Waxing

I slid my red nails over my hairless skin and smiled: in a few hours I would stop being the quiet girl from the fourth floor and become something else again.

I hadn’t dressed in two years. Then I found the key to the room the owner told me not to open, and inside was everything I needed.

She gave me a hundred euros in tip for a three-kilometer ride. It took me two days to understand the money was only the beginning of what she wanted.

I climbed up to steady the ladder without imagining what I’d find when I looked up. That afternoon, in the back room, I learned who was really in charge.

I grew up understanding naturism as something natural, but nothing prepared me for the day my mother’s boyfriend stopped covering himself in front of me.

I walked to the water with a foolish plan: pass in front of her and memorize her. I didn't know that stranger would let herself be watched as if she'd chosen it.

The owner insisted she take off her bra to try on the strapless dress. What Mariana didn’t expect was to see her mother nod in approval at every order.

Every month I crossed the street for a wax, never imagining the girl with the soft hands was waiting for the same signal I was.

She booked a routine wax before vacation. What she didn’t expect was the way that woman would look at her when she closed the private room door.

I was twenty-two and had never seen another woman naked until that afternoon in the shower, when she took off her underwear as if I weren’t watching.

There was a week left before my wedding when I sat in the middle of the room and let a stranger convince me to go into that bedroom.

The ad said “free erotic session for young guys.” What it didn’t say, and what I understood perfectly, was how he planned to charge me that night.

The sea spat me onto a yacht deck with not a single man on board. When I woke up a second time, I was already wearing their dress and didn’t understand why I was letting them.

I used to hide everything. That night I entered the theater without underwear, in a short skirt and certain someone would look. And I wanted him to.

He was limping, sweating, and too scared to look at me. When I ordered him to remove the towel in front of his brother, I knew he’d do everything I said.

Nora had always admired her older sister more than she should have. What she didn’t know was that the woman she secretly desired was, in fact, her own mother.