New Year's Eve

We hadn’t even made it through the garage gate when she’d already unbuttoned my trousers. She said she couldn’t wait to go upstairs, and I believed her.

I recognized her between the supermarket aisles: fuller, more confident, with the look of someone who still remembered what happened between us in that empty classroom.

When she climbed on top of me at dawn on New Year’s Day, I thought that was the whole story. I had no idea her secret would change everything between us.

I said yes to the game for one night only: a dress, a wig, and a name that wasn’t mine. I never imagined the girl in the mirror would look back as if she’d been waiting for me.

We three met on the last Thursday in December, under the pretext of seeing the year out. None of us said aloud what we were really going to do.

I’d spent a year listening to her describe who touched her while I only watched. That New Year’s Eve, with a glass in her hand, she whispered in my ear that this time I wouldn’t be left out.

I’d soaked her dress at the start of the party. I never imagined that same stranger would corner me against the railing when there were almost no people left on the rooftop.

I signed up at the last minute for a countryside party where no one had a partner and one rule ruled everything: what happened that night stayed there. I had no idea how far it would go.

That night Eneko broke down, so Unai did the only thing he knew would calm him: he took him to the bed where Mikel and Asier were already waiting awake.

When he had us go up on the stage and people started betting on what we were wearing under our dresses, I knew the luxury party was no longer normal.

She lowered her dress's zipper in front of the entryway mirror and, seeing herself surrounded by his arms, knew there was no going back that night.

When she poured the fourth shot and held my gaze a second too long, I knew that night we were going to cross the line we’d been avoiding for months.