Sofia was ... how old? She was younger than my mother, but a few years older than me. This was true at the time of all women with breasts and hips, with skin I imagined soft as butter and lips that needed no lipstick to be kissed. All the women I saw on the bus, the train, on the street, everywhere.

What was it like, I wondered with desire, to be a woman who needs only look in the mirror and see her own breasts, begging to be sucked?

At the time it was said that the French Academy would adopt the word “Lollobrigidian” for the mountainous terrain of fleshy Alps covering actress Gina Lollobrigida’s torso. I wanted to camp out on such fleshy terrain and taste those nippled peaks.

Some guys spoke of girls who were my age and wanted it. They wanted to kiss and let your hands roam over their breasts, pinch their nipples, even suckle at them; they also ran their hands inside a boy’s pants and knew just how much pressure to apply to get a cock hard. Of course, I did not see any girls at my all-boys school, except in my mind.

There were classmates who said they fucked. Who did they fuck? That was a secret. These guys were cool, and girls just came to them and at first acted coy. Then, when they were called on it, they would make out like crazy. You knew you were going to fuck when they slid their hands into your underwear and pulled on your dick.

I thought it was just talk. Just like in the novels I read at the time: boys messed a bit with girls a little older but didn’t end up getting much action. When it came to actual sex, they got rejected, but what they imagined they might get, got me hard.

Sofia was no story.

She was real. She worked at the boardinghouse. She made the beds; took linen to the laundry room; hung it. She did everything in that gray skirt that reached her knees and that memorable little white blouse and the beige sweater whose fine wool took the shape of breasts that I happily would die just to hold in my hands.

The boardinghouse owner was a chubby fellow who loved tossing out comments with a double meaning to make his employee squirm. He teased her mercilessly, she ignored him. The innkeeper’s wife paid attention. She was a petite and bossy redhead with sparkling blue eyes that could shoot looks fiery enough to kill. I had overheard her complaining to a renter about it. How dare her husband show interest in a girl of twenty-three! I tucked that fact away as a treasure.

Twenty-three. That was Sofia’s age.

She was tall, about my height. I passed for eighteen, even though I was still an adolescent schoolboy. She was Mexican, but her light brown hair and brown eyes matched those of the owner and she was pale white of skin, but not bland-looking, and did not look clearly half-Indian, like the other Mexican maid. She seemed to me more like a princess facing hard times rather than an immigrant who was here maybe without papers.

Plus she was a tease.

One morning, for example, a man in his thirties who had recently moved in with his wife, stepped out onto the sidewalk on his way to work. There was the classic big-city gloom hanging on his face, and he walked out a little distracted. He passed Sofia wordlessly, almost tiptoeing as if to avoid her. Big mistake.

“Morning, señor,” reproached Sofia, with a shout, “or did we sleep together last night?”

A leer bloomed briefly on his face, then vanished. He stammered a greeting; Sofia shrugged and continued mopping.

That was when I decided I would ... what? I did not know. Touch her?

Following her around at a distance, I learned I was not the first one in the rooming house to have that idea.

There was a paunchy old roomer, with a seemingly eternal well-chewed toothpick sticking out of his mouth. He walked along the second-floor porch, spit on the left, spit on the right, ptooey here, ptooey there, all the way to his room. I watched as he watched her. Sofia gave no hint she was even aware of his presence, but a veiled look passed between them.

She brought tea to his room, which seemed to take much longer than it should. Other times it was dinner. Sometimes it was clothes of his she had mended.

It could not be, I told myself. I could not imagine my goddess princess having her breasts mauled by his paws and disrobing her with his pudgy fingers in order to lie with her. Such a man could not possibly get the attention of a woman who in her wake, just beneath the functional essence of soap, left a lingering odor that even I realized was the mysterious scent of a female.

One evening when mother was out with some friends, I stayed behind claiming I had to study for a test. I followed Sofia to the laundry room, where I had never set foot before. I looked at her, and my face lit up in a flaming blush.

“What do you want, muchacho?”

She’d seen me watching her. She’d tossed me an ambiguous look that had emboldened me.

I moved a hand toward her and inadvertently, or at least without premeditation, touched her blouse. I pulled my hand back. She stopped and stared. I made ​​a second attempt. The tips of my fingers landed around her waist, just a little below the navel. I was on fire. I stroked what was undoubtedly her flat stomach, longing to reach below her layers of clothes. She didn’t move. I was on the right track.

My hand moved down, down but wandering without a compass. If her torso had been the Mississippi River, my hand would have been roaming around St. Louis instead of the Delta. She said nothing as she let me continue my silly caresses of her lower stomach. She seemed like she might let me go further.

Finally, she reacted.

“What do you have there?” she said defiantly, her eyes pinned to my tenting crotch.

She opened my fly and reached in.

“You know what to do with this?” she challenged.

“Yes, I do,” I said equally defiantly.

I managed paw her right tit, groping it like it was an orange or tomato at a market stall. Her firm breasts stood proudly, not too large nor too small, a mound of well-contoured flesh that fit in my hand perfectly. I felt myself get hot and hard.

“I have things to do,” she said and abruptly left. I stood there open-mouthed and unfulfilled.

My mind burned at night with the memory of the chest under her sweater, her blouse, and her bra and the warmth my hand had felt, if only for an instant.

I knew it was not love. But there were things I craved to do with Sofia that made me feel like I never had felt before. Hot. Horny. I had placed my hand on her ... I would have said “boob” to my classmates; the ridiculous boys who spoke of going to the bathroom to jerk off at recess and then to fuck after school. Their motto: what you don’t exercise atrophies. I didn’t bother to tell them, as our biology class textbook taught us, that the ‘love muscle’ isn’t actually a muscle.

All I knew is that I would go crazy if I did not reach my goal. Sofia moved with a grace that seemed to make her a ballerina, even when performing the most mundane tasks. I had to bed her.

Not long after the laundry room incident, my mother had another outing, and I had homework to do. Sofia appeared by my desk with a plate of meat and mashed potatoes and a cup of tea. It was my mother’s orders, she told me. She put the tray on the table and started to move the notebooks and textbooks to make room for dinner. She picked up a fairly thick paperback.

“You study a lot?” she said.

I suddenly felt a tingle in my groin, and I ached to seize her, kiss her, run my hands all over her and then push her onto the nearby bed ... when I woke up from my sexual fantasy, Sofia had left. Once again, I had blown it.

In the end, because of all my thinking and worrying, I fell ill. The benefit of which meant that someone had to bring me lunch when my mother was at work.

Of course, it was Dora, the other girl, who brought my meals. She was young like Sofia but short, squat with not much of a figure except for prominent boobs that begged to be milked. If she had invited me to her bed, I would have stripped her and plunged right into her with little ceremony; but I didn’t actually desire her.

She was more serious and called me “young man.” That’s what the bus driver, and the whole world of adults called a kid at my awkward age. I could do her, but it wouldn’t be the same as the woman I was beginning to think of as ‘my Sophia.’

The days dragged until Thursday when I began to feel better. I kept insisting I was sick. One more day and it would be Friday and the weekend! The fact that it was Friday meant that Sofia had to bring my meals because it was Dora’s day off. When Sofia arrived, I was already hot. I imagined her naked, legs spread apart, breasts in my hands, begging me to fuck her.

“Bring the tray to my bed, please,” I asked.

She came, sat on the edge, and put the tray on my legs. Quickly, almost without thinking, I set the tray aside and threw myself on top of her. My demanding cock was thick as a horse’s. Lying on her, I rubbed myself against her legs. As soon as she felt my cock’s hardness, she would be unable to resist. So there I was, eyes locked on Sofia’s, my pajamas with an open fly and swollen penis, as I felt her entire body: her legs, her crotch, her breasts ... everything. I instinctively started to push my body onto hers, crotch to crotch, my hands caressing everything I felt this woman had to offer.

Then I opened my eyes and met her expression of expectation. Now what? I had no idea. I had to say something. My mind went blank.

We lay awkwardly like that for what seemed a very long time until I sputtered, “Wanted to weigh myself.”