Young

We were coming back to the hotel at three in the morning, having gotten nowhere with the guys. What happened once we closed the door changed our friendship forever.

When I got into the car that morning and saw her alone at the wheel, I knew the weekend wouldn’t be innocent in the slightest.

I went downstairs barefoot for a glass of water, convinced I was alone. I saw the light on in the office and knew that morning wasn’t going to end the way it had begun.

When she rang the doorbell with two bottles of wine and that smile, I knew our unfinished conversation at the bar would finally end on my couch.

I recognized him the moment he turned around. He was going to be my gym teacher, and at the first touch of his hands on my back, I knew that day wasn’t ending there.

That woman looked me up and down, smiled, and said the line that would change my life: with a little makeup, I could pass for a real little girl.

When my mother finally decided to marry, I never imagined the trip to the island with my future stepsister would reveal the family’s deepest secret.

They said he wasn’t fit to be the lead. But that ass, the producer murmured with the camera on him, that ass has a future in this industry.

When the classroom emptied, he stayed in front of my desk with a clumsy excuse about an exercise he already knew how to do. And I stopped pretending.

Camila closed the blind without taking her eyes off me, and when I got into bed, I could think of nothing else but what she had said about my mother.

The theater was almost empty and the movie was just an excuse: what mattered to me was her hand moving up my thigh in the darkness of the back row.

We had grown up sleeping in adjoining rooms, until one night a sound on the other side of the wall made me understand I no longer looked at her like a sister.

I locked the door and turned on the laptop, letting my imagination finish what a stranger had started in the crush of the platform.

I peeked out without thinking and saw the three of them bathing naked in the neighbor’s pool. That same night I realized spying could also be a way of touching.

I had never touched myself. But that night, with the phone screen lighting my face, my fingers went down on their own and I didn’t want them to stop.

When Sofía opened that closet box, I knew the night wouldn’t end like the others. And yet I didn’t move.

When they put me in that cell, I never imagined two strangers would turn it into the scene where I learned what it meant to surrender to desire and pleasure.

My roommate was asleep when he knocked with a bouquet of freesias. I opened the door in a sweater and barefoot. That night I promised never to let another man into my bed.

I ordered a piña colada at the beach bar, and the waiter brought it with a smile. By the second day, I knew his service went far beyond the bar.