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 naïve, 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.
Cancun
It was a shoot in Cancun where it all came to a head, roughly six months after Tulum.
Again, no sign of Bel on the call sheet.
Again, as had often been the case recently, a difficult drive with Miguel to the airport and a strained parting, one where she’d told him she loved him, out of a sense of duty as much as anything else, and he’d simply wished her a good time, his annoyance at her going away for work again clear to see.
Nadia caught her attention immediately when Luisa arrived on location. Brazilian, in her mid-twenties, enough of a name that Luisa knew who she was when she saw her, a stereotypically beautiful woman from that part of the world with the same confident ease in her own body that Bel had. Luisa was drawn to her in a way that she couldn’t rationally explain, something about the way that Nadia was so tactile with everyone, drawing them into her world with little touches. That and her eyes,dazzling blue eyes in a deeply tanned face that held your attention when you talked to her.
Personality-wise she was the polar opposite of Bel, warm with strangers as much as friends, the life and soul of the party by reputation.
At dinner that night Luisa used all of her tricks to sit next to Nadia, before laughing loudly, probably a little too loudly, at all her jokes, and mirroring her little touches, a not too subtle brush of the fingers as they both reached for the water jug, a hand resting on Nadia’s forearm for a few seconds too long after confiding in her about something relatively trivial.
Luisa knew that she wasn’t being subtle, but subtlety didn’t seem necessary in this world that felt like it was a million miles from Aguascalientes. When the group moved to the hotel bar Luisa made sure that she was in Nadia’s orbit, and before long they had a few moments alone.
Luisa didn’t have to wait long.
“What to get out of here?” Nadia asked quietly but firmly, her accent making the words sound more seductive than they might otherwise have been, the expression on her face leaving little doubt that she didn’t mean going for a drink somewhere else.
Luisa’s heart raced as she nodded, realising as she did that this could be it… this could be the night that she worked out whether she was a lesbian or Bel was just a one off. She followed Nadia to the lift, and as the doors closed she silently slipped off her bracelet, a gift from Miguel for her eighteenth birthday, and tucked it away in a pocket, creating a boundary between her life at home and whatever this was about to be.
Nadia's room was nearly identical to Luisa’s, generic luxury made personal only by the scattered belongings of a woman constantly traveling… expensive skincare arranged on the bathroom counter, a silk robe draped over a chair, a battered paperback on the nightstand.
When Nadia kissed Luisa she was confident, taking the lead. Very definitely not Nadia’s first time with a woman, that was for sure. Luisa responded eagerly, waiting for the electric current she'd felt with Bel to surge through her. Nadia’s hands moved to her hips, drawing her closer, and Luisa pressed against her, trying to accelerate things, to reach that point of no return where thought dissolved into pure sensation.
But something just wasn’t clicking. The mechanics were there… her mouth was soft, her body warm against Luisa’s, they were both doing everything right… but the chemistry was missing. When her hand slid beneath Luisa’s shirt, cupping her breast, the touch felt nice but deliberate, like they were both following a script they’d memorised but didn’t fully believe in.
Still, she persisted.I'll see where this goes,thought Luisa, appreciating that as it was only her second time with another woman she still had plenty to learn. Maybe the magic happened later, maybe the art was in the foreplay.
