue moved before my mind did, and when she turned and looked at me, I knew there was no turning back.

I thought the vodka had clouded my head, but when she closed the hotel room door I knew she’d been waiting for that exact moment for years.

Three hours earlier I’d bitten her neck under warm water. Now another man held her arm like she was his, and she didn’t pull away.

Lucía looked at me over the fire and I knew that night we wouldn’t be sleeping alone. Two bottles of wine were missing and no one was talking about going to bed anymore.

It was our first sleepover with her parents away. When she turned out the light, her hand found mine beneath the sheets, and I understood she’d waited years for that gesture.

At forty-eight, in a Miami bar, my best friend grabbed me by the neck and kissed me. It was my first time with a woman, and I knew I could never go back.

I arrived at the square expecting a polite coffee with the woman who taught me to read poems at seventeen. What happened next wasn’t in any book.

She was twenty-one and the daughter of my best friend’s partner. I taught her equations; she taught me not to ask where she’d been on the nights she disappeared.

When Camila put the second tequila in my hand, I knew something was going to break that night. I just didn’t know it would be everything I believed about the two of us.

I thought the party was over when I closed the door. But she was still barefoot on my sofa, glass on her knee and another box in her hands.

When I opened the door and saw her there, barefoot with her mascara running, I knew she hadn’t come to talk. She had come to reclaim what she’d abandoned.

I reached down without thinking, phone in the other hand and her photo filling the screen. I’d never wanted a woman like that before, and she didn’t even know I existed.

I met her through pixels and long-distance promises. She never knew that every night, alone in my hotel room by the sea, I imagined her beside me.