Young

She pushed me against the wall with a slow kiss, lowered her voice to a whisper, and told me I’d be a good girl. I never knew her name, but I obeyed her.

Every time she walked past my desk I lost track of what I was doing. I never imagined one careless mistake would expose everything I felt for her.

I’d never thought about Nora that way—until she brushed against me in the bar and I understood, from her smile, that she’d been thinking about it for a long time.

She had trained for five years and never competed. On that last afternoon, when her coach straddled her, she knew it wasn’t nerves making her shake.

I didn’t take my eyes off her when she came to the bed. I knew what was about to happen shouldn’t happen, and still I let her sit on my lap.

We arrived at the club after midnight, not quite sure what we were looking for. We found out when Mara came out of the water, looked at the two of us, and smiled as if she already knew us.

When Diego asked me to sit between the two front seats, I knew that trip was far from over—and that night, neither of the men was going home early.

When Marina led them to the sofa and told them to start nice and slow, I knew that dinner with the gym couple would not end like any other night.

She was naked on her boyfriend’s lap, still flushed, when she said it with a half-smile: “Since we’ve started… we could keep going.” No one expected that from her.

They were newlyweds and asked us to show them what we knew. My husband and I looked at each other: that night was going to be very long.

We were alone in the sand, naked and turned on, when I discovered two young men spying on us from the rocks. Romina just asked if I wanted to keep going.

I opened the door wearing a thin dress and nothing underneath. The boy delivering my flowers had no idea the bouquet was the least of it that hot afternoon.

He texted me at ten in the morning, and I knew that afternoon, with the house empty, I’d give him exactly what his girlfriend would never allow.

We had been each other’s first love. Ten years later she returned to the village, and I still didn’t know that night I’d learn to hate my best friend’s easy smile.

There was a week left before my wedding when I sat in the middle of the room and let a stranger convince me to go into that bedroom.

While he puts away his dominoes and heads to the club, she is already burning inside at the thought of what awaits her in that student apartment.

When Diego came out of the shower with his towel barely tied, Lucía knew that week was going to be very hard to endure in silence.

He sat on the sofa, a handspan from me, with that repentant-boy face that worked so well for him. And I, after weeks without sleep, knew I was going to forgive him again.

I went down to the loneliest cove to enjoy the sun, but behind that umbrella lying on its side there was something I wasn’t supposed to see. And an idea came to me.

That night, hidden in the shadow of the hallway, my husband learned that offering me to another man had a price: watching someone else give me what he no longer knew how to give.