Young

She arrived with a backpack on her shoulder and a red pacifier between her lips. She had just turned twenty-two and laughed as if she already knew everything that would happen next.

Half-drunk beside the stream, I searched my pocket for the wipes and pulled out something that shouldn’t have been there. Bad decisions are always the ones you remember best.

There were eight of us executives on a sailboat in the sun. The tension had been building in the office for months. When we anchored in that deserted cove in Menorca, there was no turning back.

I’d go down in the middle of the night to the mattress on the floor where he slept, pull the sheets over us, and stay there until he finished. We were almost never caught.

We’d been talking for three weeks on the phone. When I finally opened the door, I knew that night wouldn’t end with a simple kiss.

I closed the fridge slowly, a syringe in my hand. Only I knew what I was about to do in that kitchen.

Every Friday, she dressed for me: nothing beneath her dress, fingers between her legs on the way to the theater, and the car hood as our bed in the dark.

When I opened the door, the first thing I noticed was his lips. The second was how he looked at me before coming in. I already knew how the afternoon was going to end.

I was bleeding inside my torn stockings, but I kept walking to his door. I needed to look him in the eyes and know whether what I felt was mutual.

At three in the morning I went to the bathroom with her smell still on my skin, and when I came back to bed I saw a slit of light under the door across the hall. Someone was watching us.

When Roberto pressed against Claudia on the dance floor, I knew that vacation wasn’t going to be what we’d imagined.

My shoes had worn holes through my pantyhose, and every step burned like penance, but I didn’t stop until I rang his bell.

When that twenty-year-old boy appeared in my doorway for the second time, hands trembling and voice breaking, I knew the night was about to change.

I’d been staring at his arms for weeks. The night of the concert, between beers and shadows, I decided to go over. What happened next changed every rule.

When he looked up and caught me staring at him in the locker room, something shifted between us. I just didn’t know exactly what, or how far it would go.

My parents were gone. The afternoon was long and the desire unbearable. When the name 'Valeria_sola' appeared on the list, I knew that day would be different.

I had tried on the plaid skirt and the shirt knotted at my navel a hundred times in my head. That afternoon, with the house empty, I finally did it for real.

She was famous, perfect, and in her fifties. I was the striker of the moment. That night I went up to her suite and learned what it means to play above your league.

I’d been tossing and turning for two hours. I knew he was sleeping three doors down, and that night, for the first time, I couldn’t pretend.

I knew it wasn’t sensible. I circled the bridge anyway, climbed down the wall, and found him sleeping exactly where I’d left him.