Young

The box hidden under the tree wasn’t for me. It was for her, and when she asked me to teach her how to use it, I knew the night would be nothing like we planned.

The alarm went off at ten and I wasn’t getting up. What I didn’t know was that that Saturday I’d discover how much I can want myself when no one is watching.

I only wanted to get home. But his honey-colored eyes and that half-smile of a boy who knows what he wants made me change course in the middle of the station.

I stormed upstairs to scold her for the noise, but when I opened the door and saw her like that, I was the one left speechless and powerless.

I asked for a foot massage almost as a joke. I never imagined that night, by the fire and with wine in me, my father and my cousin would stop holding back.

The steam came out with her wrapped in a tiny towel, and for the first time in months I felt like picking up a brush. What came next should never have happened.

With the house all to ourselves and him turned away among the rose bushes, I knew that afternoon I wouldn’t be satisfied with just watching him from the window.

Her father watched her from the pool’s edge, and for the first time she wondered what hid behind that gaze that followed her with every stroke.

In the school showers I always looked on the sly. That afternoon, on my way back from training, Mateo asked me the question I’d been waiting for for years.

When I saw her come down through the lobby at six in the morning, with a suitcase bigger than she was, I knew that summer would be unlike any other.

My mind told me never to go back. My body remembered those lips and wouldn’t let me sleep. On the third day, I dialed his number.

I knew him when he was shy and fragile, when his name was Tomás. Ten years later he came back through the door in a miniskirt, with a smile that promised to ruin my summer.

When I saw her face on the entrance camera, I knew the prey had followed the trail to the den. All that remained was deciding whether to let her cross the line.

That afternoon at the hospital, my mother took my hand and whispered a favor I never imagined hearing from her lips.

I went up to change into something more daring while they showered. By then I already knew that if I went downstairs to the kitchen, I wouldn’t be able to hold myself back.

Her mother saw us playing around in bed and, instead of yelling, smiled at me. That same night I understood that nothing in that house was innocent—and I didn’t want to be innocent either.

I asked her to put on the shortest shorts she owned. I wanted to see how the workers looked at her as she walked by, and how she endured the whole day in that outfit.