Young

He offered him his hand in greeting and, before letting go, stroked his fingers with a slowness that could not have been an accident. Mateo knew that visit would change everything.

Mariana was nursing the baby by the fire, unaware that Catalina was watching from the other side of the cabin, a new heat rising under her skin.

My hands were sweaty and my heart was racing when he set down the controller, changed what was on the screen, and, without saying a word, looked at me as if waiting for me to make the first move.

We’d been flirting between monitors for a month when she took me to the back seat of my car. What I discovered weeks later changed everything, and not in the way I feared.

When the widow undid her bodice to nurse her son, Aurora stopped breathing. What burned through her body that night had no name, but it would never let her sleep again.

I promised him I would be his woman, no matter the cost. I didn’t know each dose would erase me until my own body no longer belonged to me.

One random dawn I turned on the camera and, without knowing it, opened the door to the only woman who learned how to make me tremble from six hundred kilometers away.

He had been sleeping pressed against her back for a week to soothe the baby. A week of pretending not to notice what was happening between them in the dark.

We hadn’t spoken in six years when his message lit up my screen. That tent, that shared blanket, still makes me tremble.

I thought she wouldn’t come. But the doorbell rang, I looked out the window, and there she was, with that innocent face that had kept me up for years.

Esa mañana mi hermana me prestó su nombre, su vestido y su vida entera. Esa tarde, un chico me miró como nadie me había mirado y, por primera vez, me reconocí.

She agreed to share her bed just so she wouldn’t lose me. She had no idea how far I was willing to go so I wouldn’t lose her.

When everyone fell asleep, Diego stayed next to me in bed. He said he wasn’t sure whether he liked men. What happened next was planned by neither of us.

Marina returned from university a grown woman, and amid laughter and games in the water, Adrián understood they were no longer the children who swam there every summer.

When I held her fever-hot against my chest, I remembered the nights her mouth knew mine as if she’d been learning me for years.

He had never seen a man like Lamine, and from the first day he knew he would do anything to get back into his home.

I lay naked on the table on purpose, not covering myself, just to see what he’d do when he came in with the hot oil.

She wore a size 36, they were white and perfect, and that sangria-soaked afternoon I decided I needed them in my mouth even if everyone was watching.

He’d been sneaking looks at my feet from the bus stop for ten minutes. What he didn’t know was that I planned to bring him upstairs and put him on his knees before nightfall.

When I followed the sound of her music to the old closet in my office, I didn’t expect to find slits that opened right onto the changing room where she undressed.