Young

When the stall door opened a few inches, I knew Nuria was letting me look on purpose. What I couldn’t have imagined was how the night would end.

They called me the old maid with the cats, but no one in the neighborhood imagined what went on in my house every morning, every afternoon, and every night since that summer Tuesday.

When the coach asked her to observe the boys, she agreed with a smile. No one suspected the woman in the blue suit had already chosen her two favorites.

I only wanted to watch the sun go down and photograph the sea. Then I heard another bicycle approaching through the sand, and I knew that afternoon wouldn’t end like the others.

That afternoon, with the fan roaring and the house empty, my cousin looked at me differently and said he had something to prove to me. I had no idea how far he'd go.

I left the gym with my body still burning and took the dirt track to smoke in peace. I never expected that black car to stop right behind me.

Four months alone in the mountains had left him with a hunger no whisky could soothe. That night, behind the inn’s red curtain, three boys knew exactly how to take him in.

We came out of the showers wrapped in short towels, shaking with cold. In the jacuzzi, two strangers were waiting for us, smiling like they had just found dinner.

We lost the game and were walking toward the subway when a high-end car pulled up beside us. The man behind the wheel had a proposition neither of us expected.

It was only supposed to be the excuse his wife wouldn’t question. I never imagined I’d end up sitting across from them, unable to look away.

I climbed the stairs behind him, breathing in his cologne, not knowing his roommates would come back two hours earlier than expected.

The key turned in the lock at two in the morning and I was still beneath him, with no intention of covering myself. Four pairs of eyes watched me from the doorway.

For weeks I’d been pretending not to notice his looks, his legs spread on the sofa, the bulges he made so obvious. That night I came home early and stopped pretending.

As soon as his parents went into the kitchen, the boy grabbed his cock over his jeans. No one in that house had any idea how dinner was going to end.

He was the king of the pool and he knew it. When he called me to the locker room to laugh at me, I never imagined I’d be the one unable to stop looking at him.

I saw him alone at the kitchen bar, apart from the group, glued to his phone. One look was enough to know that afternoon he wasn’t going to stay as macho as he thought.

I knew my parents were dominant. What I didn’t know was how far they’d go to give me the gift I asked for that morning.

He challenged me to one last sprint with a condition neither of us intended to honor. But that night the pool was empty and nobody was watching us.

I saw him on the corner with the whistle between his teeth, warning the dealers. I couldn’t stop looking at him, and I knew I wouldn’t go home that dawn without him.

At fifty-three, single and bored, Ramiro discovered that supply and demand also work at three in the afternoon, on the sofa in his living room.