Mature

I’d been going to the same boring gym for weeks when the owner showed up: mid-forties, defined arms, and a calm that’s more intimidating than any gesture.

I’d spent years teaching that taboo never disappears; it only disguises itself. I never understood that better than on that night at the motel.

I was fifteen and didn’t know what I was seeing. Now, at twenty-two, every memory of those afternoons takes on an entirely different meaning.

That night I walked into the living room with my heart racing. I knew what I wanted and I knew he wanted it too. All that was left was to make the first move.

He crouched behind the dumpster in the alley, and what he saw beyond the curtain left him speechless. The Córdoba night held secrets he was never meant to discover.

He was older than my father, had the hands of a man used to getting what he wanted, and looked at me as if he knew exactly what I was thinking.

I walked into her room with a tray and she looked at me from the bed, almost naked, and asked: “Do you like what you see?” Something in me woke up without warning.

Her perfume was still following me when I opened the card in the taxi. An address in Recoleta. The door will be unlocked, she had told me.

I boarded in Cologne looking for rest. What I found in that group was something I had never known how to ask for before.

He was nineteen, his hands were shaking, and he asked me to teach him. I was thirty-eight, wearing a silk robe, and had the whole night ahead of me.

Outside, the snow kept falling. Inside, on the other side of the wall, someone was moaning. And I had my aunt asleep beside me, her robe barely closed.

I had been ignoring their looks for months. That night, for some reason I still don’t quite understand, I decided not to keep walking.

He called me a little slut the first time he saw me. The second time he begged me not to stop.

When I went into my room, I found her sitting in the corner, naked, her head tilted and a question in her eyes that neither of us expected.

We’d spent years in silence and cold dinners. When he came to fix the fireplace, something broke in me. And I let it happen.

When I opened his gallery to clean the camera, I found hundreds of photos of me. I thought about leaving. Then I saw what was under his pants and changed my mind.