Memories

I went up the stairs, opened the main bathroom door, and there she was, in the tub with the baby, barely covered by a thin layer of foam.

I was eighteen and had never been with anyone. My mother’s aunt ended up sleeping beside me that night, and everything I thought I knew about desire broke in silence.

I spent twenty-eight years married to a man who treated me like furniture. At fifty-two, a delivery man rang the bell and gave me back things I didn’t even know were lost.

We had been sharing a roof for months when, one afternoon, she looked up from her computer, saw my shoulders tense, and said something I’ll never forget: “Come on, take a while to relax.”

Lucía never told that part. That Thursday she dressed the only way she knew how and made sure that virgin nephew wouldn’t leave without leaving something inside her.

I was still dripping from the shower when she walked into the bathroom without knocking, wearing that crooked smile she’d been avoiding me with for weeks.

We were alone that March siesta, and she was still in her uniform. I don’t know how we went from tickling on the sofa to something else.

I saw the bus driver watching us in the rearview mirror and, instead of covering up, I let him pull down my top. At three in the morning, my ex and I were a free show.

I had never really noticed another man until his eyes met mine in that bar. Three drinks later I was in his apartment, not knowing what to do with my hands.

Whenever I enter a fitting room, I leave the curtain slightly open. The woman watching never knows I’m looking for her—and almost always, one of them plays along.

I went in naked and walked among bodies without knowing what I was looking for. When I climbed into the hammock with a glass of wine, a forty-year-old man settled beside me and asked if I minded.

I went down to the living room after midnight and found them both naked on the sofa. My mother turned her head, and there was no shame, only annoyance.

I asked her to palpate the muscles in my neck to study anatomy. I didn’t expect her to end the lesson by turning my face and kissing me as if she’d been wanting it for years.

When I realized that what turned me on wasn’t looking but being watched, I sought out the empty shed behind my house on New Year’s Eve and deliberately dropped my panties.

Catalina came into the room at three in the morning, took off her dress without looking at me, and said she didn’t want to sleep alone in the cold.

It was two in the morning, I opened the window looking for air, and saw her lying on the sofa across the way, with no idea anyone was watching her.

The glassed-in terrace lets my silhouette show from the outside. That morning, while I was hanging laundry naked, I heard two girls’ voices laughing right below my window.

I went into the bathroom with Camila’s underwear still warm in my hands. I never imagined that minutes later her mother would be kneeling in front of me.

When he opened the door wearing only his shirt, I knew we weren’t going to talk much that afternoon. And I wasn’t wrong at all.

Three friends, a dance floor, and one decision that changed the night. This is what happened when I stopped looking for Renata and found her exactly where I shouldn’t have been looking.