Memories

There were twenty photos and a video hidden in a folder with a single letter. I opened it expecting anything but what I was about to see.

At forty-nine, my mother was still the woman everyone watched on the street. I, meanwhile, learned very early what it meant to feel invisible beside her.

I found my friend trembling in the bathroom at that dinner. When I asked who had left her like that, I never imagined she’d say the name of our most feared professor.

I dressed in my plainest clothes so I wouldn’t give anything away. What I didn’t count on was that I wouldn’t be alone in that apartment—and that I was still the same girl as before.

At forty-five, and after eight years without touching a man, Inés thought she’d seen it all. Until her two most prim friends showed up crying with the truth.

When I asked what really turned her on, she straddled me and began telling me about a night she’d never confessed to anyone.

I remember her at the door of her bookstore, with her almost white hair and those impossible eyes. Ten years passed before I had her near me again, and this time I wasn’t going to let her go.

When I passed the half-open bathroom door and saw her naked from behind, I knew that night at my place wouldn’t end with two old acquaintances drinking tea.

When I got into her car that Friday, I knew we were no longer going to talk about my future. There was something else between us, and we’d both spent weeks pretending it wasn’t there.

I opened the trunk not knowing that inside it waited another woman’s secret: her lingerie, her diary, and proof that she too loved someone forbidden.

My hands were ice-cold in the boarding lounge, but it wasn’t the weather: in a few hours I’d see her again, and I didn’t know whether I’d run to her or hide.

Six days before my wedding, I saw her leave the café. I hadn’t seen her in years, but my body recognized her before I did.

I’d gone three months without her hands, without her mouth, without her tits on mine. That night I poured a glass of wine, stripped naked, and decided pleasure didn’t have to wait for her return.

I’m writing this knowing you’re going to read it, even if you pretend you didn’t. And knowing, too, the exact way your body used to respond when you thought no one was watching.

It was almost eleven when she walked through the door with that smile I knew too well, the same one she wore whenever something forbidden had just happened between her legs.

The moment I closed the door, a red-haired silhouette threw herself around my neck and kissed me like time had never passed. The welcome had only just begun.

I told Ingrid how an Austrian photographed me naked on the beach, never imagining the story would lead us to live it together.

I told my husband we were only going out for drinks with another couple. What I’d really been planning all week was what ended up happening in that apartment.

She kissed my neck, looked me in the eye, and let out the sentence she’d been holding back for weeks. It wasn’t a question: it was an invitation to break every rule.

We had been each other’s first love. Ten years later she returned to the village, and I still didn’t know that night I’d learn to hate my best friend’s easy smile.