Now, it appeared to me that gay men would rather entertain sex without chemistry than the grueling burden of getting to know each other. This was new for me. Being closeted had made my pursuits of vaginal intercourse gradual, to say the least. Usually, a girl would have to throw herself on top of me. I never felt like I had the option to say no then, and to a certain extent, I didn't now.

I wasn’t opposed to casual sex, but I wanted romance, too. I craved everything: the white picket fence with a sex swing inside the house.

Our lives began in the Colombian capital of Bogotá simultaneously, my heart beating to the same rhythm as three others. The media celebrated the birth of my brothers and me in 1994 as if it were a miracle. It's weird to receive praise for just being born, but newspapers and magazines printed the news as such: ​"The first quadruplets safely delivered in 30 years."

A short story about unrequited love, self-denial, and the influential power of coincidence.

He invites you to come over but doesn’t know who you are. He likes the skin you’re wearing, the bone structure beneath it. Would revealing more than that even be to your benefit? His chest looks hard, but his eyes seem soft, like light blue almonds of kindness. The conversation’s promisingly flirtatious, you think, as much as two foreign bodies can when they are 1,479 feet away.

“Now?” He says, sharing an address but not his name.

Knocking shyly on the stranger’s door, he appears cuter in pers