Young

I rang his bell with trembling hands. Twenty years older, a declared sadist, no mercy. And me, a virgin, begging him to begin the moment he closed the door.

She was twenty-five and, on paper, his stepmother. Dinner began with seafood and white wine, and neither of them planned to end it at his place.

She smelled of clean skin and expensive perfume. My tongue moved before my mind did, and when she turned and looked at me, I knew there was no turning back.

It was almost eleven at night and the whole building seemed empty. When I turned my chair around, all that was missing was someone opening that door. And they did.

Three hours earlier I’d bitten her neck under warm water. Now another man held her arm like she was his, and she didn’t pull away.

It was our first sleepover with her parents away. When she turned out the light, her hand found mine beneath the sheets, and I understood she’d waited years for that gesture.

When I went barefoot into the kitchen that morning and saw my father sitting there in his underwear, I knew something was going to break before the first coffee.

She was my assistant at the office, an impossible beauty who kept stealing my gaze. One night, over chat, I discovered everything her tight clothes had been hiding from me for weeks.

When I reached the clearing, Iker was already waiting, leaning against the rock, with that nervous smile he only ever gave me when we were alone.

When he told me he looked like the singer behind the counter when he dressed up, his mother smiled and I understood it wouldn’t stay a joke.

I’d known him for years, and nothing had ever happened between us—until that afternoon in the park, when he looked at me differently and everything began to change, very slowly.

She was twenty-one and the daughter of my best friend’s partner. I taught her equations; she taught me not to ask where she’d been on the nights she disappeared.

When Diego closed the van door and disappeared toward the supermarket lights, I knew I had half an hour to do everything I’d been imagining for months.

Camila wouldn’t meet my eyes from the far side of the pool. That night, when I went out to get some air among the orange trees, she followed me into the dark without me asking.

The first time was an accident. After that, every night he had company, I moved the armchair to the window and let my hand drift down on its own.

My husband doesn’t need to touch me first. He needs to see how other men look at me without permission, how they falter when I pass. Then he comes, and desire no longer fits in the bed.

We’d been waiting for months. My parents finally left, she arrived in dark blue lingerie and both of us trembling, and then the body decided otherwise.

I reached down without thinking, phone in the other hand and her photo filling the screen. I’d never wanted a woman like that before, and she didn’t even know I existed.

I met her through pixels and long-distance promises. She never knew that every night, alone in my hotel room by the sea, I imagined her beside me.