Aguascalientes
All around her were familiar shapes... posters and a crucifix on the wall, the small desk where she'd studied, the clothes rail that was overflow for her wardrobe.
But they all seemed alien, had done since she'd returned from Tulum.
They belonged to someone simpler, someone who hadn't experienced what Luisa had three weeks before in Bel's hotel room.
Luisa rolled onto her side, kicking her blanket off in the night time warmth in a desperate attempt to sleep.
Her body remembered everything... Bel's hands and words guiding her, showing her pleasure that she'd not known was possible, the way their bodies matched together so perfectly.
The physical memory was so vivid, so clear, it haunted her waking moments and her dreams.
But... physical memory was one thing. The emotional side, that had left Luisa a deeply confused woman.
Who was she now? What did that night mean?
These questions circled through her mind relentlessly.
She'd always assumed certain things about her life.
She'd marry a local man, presumably her current boyfriend Miguel, have children, live a life not so different from her mother's albeit hopefully after she'd had a few years to try to make something from her modelling career.
These were such fundamental assumptions that they were axiomatic to Luisa.
It was simply who someone with her upbringing in her town with her parents would become.
Bel, in one night, had shattered all of that. It was as if the laws of nature themself had changed.
Am I a lesbian? That was the question that Luisa kept coming back to, and she had no frame of reference to guide her.
The word itself felt strange in her mind, fraught with connotations that she barely understood.
A Catholic upbringing and a Catholic education had been silent on the subject of homosexuality beyond its sinful nature, and as a result she had no exposure to that world.
Everyone, literally everyone that she had grown up with was strictly heterosexual, and for someone in their community to be gay, whether a man or woman, was so out there as to be inconceivable.
Luisa wondered if she was an aberration, the one in a thousand who slipped through the cracks.
Yet she had a boyfriend, Miguel. Kind and patient, he'd driven her to the airport to go to Tulum, collected her when she returned too, had been the model boyfriend since she'd returned.
She'd been with him for nearly two years, enjoyed being with him, emotionally and physically.
Not perhaps with the same electric intensity that she'd experienced with Bel, but enough that she couldn't dismiss their connection as anything other than genuine.
But yet... but yet... if she wasn't a lesbian, how was it that all Luisa had been able to think about since she returned from Tulum was Bel and that incredible night with her?
Giving up on sleep, Luisa switched on her bedside lamp and pulled out her laptop, a gift from her parents intended for her to use when she eventually went to university as they desperately hoped she would.
Opening a browser tab, her fingers hovered over the keyboard. What should she even search for?
Finally, she typed: Straight woman with boyfriend but had sex with woman
The results were overwhelming and utterly unhelpful, a mix of pornography, relationship advice columns focused on cheating rather than sexuality, and forum posts from men fantasising about their girlfriends sleeping with other women.
Nothing, not a single thing, that spoke to her fundamental question. .. was she a lesbian?
She tried again: Am I a lesbian quiz
This returned more quizzes than she could count, all in various bright tones and casual language. She chose one at random, answering questions about celebrity crushes and whether she liked dungarees, to get the result of 'You might be bi-curious'. No shit, she thought, sighing in frustration.
A third attempt: How do you know if you're attracted to women?
This was better, and she finally started to make some headway.
Articles from LGBTQ+ websites, personal testimonies from women who'd come out, scientific analysis of sexuality as a spectrum rather than a binary classification.
.. Luisa disappeared down the rabbit hole for hours, absorbing terminology that she'd never encountered before, perspectives she'd never considered, giving her new tools to understand what she'd experienced.
She read until dawn, engrossed, before she finally felt so tired that she couldn't help but sleep.
Her reading had left her with more new questions than answers, but one thing she was sure of by then.
.. she was somewhere on that spectrum of sexuality that wasn't strictly heterosexual, not after the emotional intensity of that experience with Bel.
The big question, though, was where on that spectrum did she sit and what did it mean for her current relationship?
Over those weeks she heard nothing from Bel, not that she expected to really, she’d known that what they did was a one night only sort of thing, but that didn’t stop her from secretly hoping and, indeed, fantasising…
Luisa’s career started to take off over the months that followed, in part down to something that the people on the Tulum shoot had seen in her, and also in part she suspected down to Bel’s influence in the background.
Despite no direct contact with her she’d come through on her promise of getting her LA agent to make contact with Luisa and, with representation there, the good jobs started to come in.
Luisa would eagerly await the call sheets for each photo shoot in the hope that Bel’s name would be on it.
Still eighteen and relatively na?ve, Luisa couldn’t have really put her finger on why other than maybe a vague hope that something would happen if she saw her, but when she looked back on it in the years to come she realised that she’d developed a good old fashioned crush on Bel.
Luckily, in hindsight, they weren’t booked to the same jobs throughout that time…
luckily, because Luisa would have probably made a fool of herself, throwing herself at Bel.
And if there was one thing that Luisa learned about Bel over the years that followed it was that she wanted what she wasn’t supposed to be able to have, not what was there on a plate for her.
***
As her professional life was on the up, so her personal life was heading in the opposite direction, for several reasons.
To start with both her parents and Miguel couldn’t hide their disappointment that she was starting to do well, so much so that when she was away modelling, a frequent occurrence by then, she was sure that they were talking to each other disapprovingly about her choices.
Her parents she wasn’t surprised about, they’d always been deeply conservative and wanted her to get married young and become a local teacher, be an upstanding pillar of the community and their church, not chasing these high fashion dreams with what they presumably imagined were a group of undesirables and degenerates.
Miguel, though, surprised her. He’d been supportive of her modelling since they’d first met but now, she was finding, he was growing sceptical, making cynical comments about the industry and asking Luisa openly about whether she was doing the right thing pursuing it as a career.
For her part, Luisa was starting to wonder just a little whether Miguel, deep down, liked the idea of dating a model, or indeed of his friends knowing he was dating a model, more than he liked the reality now that she was away a lot, and while they still had their moments she could feel that there was a distance growing between them and their lives.
But then also thrown into the mix was Luisa’s own confusion as to what she was now.
Was she a lesbian? Was she a straight woman who’d experimented as a one off?
Was she something in the middle? She was clueless and hadn’t found anything out really in the months since that sleepless night asking her laptop for help.
She knew that she still got pleasure from being with Miguel, although pleasure that didn’t come remotely close to that first time that Bel had touched her, the memory of which even months later left her breathless.
But when she was alone, when she let her thoughts wander and let her hands roam over her body, she didn’t think about men, not any more.
She thought about women, and not just Bel…
she imagined doing things with a variety of other women, some she knew, some she didn’t, and found herself aching with desire for these unreachable women.
So… maybe just a phase? She’d read that that can happen. But if it was a phase, it was pretty all consuming.