Mature

He came to help me with the new TV, with his marked arms and that look that kept avoiding mine. He was twenty, and I already knew what was going to happen.

At two in the morning I got into the pool naked, thinking I was alone. When I heard her steps coming closer, there was nothing left to hide.

Martín arrived with a ladder and a toolbox. Doña Carmen saw him from the window taking off his shirt in the sun and knew the job would be a long one.

I caught her naked in bed, with two fingers buried in her cunt. What I didn’t expect was for my own mother to show up and join the game without asking.

When she closed her fingers around the card, she whispered that I had twenty minutes to decide whether I was going up to her apartment or staying a journalist.

That Saturday he came over to correct my posture without being asked. By Monday, we already had a silent arrangement and I had chosen the right thong.

When my husband traveled, the two old men on the fifth floor invited me to celebrate a birthday. What happened on the dining table should never have happened.

My grandmother, my mother, and I thought that trip to the mountains would be the break we needed. Until the storm trapped us with two strangers.

When he showed up at my door thinking he was coming to help me, I already had everything planned. He was twenty and as naive as someone who doesn’t know what’s waiting for him.

For twelve years, no one had looked at her like that. Rodrigo was twenty, he came with a ladder and a smile, and all she wanted was for him to fix her roof.

The first night in the new apartment, I heard the neighbor on the other side of the wall. I had to go to the bathroom to finish while Laura slept.

When he opened the wrong door and saw me fresh from the shower, his eyes never looked anywhere else again. What happened that night wasn’t in anyone’s plan.

For two years I ignored my boss’s stares and his wife’s silent insults. That afternoon, when the last employee turned off the lights, I stopped ignoring everything.

When we reached the harbor and she got off the bike, her hands were still on my waist. Neither of us pulled away right away.

My boss’s wife called me a bitch in her private messages. If she thought it was true, that afternoon I was going to prove her right.

It was five-thirty when I heard her voice on the other side of the door. What I heard next left me frozen in the hallway for ten minutes.

There was something in her eyes when she turned around that should have worried me. It wasn’t the anger of an irritated neighbor. It was a promise.

When she locked her office door and looked at me like that, I knew the document boxes were just an excuse for what was coming next.

I was fifteen when I caught them the first time. Now, at twenty-two, I can’t look at those memories the same way.

I’d been telling him no for months. When I saw that phone in the display case, I knew exactly what I could offer him in exchange for it.