Oral

I thought it would just be another chat to kill the boredom. But when he started typing, I closed my eyes and let his words do what no hand had done in months.

I closed my eyes looking for sleep and what I found were unknown hands holding me in the dark and not letting me escape.

By thirty, no one had ever kissed me. The night I spied on my roommate through the crack in his door, something inside me finally woke up.

I spread a towel over the bed just in case, opened my legs, and followed the video’s instructions. Half an hour later I understood my body kept a secret.

When the technician fixed my computer, I thought it was over. I didn’t know he already knew Marina, my best-kept secret, and planned to use it against me.

She stood beside the bronze sculpture in a black dress that seemed in love with her body, and she looked at me without shame, as if she already knew what we would do that night.

I slipped the vibrator into the toiletry bag beside the toothbrush. If fantasy could ease the pain, no one was going to stop me from trying that night.

I only wanted to get home. But his honey-colored eyes and that half-smile of a boy who knows what he wants made me change course in the middle of the station.

I went upstairs furious to scold her for the noise, but when I opened the door and saw her like that, I was the one left speechless and powerless.

On the other side of the wall, his mother’s moans kept him awake. And when she called him to her room the next day, Bruno knew nothing would ever be the same.

“If you’re a good boy, you’ll get a reward,” she told me before we left. I never imagined the reward would be shared, or that my mother would enjoy watching so much.

Nadia had spent years alone, training so she wouldn’t have to think. Her nephew was the only one who looked at her as a woman, and that hungover afternoon they both stopped pretending.

When I got out of the car dressed as a sailor girl, my brothers’ six friends whistled, not yet knowing my secret or what I was about to do for the guest of honor.

In the school showers I always looked on the sly. That afternoon, on my way back from training, Mateo asked me the question I’d been waiting for for years.

The mattress creak in her parents’ room wasn’t sex: it was theft. Sabina padded down the hall barefoot until she pressed her eye to the crack in the door.

My mind told me never to go back. My body remembered those lips and wouldn’t let me sleep. On the third day I dialed his number.