Party

She had never been with someone fifteen years older. That night, in the hotel room, she discovered that intelligence can be seductive too.

That night they shot me up with the first hormones and made me throw out all my men’s clothes. “You’ll see how pretty you get,” she said, smiling.

Caro was six years older than me, with a life that seemed perfect and a secret she meant to take to the grave. That night, she decided she couldn’t take it anymore.

In the drinks line she asked to smell my perfume. When she leaned in against my neck, I understood that night’s concert would end somewhere other than my home.

I went upstairs to use the bathroom and he was waiting for me with his fly open. What I didn’t count on was someone opening the door just when we were on all fours.

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 hesitated for a couple of seconds, but the drinks had already spoken for me. I took off my dress, sat on the sofa, and let the others settle on the floor to watch.

I arrived shattered by my parents’ death. Verónica promised that in Brazil I’d learn to forget, but I never imagined how my own sister planned to comfort me.

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.

I heard the lock click behind me. When I turned, she was smiling with the calm of someone who had planned every step from the first look at the table.

When she twisted her ankle, my aunt didn’t look for another chair: she sat right on my lap in front of the whole family and started moving slowly.

Bruno had spent the whole night staring at his friend’s mother’s neckline. What he didn’t know was that the two women had worked out every detail of the game long before they did.

At three in the morning I found him in the dark on my bed, waiting for me. The fury with which he dragged me out of the bathroom wasn’t just brotherly concern.

Hidden among the trees, they heard them gasping, and back at the table the woman whispered to her son an idea she never thought he’d dare carry out.

I’d spent years looking after her, paying for everything, putting up with her screaming. That dawn, in front of the empty alleyway, I decided that for once she was going to give me something in return.

When my aunt asked if I already had a girlfriend, everyone laughed. My cousin Camila didn’t. Beneath the tablecloth, her bare foot slid up my leg and I knew the night was only beginning.

When she opened the door in a rush, with smeared mascara and a wrinkled dress, I knew something had happened that would change everything between us.

Marisol thought her son was only watching his cousin. But that night, in the same dress and with the same curves, she learned the real temptation was her.