Oral

When the technician fixed my computer, I thought it was over. I had no idea he already knew Marina, my best-kept secret, and intended 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 stormed upstairs 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 from sleeping. And when she called him into 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 little 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 creak of the mattress in her parents’ room was not sex: it was theft. Barefoot, Sabina followed it down the hall and 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.

A little too much to drink and an empty apartment were enough for my sister-in-law’s daughter to stop being the little girl I remembered. What happened that night should not be told.

I waited at the bus stop with my heart racing, knowing that the moment his car appeared we’d stop being mother and son and become something else.

I was half asleep, touching myself, when I felt a hand that wasn’t mine. What came next shattered every boundary I thought I had.

The moment the elevator doors close, my sister kisses me like she’s been waiting all week for it. Truth is, we both had.