Young

I arrived at the farm with my designer tees and my city attitude. They had callused hands, a sharp knife, and a real talent for cutting me down to size.

I opened the wrong door and found her in front of the mirror, two fingers where they shouldn’t have been. She didn’t scream. She smiled like she’d just chosen her prey.

“If you stay, you stop being the perfect student,” he said without touching me yet. I looked at the locked door. My legs did not move.

Every night I go down to the dungeons with bread and water. Last night, the woman chained to the column was waiting for me naked, with an order on her lips I couldn’t refuse.

I blush just thinking that you’re going to read this, but he ordered me to: I must tell, without hiding anything, how I learned to kneel and give thanks.

Pressed against the counter, they thought the house was empty. They didn’t count on her coming back early, or on what she had in store for anyone who dared to lie to her.

I went back to school that afternoon under the excuse of studying in the library, but neither of us was going to open a single book. We were there for them.

He was my best friend, my confidant. That fair-night between wine and laughter, his hand on my waist sparked something I had never felt for him.

It began as an academic interest in the brightest student in the group. What ended up happening in my office is still hard for me to put into words.

I let my guard down the moment he walked into the stall. I hadn’t come looking for any of it, but his voice ordered me to kneel, and I no longer knew how to say no.

I waited for the doors to close. Diego was already kissing his girlfriend without a care, and her sister kept glancing at me, biting her lip, not knowing what to do with her hands.

We went up to hang the laundry under any pretext. Among the water tanks on the rooftop, I discovered she was as impatient as I was to stop pretending.

I recognized the basket of clothes that wasn’t mine, and before I could think, my hand was already buried in his things. What happened next changed me from the inside.

I heard him on the phone say, “This old lady is ready.” I should have been offended. Instead, I felt myself get soaked right there against the bar.

She’d go up to her room, open the closet, and change knowing we were watching from the street. I was the youngest in the group, but I was the first to go through her door.

I’d sworn her virginity was nonnegotiable. That morning, in the apartment a friend lent me, she showed me just how far she was willing to go.

I hid on the locker-room mezzanine with Bruno pressed against my back. Below, my mother and her friend were undressing among the workers, and I couldn’t look away.

It began with a twisted ankle on the court and ended many weeks later, one night when her house was empty and there was no longer any reason to hold back.

I went looking for Bryan, but it was Andrés who stopped me in the street, grabbed me without shame, and set a date for the next day. I already knew what would happen and did nothing to stop it.

I’d watched her for years in ways I shouldn’t have. That night, after catching her with another man, she got into my car not knowing I had secrets of my own.