#12:

"You came!" the excited birthday boy greeted me.
"Yeah." I answered dryly." It would have been better if you had warned me that I should wear a bikini."
Ramses drew an O with his lips, nervously ruffled his hair with one hand and I swear he even blushed.
"I forgot, I didn't tell you… sorry."
"It doesn't matter. Here's my gift." - I extended the small box lined with colored paper. Ramses took it and waved it a couple of times against his ear.
"What is it?" he asked curiously.
“Open it."
With a jerk he tore the wrapper and ...
"Another key chain?" he muttered and I smiled mockingly. "Shit! We have so many that sometimes I don't know which is which.
"That's why mine is different. Look."
From between his hands I moved the gift in this and that direction, showing him what I meant. The key chain I had bought for him showed the image of a stethoscope on one side and the medical caduceus on the other.
"I don't think any of the ones you already have are like this."
Ramses grinned at me from ear to ear.
"It's perfect, too bad my brothers won't let me keep it. It will be the third world war over this little item, i tell you. But thank you, though.
So saying, he gave me a fast tiny peck on the lips.
I frowned, with the intention of asking him to explain the strange comment he'd just made, but he left me speechless, turning his back on me and going to wrestle with a tray full of sandwiches from the hands of a girl.
"Are you hungry?" Lucía appeared next to me, once again.
I did not take my eyes off Ramses and his friend, they were playing in a way that made evident the great familiarity between them.
"No, thanks."
Lucía followed the direction of my gaze and shook her head.
"The girl is my daughter, Violeta. She had hernia surgery a month ago and she's fine now, but Ramses keeps treating her like an invalid."
I didn't comment, I just nodded, watching Ramses take the tray from the girl's hands, pick her up in his arms and jump into the pool with her as she screamed at the top of her lungs.
"They love each other a lot. They have practically grown up together, like brother and sister.'' Lucía continued.
Yet I watched them emerge from under the water, laugh together like couple of maniacs and then play chase around the pool. Their behavior seemed quite innocent, but I don't know why I couldn't help thinking that they liked each other. They smiled too much at each other, they looked at each other too much, in short…I noticed a certain tension between them.
Lucía returned to the kitchen to prepare more things to eat as she told me, and I took the opportunity to spy on the partygoers more closely. Almost all were students of Ramses's year, whom I knew by sight but many of the same year were also present.
There were loungers, on the other side of the pool, and Mark and Matt sat on them respectively.
Matt had a girl sitting on his knee and was playing a game of passing beer from his mouth to hers.
Has it ever happened to you that you don't like a person, but do you know that they like you and you get offended when you see it with another even if you don't want it for yourself? That was just what happened to me. I swear I was outraged. I felt very bad seeing him playing with her, it wasn't jealousy per se, rather I felt as if my self-esteem had dropped or something…I don't know, it's hard to explain.
Human beings are complex like that. Sometimes we don't want someone, but we also don't want them to be with someone else.
Mark, on the other hand, drank from his bottle and scowled at the girl who sat across from him on his lounger, who tried to kiss him every five minutes.
I didn't know Mark had a girlfriend, I thought. Then the girl turned around and my stomach clenched in disgust. It was Mildred.
But… didn't she like Yunior? Look at her there after calling me a vulture when she's the one groping with one of the late Amalia's exes. Horror!
I turned my back on the Montalvo show and went back to the kitchen, explained to Lucía that I was going to the bathroom and took advantage of the fact that everyone was outside in the patio to go quietly to Mark's room. Yep, despite all the revelry he hadn't forgotten the real reason he had attended the party.
*****
I found the door open, luckily. I walked in and stopped for a second thinking that what I was doing was wrong, but I remembered that someone had tried to suffocate me with a pillow and the little angel on my shoulder turned into a little devil instantly.
I went to the nightstand and opened the drawers one by one without finding anything suspicious, there was only underwear in some and a wad of documents inside the last one.
I was heading towards the closet when I heard voices, and I almost got paralyzed with fear. Mark and Mildred were coming down the hall!
I didn't have time to leave the room without being seen, so I did the first thing that occurred to me. I hid under the bed. The door opened and I could hear the characteristic sound of a risqué kissing.
"I don't like you and I don't like you, this is just random sex, okay?" Mark muttered.
"Exactly," Mildred replied, and the weight of both of them sank the mattress of the bed under which I was hiding.
The next twenty minutes were really traumatic for me.
I placed one of my hands over my mouth so as not to produce the slightest sound while they kissed, she announced that she would put a condom on him and they proceeded to… well, you know, that intense physical exercise, characterized by the exchange of bodily fluids, which it should end with an orgasm.
Yeap.
She squealed every once in a while, while he snarled and hissed from time to time.
All of that seemed so strange to me, it's just that I'm a very romantic girl, one of those who likes long foreplays, caresses, kisses and that they talk in my ear all the time. What was happening right above me was only physical, kind of cold... and maybe another girl, one more... perverted, would have been turned on by that, but not me.
Disgust, was what it all made feel.
When the jumping and squeaking of the bed stopped, he told her to go away. She collected her things, got dressed and went out, then he took a bath and then left the room. I felt sorry for Mildred. At that moment I understood that Mark had used her and she had used him without anything else between them, I am no sexual expert but I believe that there is nothing like having sex with a person for whom you feel something, attraction at least.
And there is nothing more beautiful than staying for several minutes being hugged and kissed by the person you have just been with... at least I adore that.
I waited a few minutes and crawled out from under the bed. Taking special care not to look at the crumpled sheets or inside the trash can.
Opening the closet, I saw that almost everything was occupied by clothes hangers, I opened one of the drawers and the pang in my stomach returned.
Inside it, broken, as if someone had cutted them open, I found the three padlocks with which until very recently I'd kept closed what had been my door.