Masturbation

I had never smelled another woman’s desire until that afternoon, standing in the hallway with my flatmate’s soaked garment in my hands and my pulse racing.

I’m naked while I write this. And I want you to know exactly what goes through my head when I shut the door and no one can hear me.

I went into the bathroom by mistake and found him under the water. Since that afternoon, every night I’m alone I go back to that image and can’t get it out of my head.

I had gotten used to being looked at, but that afternoon, alone at the waterfall, I decided I wouldn’t cover up this time when I found him hiding among the trees.

I first saw her cheering from the stands, with wet hair and that easy laugh. Ten days later, behind the fronton, she taught me something I’ve never forgotten.

Every time she touched herself, liquid stars and new flowers burst from her body. That night the eons had been fulfilled and she was about to burn like never before.

At four in the morning, locked under the sheets with my mother’s phone, I started opening folder after folder without suspecting that nothing would ever be the same again.

Our bedroom window faced his rooftop exactly. That night I realized the idea of being watched aroused me more than I’d ever admit.

We’d met to review for finals, but by six o’clock the books were closed and no one wanted to leave. What came after still makes my pulse race.

I opened the curtain just enough to confirm my suspicion: he was outside, with his hand inside his pants, waiting to see something he shouldn’t have seen.

That afternoon, in the silence of the house, an accidental brush revealed a language my body spoke and I still didn’t know how to read.

When she slipped her hand under my desk, I knew that morning wasn’t going to solve a single incident. I could only think of her and what she had just left me.

He kept saying it was wrong, that he shouldn’t touch me. But his hand was already seeking my waist, and we both knew nothing would stop us for those five days.

I left the curtains open on purpose and pretended not to see him. He, standing on his rooftop, didn’t miss a single detail of my naked body.

On the last night before becoming mortal, she curled up between her two divine mothers, knowing that at dawn she would have to bury everything she was under layers of plain cloth.

I had never felt so much from a simple brush of hips. When she settled behind me on the crowded bus, I knew that ride wouldn’t end like the others.

—Marina, you won’t believe this: I went in to clean the room and there was a couple in the bed. And I just stood there watching from the doorway, unable to move.

She came down from the plane of pleasure to a flat in Ruzafa, and as soon as the street’s desire brushed her skin, she knew no loose clothing could contain what she was.

You didn’t know us from Adam, but you spent the whole afternoon with your hand in your swimsuit, watching us play. And we knew it from the start.

No one on that trail could imagine what I was wearing under my clothes, or the wild woman the brush of the air ended up awakening in me that afternoon.