Masturbation

Blindfolded on a hotel bed, you hear someone enter the room. You don't know if it's a man or a woman. You only know you were browsing the app together an hour ago.

When she invited me up to her apartment, I knew I couldn’t say no again. She was almost seventy and I was thirty-six, and that had never mattered so little.

For twenty years I thought I knew my own desires. It took ten minutes in an elevator with a nervous twenty-something to realize I knew nothing.

On the second day, the wind shook the cabin so hard that all we could do was watch movies. One of them should never have come out of that wet case.

I put down my suitcase without knowing that one of the wardrobe drawers held something that would change the course of that weekend at my partner’s family home.

I went to the shoeshine stand to have my shoes polished and read comics. Neither of us imagined what he would end up keeping in his shirt pocket—or how far we’d go.

The two wineglasses on the coffee table and the dim bedroom light told me I was about to see something I should never have seen.

We’d watched weird videos on his computer at the office that time. What I didn’t expect was that months later, that same curiosity would end up on the couch, under the blanket.

I thought it was just curiosity. Until I saw his photo, felt my pulse race, and understood I’d spent three years avoiding what my body had already decided.

Until that night I’d been completely heterosexual. It took one bad movie choice, an improvised pillow, and a stranger’s breathing on my neck.

I closed the hotel door, looked at his trembling hands, and knew that this stranger was as scared as I was. And neither of us was leaving.

I massaged him after the beach, without thinking. I felt his erection under his trunks and knew that summer wouldn’t end like the others.

I climbed the four floors with my heart racing. I wanted a toy, but I left with something more: the girl behind the glasses burned into me for that night.

Years later I still remember her panties in the breeze, her hand between her legs, and the kiss she blew me from the sidewalk before disappearing. We never said a single word.

I came out of the bathroom naked and he was there in the hallway, as naked as I was. We looked at each other, unable to move. That second changed everything.

Andrés knew exactly what he was doing with his hands. I arrived with back pain and left with something nameless—something I still think about as I fall asleep.

We hired Valeria to care for my father-in-law, the man who had insulted me for years. No one imagined what would happen that morning in the bathroom.

Carmen looked at me from across the kitchen and, without saying a word, closed the distance between us. Her daughter was five meters away. That only made it harder to resist.

I’d come home early from the bar. The hallway was dark and his bedroom door was half open. I stopped for just a second. That second changed everything.

I waited for him with whiskey and very little clothing. He had no idea that night was only the beginning of a plan I’d been building in silence for weeks.