Young

We’d met to review for finals, but by six o’clock the books were closed and no one wanted to leave. What came after still makes my pulse race.

We thought it was a twenty-block ride. Neither Lucía nor I imagined we’d get off that bus as two completely different women.

That afternoon, in the silence of the house, an accidental brush revealed a language my body spoke and I still didn’t know how to read.

I was nineteen and impossibly horny. He noticed it the moment he opened his apartment door, and there was no way to hide what we both wanted.

She was her father’s wife, but that dawn, sitting in the sand and pressed against his chest, I no longer knew where affection ended and something else began.

Everyone at the university knew what I was like, and the guard at the gate only needed a smile to understand that that afternoon, after cleaning up, I wouldn’t be leaving so fast.

I had never felt so much from a simple brush of hips. When she settled behind me on the crowded bus, I knew that ride wouldn’t end like the others.

I’d been a widow for fifteen years and sexually asleep. Then that man, nearly twenty years younger, looked at my lips and I knew the morning wouldn’t end in notes.

From below, while she pushed the guide wire at the top of the ladder, her top lifted from her body and Adrián realized that summer would not be like the others.

I learned very early that my body was worth more than any degree. What none of them knew is that I never felt a thing while they paid me.

When she stepped off the plane in those shorts and with that smile, I knew the rule about not touching a friend’s sister was going to cost me dearly.

We were never friends, but she looked at me with contempt every time her boyfriend lingered too long staring at me. So I gave her a real reason to hate me.

I’d been imagining it for weeks. That dawn I opened the gate, stepped onto the asphalt, and knew I wouldn’t stop until someone saw me.

The hospital smelled of bleach, but all she could breathe was the memory of callused hands on her back and the suspicion that tonight, too, she wouldn’t open the door.

I thought the spa was empty until I heard the laughter. Five young voices, five gazes that never left the wet white bikini against my skin.

I pulled the curtain aside in fear, thinking they were burglars. What I saw in the patio left me breathless and trembling between my legs.

The coach looked at me from across the table and smiled. My father gripped the back of my neck and whispered, “Son, we’re going to do whatever it takes to get you on the team.”

When he pulled down his boxer briefs without asking me to leave the room, I knew the afternoon had stopped being about sportswear.

When she suggested the loser take off a piece of clothing, I said yes without thinking. I had no idea what dare would come next, or that we’d end up with nothing on.

When she poured the fourth shot and held my gaze a second too long, I knew that night we were going to cross the line we’d been avoiding for months.