Young

I didn’t realize what kind of neighborhood I’d wandered into until Valeria stopped in front of the hostel. Then I understood everything—and went in anyway.

When the weight of his body sank the mattress behind my back, I knew it wasn’t my boyfriend. And I knew I wasn’t going to do anything to stop him.

Daniela was twenty, lived on the fourth floor, and had never been with a woman. That day, all of that changed at once.

I had never thought about it until my new friends mentioned it. That night, alone in my room, curiosity won out over fear.

My son organized the evening without telling me his plans. I understood when he took his guest to the bedroom and left me alone on the sofa with his friend.

That morning the shower lasted nearly an hour. It began with soap and ended with something I had never quite dared to discover before.

I recognized the surname as soon as she said it. Two years earlier I’d been with her aunt, and now she was looking at me with those same dark eyes and that small mouth.

The girls from the team had gone out to see the city. I was alone in the room when someone knocked. It was him, with the smile that had made me nervous since the first Wednesday.

We were naked when the doorbell rang. Camila went to answer, and I dressed in a hurry. What happened next changed everything between us.

When Sofía walked through the door of my apartment, she didn’t know exactly what was waiting for her. Her mother had planned everything weeks in advance.

When she came up to the pool that afternoon and asked if I had ever been with a woman, I knew that summer was going to be different.

They were cousins, they rarely saw each other, and that night they were alone in the living room while everyone slept. Nothing should have happened. Almost nothing did.

I’d been talking to him on the app for weeks, but until that night we’d never met. I had his body burned into my mind and an erection that wouldn’t let me think.

She had spent weeks unable to get him out of her head. That skinny boy in the park, with charcoal-stained hands and that direct gaze that asked no one’s permission.

She had never been with anyone. I was her cousin. What began as a family gathering ended at dawn when she whispered that she had been waiting for me all night.

I met Andrés, with that smile that undid me. Sofía wasn’t home. I hadn’t come for her anyway.

Sofía weighed two hundred pounds of pure authority. Renata understood that the night an old folder changed the balance of power between them forever.

The gym owner asked her to take all her clothes off. I nodded calmly and waited. What happened next was better than any fantasy.

I spent two hours in her sitting room answering questions as if it were a job interview. In a way, it was.

He heard her go into the bathroom at the same hour three nights in a row. On the fourth, he stopped in the hallway. Just to look once, he told himself.