Memories

I met her through pixels and long-distance promises. She never knew that every night, alone in my hotel room by the sea, I imagined her beside me.

That October Sunday we came down from mass soaked by the rain. We went into her kitchen to dry off. And there, against the wall, I kissed her the way I’d wanted to kiss her all my life.

My friend finished his last drink, looked at me from the armchair, and began to tell me why he had left his wife one June morning without warning.

I got out of the car with numb legs and saw her waiting in the doorway, barefoot, biting her lip the way she did when she couldn’t take it anymore.

On the strip she faced her without mercy; in the locker room, with the medal still warm on her chest, she only wanted to feel her arms around her again.

For weeks she slept in another bed, swearing she’d stopped thinking about her. Until I saw her on the other side of the glass, soaked and looking at me like she never had.

She counted to ten before pushing the bathroom door open. Steam covered everything, and for the first time, she chose not to run from what she felt for her.

I turned the living-room light down so she wouldn’t see me, but when the sheet started moving beneath her hips, I knew I wouldn’t be sleeping that night.

She went down to dinner without panties or a bra. She said she didn’t know what was wrong with her, but I was starting to understand: that day she was going to cross every line.

I had forty-seven messages from her when I came back to the game, and they all ended with the same screenshot: her avatar on the empty bench, waiting for me at different hours.

I opened the door to his apartment wearing the shortest miniskirt I owned and saw his expression crack as his gaze climbed up my legs.

For two weeks, I'd been reliving that threesome with my sister and my husband. That morning I called her out, never imagining how the day would end.

When the others went to the bar and we were left alone by the pool, my aunt asked me something that changed the way I would look at her forever.

I rang the bell with frozen hands. I hadn’t heard his voice in two years, but when he opened the door I knew that night we’d finish something we had left open.

When I started drifting off on the couch, I felt her hand climbing up my thigh. I looked up and Camila was staring at me with a smile I didn’t know yet.

While rain beat against the windows, my wife’s friend drank my vodka and asked the exact questions that made me reveal everything I’d kept silent.

I came back sunburned and my aunt called me to her room to soothe me with cream. When her hands reached my hips, I knew something between us had changed.

I left the bathroom door half open on purpose and knew, from the mirror’s reflection, that he was watching me. That day I accepted the five hundred soles and everything that followed.

I went upstairs thinking I knew the fifteen-year-old girl who no longer existed. The box under her bed made it clear: my daughter was someone else—and so was I.

Her white T-shirt soaked with sweat, her nipples pressing through the fabric, and the question thrown between two glasses of wine: is what they say about you and Lucía true?