What I Saw in the Mirror During My First Shift

My name is Camila, and that story happened during my first week as an intern at a provincial hospital nobody wanted to go to. I was twenty-seven, I had just finished my internal medicine degree, and after months of waiting they assigned me a post in a huge, nearly empty building on the outskirts of a city I’d rather not name.

I’m short, barely five foot three, very fair-skinned, with hips wider than my torso suggests. I have shoulder-length mahogany hair and small breasts that stiffen at the slightest breeze. Those details —which seem silly at first— ended up mattering that night.

I arrived at the hospital after eleven. The façade gave me chills: peeling brick, windows with rusted bars, and a single streetlamp lit on the whole block. Dr. Bermúdez, my supervisor for the next two years, came out to greet me with a kind smile that didn’t quite fit the place. He was a tall, thin man in his fifties, with huge hands and a soft voice. He introduced me to the nursing staff and to my two fellow interns, a blonde with short hair and another who barely looked up from her phone.

After a quick dinner in the cafeteria, Bermúdez gave me a tour of the building. I particularly remember a long corridor in the old wing, with antique mirrors on a single wall. Full-length mirrors with black frames, spaced about six feet apart. It was the mandatory route between the rest room and the operating room.

“It’s a little eerie, I know,” he said, without stopping, “but you get used to it.”

I wasn’t going to get used to it.

My first shift was a logistical nightmare: paperwork, charts, transfers, an emergency that wasn’t really an emergency, and two calls my supervisor asked me to answer using a memorized script. Fifteen straight hours. By one in the morning, my scrub top was stuck to my back. Intern uniforms are tight, made of a light fabric that goes sheer if you’re careless, and by then I was past the point of modesty.

I went down to the basement, walked through the mirror corridor —I looked at the floor, I admit it— and entered the room that would be my refuge for the next few months. It was small, without air conditioning, with bunk beds against one wall and a tiny bathroom on the other. The bathroom had a huge dressing mirror with a gold frame, which in the afternoon had been beside the door. Now, when I came back, I found it leaning against the wall facing the bunks, tilted at an angle that reflected the entire surface of both beds.

My roommate, Valeria, was asleep in the lower bunk. I had only seen her for a few seconds in the cafeteria: tall, very thin, with black hair pulled into a braid. She had spoken to me for no more than three sentences. I heard her breathing heavily under the sheet and assumed she was sound asleep.

I took the night shirt the hospital provided us —a sort of long blouse made from the same material as the uniform, reaching to the knees— and a clean pair of panties out of my bag. I went into the bathroom on tiptoe.

As I took off my pants, I felt a wash of cold air across my lower back. It made no sense: the window was closed and it was hot outside. I stood there for a second staring at the half-open door, expecting to see something, but there was nothing. Only the hum of the extractor fan.

***

I showered quickly, with cold water to shake off the exhaustion. When I was rinsing my hair, eyes closed, I felt the air again at the base of my spine. This time I would have sworn it was a breath, soft, right where the spine curves before the buttocks. I flinched, opened my eyes, and there was no one there. The curtain was still. The fan kept doing its thing.

I thought the corridor had gotten into my head. I dried off, put on my white panties and the night blouse, and climbed slowly into the top bunk so as not to make the wood creak.

I lay there on my back, arms stretched out to the sides, staring at the ceiling. And, without meaning to, my gaze fell on the mirror.

From where I was, both beds were perfectly visible. Mine, empty except for my shape lying in shadow. The one below, with Valeria on her side, covered to the waist. The light from the lone streetlamp came through the little window and barely outlined her shoulder.

Twenty long minutes passed before I saw her move.

First it was her legs. She bent them as if she had a cramp and stretched them out again. Then she shifted to one side, then the other. The sheet slipped down to her thigh and I noticed she was wearing very short, tight black leggings. Her right hand began to slide over her stomach, slowly, until it slipped beneath the waistband. I heard her breathing deepen. Then I heard something even more explicit: that barely audible, wet sound of fingers moving where sight can’t reach.

I had frozen my body. One eye shut, the other fixed on the mirror, pretending to sleep. I’ve always been a lesbian, there’s no secret about it inside me, but I had never suddenly found myself in front of a scene like that. The serious girl from the cafeteria, the one who hadn’t looked up from her phone, was touching herself a meter and a half beneath me, without knowing —or so I thought— that I was watching her.

I felt my nipples harden beneath the blouse. The cotton brushing against them tightened, and I felt the dampness starting to show in my panties.

Valeria stopped all at once. She looked toward the mirror. I shut my eye quickly. I heard her move, felt the soft creak of the lower bunk, and when I opened my eye again she had changed position.

She had taken off her leggings and her shirt. She was completely naked, on all fours on the mattress, with both pillows stacked under her. Her ass was pointing toward the mirror, her small, firm buttocks shining with sweat, and between them her pussy was clearly visible, open. She arched her back, lowered her head, and began rubbing against the pillows with short, rhythmic, almost innocent motions.

***

I couldn’t believe it.

It wasn’t just the sight. It was that she had positioned herself exactly, exactly, in the only angle from which I could see her whole body from above. The mirror, the bed, the body: everything formed a triangle that was too perfect. In that moment I understood, with a jolt in my chest, that she had moved the mirror into place when she learned what time I was arriving. That the mirror wasn’t an accident. It was an invitation.

I slid my right hand under the sheet. I ran my fingers over my panties and confirmed what I already knew: I was soaked. I pulled them aside and slid my middle finger between my lips, slowly, while I kept watching her move. My own sound startled me: the friction of my fingers against myself mixed with hers, and for a second I couldn’t tell which was which.

My legs began to spread on their own. I bent my knees and the sheet rose into an obvious dome over me. If Valeria was looking at the mirror, she couldn’t not see it.

And she did.

She changed the position of her body. She turned the pillows, got back on top of them, but this time she faced the mirror. Her small breasts, identical in size to mine, jolted with every movement. She planted her palms on the pillows and sped up. Her eyes were half-lidded, fixed on the reflection, and her tongue played with her lower lip.

That expression was such a clear invitation that I stopped pretending. I lifted the sheet, pushed it to the side, pulled my panties down to my ankles, and stayed exactly like that: legs bent and spread, two fingers buried inside me, the other arm lifting my blouse to reveal my stomach and breasts.

Valeria met my gaze in the mirror. For the first time she smiled. She quickened the rhythm of her hips against the pillows, making them creak, letting the bunk rock almost imperceptibly. I fell into the same rhythm. I could hear her breathing, she could hear my fingers working me: the whole room smelled of sweat and moisture and that electric thing that only appears when two bodies recognize each other without having touched.

I didn’t last long. I came with a cramp that climbed up from my feet, closing my legs around my hand, biting down on my free hand so I wouldn’t moan. I was trembling. I felt my thighs go wet. When I managed to open my eyes, she had already stopped and was looking back at me with wide eyes in the reflection. Her cheeks were red and her chest was still heaving.

Without saying a word, she took the pillows down. She stood beside the bunk, completely naked, and walked to the bathroom. I heard her shower in silence. She came out naked, lay down like that, covered herself to the neck with the sheet, and stayed still.

It took effort to move. My legs were numb and my heart was beating like a drum. I went into the bathroom too, washed without looking at myself in the mirror, and went back to bed. For the first time in my life, I slept naked.

***

My phone woke me at six-thirty. The lower bunk was empty and neatly made, as if nobody had slept there. I climbed down with effort, turned on the bathroom light, and stood in front of the dressing mirror to gather myself before the new shift.

Then I saw it.

On my right buttock, just above the edge where the curve ends, there was a clear lipstick mark. Red rouge, untouched, perfect. Valeria had come up silently while I slept and left me her signature on my skin.

I sat on the edge of the bathtub and laughed to myself. A strange laugh, half embarrassment, half pride. Then I got dressed with the mark still intact, determined not to touch it all day.

That first morning I expected to run into her in the corridor and she was nowhere to be seen. We worked in different wards: she in pediatrics, me in internal medicine. Crossing paths depended on shift luck. I spent the whole day with the feeling of still having painted lips on my skin, beneath my pants, hidden from everyone except me.

Three days passed before I saw her again in the room. And then something else happened, longer, calmer, more complete. But I’ll tell that one another day.

All I understood that first night, looking at myself in the mirror with the mark of her mouth on my body, was that the mirror hadn’t moved by itself. And that the cold air I felt on my back in the bathroom was her, spying on me from the crack of the half-open door before climbing into her bed and starting what had been waiting for me.