Young

There were five empty seats on the bus and she still chose mine. She smiled, settled the shawl over her lap, and I knew something was about to begin before we even left.

I was still dripping from the shower when she walked into the bathroom without knocking, wearing that crooked smile she’d been avoiding me with for weeks.

He’d wanted those lips in silence for years. That night, fighting over the console controller, his mouth fell on mine and everything shattered.

We were alone that March siesta, and she was still in her uniform. I don’t know how we went from tickling on the sofa to something else.

I came back from months in Patagonia and found her sitting in the kitchen at one in the morning, glass in hand, with that look that promised a fight.

The shop was empty at three in the afternoon. When he pulled the shutter down and led me to the fitting room, I knew that siesta wouldn’t be like any other.

I got out of the car just to pick up a package, and there he was—the skinny boy who used to watch me in a bikini—now a man, looking at me like he still had a thousand questions.

I booked the room three weeks early. When she bit her lip on the second-floor landing, I knew there was no going back for either of us.

When Camila came out of the room dressed as a devil with a trident in her hand, I knew we weren’t going to sleep virgins that night.

When I bent down to pick up a magazine from the lowest shelf, I felt the cold air rush between my legs. Three pairs of eyes rose at once. I didn’t pull down my skirt.

Whenever I enter a fitting room, I leave the curtain slightly open. The woman watching never knows I’m looking for her—and almost always, one of them plays along.

I asked her to palpate the muscles in my neck to study anatomy. I didn’t expect her to end the lesson by turning my face and kissing me as if she’d been wanting it for years.

She accepted the service as a one-time fantasy, but she never imagined that stranger would lead her to discover orgasms she didn’t even know her body could have.

When I realized that what turned me on wasn’t looking but being watched, I sought out the empty shed behind my house on New Year’s Eve and deliberately dropped my panties.

Catalina came into the room at three in the morning, took off her dress without looking at me, and said she didn’t want to sleep alone in the cold.

I met him online when I was sixteen. Two years later, one August morning, he texted me that he was traveling to the capital and that it was my only chance to see him again.

The glassed-in terrace lets my silhouette show from the outside. That morning, while I was hanging laundry naked, I heard two girls’ voices laughing right below my window.

Marina had spent months being invisible to her husband. Her nephew looked at her the only way she needed to be looked at. That night, the cards made a decision.

Marcos never said anything without purpose. But that afternoon in the woods, every word he spoke was a line inviting me to cross with no way back.

When he opened the door wearing only his shirt, I knew we weren’t going to talk much that afternoon. And I wasn’t wrong at all.