And we played at dreaming and made lists of the wishes we would fulfill when we were free. We dreamed about feeling love again, with a man’s skin next to ours. And we would hug and caress each other, and where was the line between the licit caress and the forbidden one? In that space of distorted contours and without time, it was difficult to identify it. (Like in Jail)

He slowly came closer and kissed her, first on the neck and then on the mouth. She responded without reserve, without control. It was a frenetic meeting. Arms and legs interlaced, he tried to lower the neck of her dress, she to unbutton his shirt. In the small space, they each struggled to take the initiative in the caresses until he embraced her vehemently, immobilizing her arms at her sides, and bending his knees slid down to the floor without letting go of her, held tight to her, kissing her over the dress that was slowly wrinkling with the pressure of his lips and teeth. (The Eighth Fold)

She followed that advice for some months. Rubén, like Mygdalia’s boyfriend, insisted. He wanted nothing more in this life than to make her his, and Carmina heard her friend’s voice, “Don’t bring the front part into it.” But one Friday at five in the morning, waiting anxiously for Saturday to dawn, she was reading Juana de Ibarbouro’s Take Me Now, Since It’s Still Early, and she decided she wanted to “be” Rubén Carretero’s. She decided it because she couldn’t imagine that in the future she would want something as intensely as she wanted to feel Rubén inside her this sleepless early morning, and she thought that the rest of her life she would regret not having obeyed such a strong demand from her body. (Blue Like Bluing)

She was so tired of crazy people. So incredibly tired. And she saw herself ages ago, the after-dinner beer bottle empty, listening to Mark’s amorous joys and sorrows. And she remembered the night of a full moon when she had wanted him to hear her confessions, and how he had refused to listen to them, saying that it wasn’t worth it to relive the stories of past loves. She remembered Ada’s crazy jealousies, her weak act of love, the night that she chased her around the house with a knife, on coming back from studying for her master’s exams with a friend from school, married and in love with her husband. She saw Diana throwing tomatoes, lettuce leaves, radishes, cucumbers, the whole salad out the window because she had had lunch with Ada six months after ending the relationship with her ex-lover. She remembered Consuelo’s incurable need to comfort every woman who crossed her path, in bed. She remembered Silvia, for whom she was always guilty until she could demonstrate her innocence one hundred percent, and even then she was never convinced. She even thought about Shrinivas, who she had only been with a weekend, but hey, he’d made her suffer quite a bit by being so good for two days and then disappearing from her life forever. And now this last one, Rocío, lying and slanderous. Her mother would have said that the luck that she’d had would draw tears from a stone. She would have said it was a fucking mess. (Deepest Seed of the Lemon).