Oral

At midnight, someone stopped outside my cell. I was still wearing my habit, and the candle was still burning on the altar.

We’d been kissing in secret for four years like two hidden lovers. When our aunt and uncle closed the door on the way to the airport, I knew there would be no turning back that night.

A hidden camera behind the books, two brothers willing to share everything, and a girlfriend with a smile too frank to be innocent.

I found her crying on the sofa, her blue robe barely tied. When I told her she was beautiful, I already knew that night I wouldn’t be just her son anymore.

My husband had whispered it to me so many times in bed that it no longer sounded like a fantasy. That night, the professor walked through the door and it all became real.

For months I charged strangers, until a girl called to lose her virginity with me. That afternoon, I understood almost everything.

When she knocked on my door at midnight, I thought she needed something. What I didn’t expect was for her to take off her nightgown and slip under my sheets with that smile.

A proposal made amid laughter in front of the cabin TV opened a door my sisters and I could never close again.

When we arrived at my father-in-law’s house, I thought the send-off would be like any other—until I saw my mother-in-law coming down the stairs with that look I already knew.

She arrived at my apartment with her cheek still bruised. That same night she stepped into the bathroom wrapped in a towel and dropped it when she saw me.

That night, while I was stroking him in bed, he stopped me and asked me to tell him what the other man was like. I never imagined my confession would change our bed.

The robe barely covered her legs when she approached the sofa. Tobías was no longer pretending to sleep, and everything I’d been keeping quiet for months was showing.

The living-room sofa had already seen too much, but nothing like the slow smile with which my sister-in-law waited for me that afternoon while my father-in-law pretended not to notice.

At five in the morning, heels in hand and her dress sliding off her shoulders, Renata got into the car with me and made me a proposal I shouldn’t have accepted.

For years I thought fun meant books and documentaries. Then she locked the bedroom door and started undressing in front of the two of us.

The first was my physics teacher. The second was my French teacher. They both summoned me alone during their final days in Valencia, and I learned that goodbyes can be very different.

When the warning arrived, I turned on the screen thinking it would be just another meeting. I never imagined I’d see my sister-in-law kneeling in front of my father-in-law’s business partner.

My mother leaned in front of me to pull an old tape from the box, and when she slowly adjusted her robe, I knew she had seen what I didn’t want her to see.

When I found him behind me in the kitchen, his body pressed to mine and his breathing ragged against my neck, I knew I was going to give in before I fought.

I’d promised her a different kind of anniversary gift. What she didn’t know was that my surprise was waiting on the other side of a hole in the wall.