Lesbian

When she went into the bathroom, I didn’t expect her to kneel between my legs, or for her tongue to decide for me what I’d been avoiding asking for years.

I was her assistant. We worked twelve hours a day. That night, barefoot on her sofa, she looked at me like never before, and I knew something had changed forever.

Thirty-two years old, red nails, and a way of looking at women that seemed like a greeting and a question. I was a married woman. That is, until the night I forgot my keys.

When Mariela asked her to take off her panties too, Carla looked to her mother for the stop she expected. She found none—only a complicit smile.

When I offered to shower together to wash off the sweat, I thought it would be an innocent gesture. The way she looked at me from the bathroom door said otherwise.

Adela had always avoided being touched. That January night, a translucent-skinned stranger sat on the edge of her bed and knew she could not send her away.

I hadn’t seen her in two years when she came to my door broken, feverish, with a name that wasn’t mine on her lips.

When she leaned in to say goodbye at the door, her mouth found mine and everything I’d buried for years came rushing back.

When I opened that old folder on his computer, I never imagined a photo of her would be the beginning of my own betrayal.

My daughter set down her glass, took off her tights on the sofa, and looked at me with a smile I hadn’t seen in ten years. Outside, the first snowfall of winter settled over the attic.

We talked for weeks without sending each other a single photo, until she told me she wanted to be the first to do it to me, in person, in her bed.

We hadn’t seen each other in nine months. When Renata opened the door and hugged me, I felt something different against my chest—something I wouldn’t understand until that afternoon.

The fireplace was lit, the champagne had gone flat, and I was in my panties in front of the fire. I was waiting for Helena, fresh from the shower, smelling of perfume and promises.

I thought she was just flirting with me, until she took me to her apartment without asking and I understood the night would not end with one drink.

At eighteen I thought I’d seen everything, until my cousin pulled the blinds, put on that movie, and started touching herself without taking her eyes off me.

When the downpour left us soaked, she ordered me to take off my wet clothes and started undressing without shame. I tried to hide the tremble in my hands.

The burgundy curtain separated me from the empty street. Mara leaned in to fasten the bodysuit’s clasps for me and, without warning, her fingers lingered a little too long.

Lucía never told that part. That Thursday she dressed the only way she knew how and made sure that virgin nephew wouldn’t leave without leaving something inside her.

I went to visit my submissive, but it was her maid who opened the door. Something in her look made me forget exactly why I’d come.

I opened the hotel-room door, and there was Renata: just like her pictures, but with nerves no image could ever capture.