How My Son’s Friend Ruined My Christmas Eve
He was twenty-one and had been looking at me for months in a way I pretended not to notice. That night my son went to bed and we were left alone.
He was twenty-one and had been looking at me for months in a way I pretended not to notice. That night my son went to bed and we were left alone.
Two separated women, an apartment too orderly, and a deck of cards no one should have found that night.
It had been a month since I couldn’t get that corner of Industria out of my head. That night I decided to go back, but this time I wouldn’t be alone.
Andrés was away on a trip and I was wearing my new skirt. When the doorbell rang and I saw my uncle at the door, I knew my secret was over.
From the moment I got into the car, his eyes kept going back to the mirror again and again. It was obvious he was looking at me. I decided to do something about it.
I was walking alone when Ernesto leaned out of the bus window and called me by name. I should have kept going, but something in his voice stopped me.
Marcos had the body I had at his age. That night, with everyone asleep, I knew something more than heat was keeping us apart in that narrow bed.
I was wandering aimlessly when he lifted his head from a second-floor window and held my gaze as if he knew, before I did, that we’d end up tangled in his sheets.
He asked me for a quickie while I was writing. He came out of the bathroom smelling like him, and I put on the lace stockings. I’m still savoring the rest.
She wore only a long coat and high heels. Her only plan was to feel strangers’ eyes roaming over her body while she pretended to shop.
Bruno would take our parents back to the city and I’d stay behind alone. What no one expected was that Sunday lunch would end like that.
When I walked into that bar and heard her introduce herself, something inside me collapsed. It wasn’t desire. It was absolute surrender.
He took forever changing. She waited outside. And a group of tourists passed through at exactly the wrong moment.
I’d spent months fantasizing about surrendering to someone who knew how to take control. I never imagined I’d find him on a Friday at a bar.
She lied in front of everyone in the parking lot to get into my car. Before we left the city, she’d already found my hand. And I didn’t want to go home like that either.
The night breeze, two lit joints, and the certainty that everyone was asleep. All that was left was for one of us to say aloud what we were both thinking.
I recognized her at the top of the hill. Seven years had passed, and she looked at me like she knew I’d be there that Saturday. What happened after that should never have happened.
We’d been trading looks in that bar for four years. Her in her glasses, me not knowing what to do with everything I felt every time she served me.
Rodrigo didn’t make her leave when she stayed till the end. Sofía didn’t want to ask her to. All three of them knew it, unspoken, from the moment the ballroom doors closed.
Four weeks without seeing him. Four weeks trying to erase the memory of other hands. That night, April became someone she no longer recognized.