Memories

I came out of the shower dripping, thinking it was my mother at the door. But when I opened it, there she was—the only woman I could never get out of my head.

I came to therapy in pieces. The only way to understand how I lost him was to go back to that night when I was completely his, not knowing it would be the last.

I’d known her for almost thirty years. She was my girlfriend, my impossible love, my daughter’s godmother. That night she came into the bathroom wrapped in a towel and let it fall.

“She came to see her boyfriend, the doctor,” the receptionist told him. Damián had no girlfriend. But when she described the visitor’s blush, he knew exactly who was waiting inside.

I had buried it under years of exams and routine, but all it took was hearing him say my name from across the bar for my body to remember what my mind wanted to forget.

The night she threw me out, I dreamed of my own corpse rotting in an empty workshop. I woke up soaked in tears, with her asleep a handspan from my skin.

Five years later I saw her pushing a cart with a little girl inside. She looked down and ran off. Neither of us wanted to remember what we filmed together.

I came out of the bathroom with my bikini half unfastened and he was there, drying his hair. We froze. What happened next still makes me smile.

She had spent months imagining his hands, his cologne, his voice. She never thought a storm would be enough to make them stop pretending they didn’t want each other.

I woke to the smell of coffee and knew that those two days with her, shut inside while the rain fell outside, would stay with me forever.

When she told me she hadn’t enjoyed sex in years, the sensible thing would have been to leave. Instead I reached for her leg and she didn’t pull away.

For thirty years we’d kept crossing paths by chance. That rainy afternoon, in the pharmacy queue, she looked at me differently. And I did too.

They arrived at the ranch looking for a mattress to spend the night. What they didn’t expect was the story the two brothers had kept for years, or how eagerly they’d tell it.

She had hated him for years, but when she saw him sitting in that café, all she felt was heat between her legs and a desire she thought buried forever.

I met her in a dive bar, and at thirty I thought I knew everything about sex. That woman proved in a single night that I knew nothing.

She boarded the carriage after midnight, sat across from me, and began telling me things no stranger should ever confess in the dark.

Twelve months had passed since the last time. I turned a corner downtown and collided with her: the same perfume, the same look, the same desire I thought I’d forgotten.

No one answered the intercom, but the door opened anyway. That’s when I knew there was no turning back and that man was going to do whatever he wanted with me.

I lay naked under the last September sun, offering my body to anyone who wanted to look. Then the only man I thought I’d never see again appeared.

At thirty-three, with an athlete's body and a secret he'd been smothering half his life, one boy walks into his shop and looks at him without fear.