Young

I’d spent years looking for someone willing to truly watch me, not through a screen. When Lucía said yes, I knew I’d never forget that day.

Valentina was lying on the bed in a turquoise top and lace panties. When she looked at me with that smile, something inside me broke.

My grandmother, my mother, and I thought that trip to the mountains would be the break we needed. Until the storm trapped us with two strangers.

When I clung to his waist on the first curve, I knew I wasn’t going to behave like his father’s wife that night. He was ten years younger than him.

We had spent our whole lives doing the right thing. Then suddenly it was three in the morning, and the three strangers were still in the house.

She had just had her first experience with another woman when two strangers appeared through the zipper, and she realized the night was only beginning.

The back curtain didn’t close properly, and the voice I heard from the bedroom wasn’t the neighborhood Carla who greeted me every morning.

I went down to the bar courtyard at two in the morning because I couldn’t breathe in my room. I never imagined I’d follow her to the little room out back.

They were my son’s friends. They were twenty years old and looked at me like I was the only thing they wanted in the world. I should have gone upstairs alone. I didn’t.

I read the letter in the dressing room with trembling hands. The offer was indecent, the sum obscene. I showed my husband, expecting fury; he smiled and told me to accept.

Three days had passed since the first time. Three days of imagining him, of feeling the burn every time she closed her eyes. That afternoon the club would be empty.

When the air returned to my lungs and he turned on the red camera, I knew that night of domination had only just begun and I could no longer go back.

I went down to the park with the bills ready, but he demanded something different. If I said no, they’d break my son’s face again tomorrow.

When I went to the park to confront the boy extorting my son, I never imagined I’d be the one paying the most intimate price.

When he showed up at my door thinking he was coming to help me, I already had everything planned. He was twenty and as naive as someone who doesn’t know what’s waiting for him.

For twelve years, no one had looked at her like that. Rodrigo was twenty, he came with a ladder and a smile, and all she wanted was for him to fix her roof.

I was 18, so shy I had never touched a woman. What started as tutoring ended up being my real initiation.

The hallway was dark when I finally decided to push open his door. I knew what it meant to walk in. And I went in anyway.

I arrived at the hotel trembling, convinced it would only be photos. When the second brother walked in, I knew that night wouldn’t end as planned.

When we pulled up beside them, the girl was already moving her hips to the song. Mateo had painted nails. That trip wasn’t going to end the way we’d planned.