Memories

I was wearing the wig and heels when I saw someone waiting at the door. It was Germán’s nephew. I froze half a block away, not knowing whether to keep going.

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.

She had a boyfriend. She said she was straight. And yet that afternoon at the hotel pool, her foot found mine under the water and I didn’t pull away.

We’d spent years avoiding those childhood games, until one winter afternoon I asked him to take me on his bike and my hand landed where it shouldn’t.

We pulled down our pants in front of the other four and, when he bent over me, I knew I wasn’t leaving that classroom the same man.

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.

He was the neighborhood kid who came on as a substitute when someone was missing. It took me a whole year to realize he was looking at me too.

I hadn’t seen Mateo, Diego’s father, in years. When we ran into each other that afternoon, I never imagined I’d end up on his sofa with borrowed red swim trunks and my breath coming fast.

The music was playing far away, the family was toasting downstairs, and I was still sitting on the bed, not understanding when his kisses had stopped being a game.

I remember every name, every room, and every kiss. But she looks at me as if I invented everyone I spent the night with.

When I crossed the hall, I heard every taboo I had crunched beneath my feet. I reached his door naked, with only my hair over my shoulders.

Lucía never wanted anything to do with a man. Camila was a bombshell who drove the guests crazy. I only had one question I couldn’t keep to myself.

At eleven it was just two couples laughing around a bottle; by three in the morning we were four bodies that didn’t know who they belonged to.

We were walking back from the beach when a girl hitched a ride. I didn’t know that night would reveal something else to me.

I thought the rain would leave me with nothing. Twenty meters away I saw the dark-skinned boy by the bench, soaked, and I knew the night was only beginning.

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 went to return the five hundred pesos she’d slipped into my folder. I didn’t expect to find her crying, or to stay until six in the morning.

The ropes marked my skin red. Guilt marked my soul black. And that man kept looking for the crack where he could break me open completely.

She reached out to shake my hand and my heart skipped. Months of talking, laughing, pent-up tension. All that was left was to see what we'd do with it.

We had been walking for minutes when I began recognizing the streets. When he opened that door, I knew I’d been there before—though never imagined under what circumstances.