Taboo

With mascara running from my tears, she took my hand and led me upstairs, determined that what we felt would no longer be a secret.

I told him I just wanted to practice taking photos. It was a lie. What I really wanted was for him to finally look at me the way I’d been looking at him for weeks.

When Valeria told me her three cousins were waiting to celebrate, I never imagined the celebration meant finding out whether I was good for more than balancing their accounts.

I opened my eyes in the middle of the pleasure and saw her leaning against the doorframe, watching us. She said nothing. She just slid a hand inside her shorts.

The first afternoon I went to help him, I thought I’d only be doing his exercises. I never imagined I’d end up discovering with him everything my home had denied me.

I thought she’d laugh at me, that she’d say I was crazy. But when I led her by the wrist to the half-open door, my sister could no longer look away.

With days left before my trip, she called me for an innocent favor. Neither of us imagined we'd end up locked inside, in the dark, without clothes.

I found an old photo tucked away in a drawer, and all at once I knew exactly what I wanted to ask each of them for that vacation.

When she hung up the phone, I knew I’d be at her place the next day. Her husband was away. And my daughter would never look at me the same way again.

I woke up not knowing how I would ever justify what they forced me to do that night, or how I could look the man I still loved in the eyes.

She came out of the bathroom in lingerie, posed in front of me, and asked me from one to ten how hot she was. I already knew where that night was going to end.

When he staggered against me on that packed bus, I felt something I should never have felt. Since that day I haven’t been able to think of anything else.

I thought nobody had seen me that afternoon at my grandfather’s house. I was wrong: there were a pair of eyes behind the door, and they took fifteen years to speak.

I came out of the shower wrapped in a towel, knowing my father was alone. That night I wanted to see how far he’d dare go without alcohol.

Everyone in the neighborhood wanted her, but that birthday afternoon she discovered just how far she was willing to go to be the center of her own family again.

When he opened his shirt and I felt his cologne fill the kitchen, I knew that breakfast with my nephew wasn’t going to end with a quiet coffee.

I needed company. Without thinking, I asked him if he wanted to get in with me. What happened next changed everything I thought I knew about myself and my friends.

We were up in the cherry tree stealing fruit when Hugo confessed the obsession he’d carried since childhood. That same afternoon, his mother still had no idea what was coming.

She was twenty-five and, on paper, his stepmother. Dinner began with seafood and white wine, and neither of them planned to end it at his place.

When I put my hand on his chest and didn’t take it away, I knew that afternoon wasn’t going to end like the others. He was twice my age and smelled like cold beer.