A VIRGIN’S DIARY

The sound reached me before I'd even closed the front door.

A rhythm. Low. Insistent. Coming from somewhere down the hall.

I froze, keys still in the lock. The apartment had been silent when I walked in — the kind of silence that makes you believe you're alone. Now it wasn't.

My first thought was that something was wrong. My feet moved before my brain could stop them, pulling me down the corridor instead of away from it.

The door to my cousin's room was open. Not all the way. Just enough.

I shouldn't have looked. I know that now. But my body didn't ask for permission. My eyes went there on their own, and for one full second I saw everything I was never meant to see.

Her eyes were open, but she wasn't looking at anything. Her mouth was open too; no words, only that broken, uneven rhythm of breath. Skin against skin, slick with sweat, moving together like a single pulse. A voice I had known my whole life, twisted into sounds I had never heard it make.

My heart slammed once, hard, like it was trying to escape my chest. Heat crawled up my neck. My throat closed so fast I choked on the breath I hadn't finished taking.

I don't remember walking to my room. One second I was in the hallway. The next, the door was shut behind me and my back was pressed against it, pulse still wild.

So that's it, I thought. That's what they've all been talking about.

But that wasn't the thought that scared me.

This one was: why did it sound like that?

Not soft. Not sweet. Not the way I had always pictured it; two people, careful, almost shy with each other. It sounded urgent. Almost violent. My cousin, who laughs at her own jokes before she even finishes them, who cries during every single family photo, had sounded like a stranger in there. Someone I didn't know at all.

I thought about my uncle, telling the same three jokes at every dinner, laughing hardest at his own punchlines. I thought about the boys from orientation who go red in the face when a girl says hello. Ordinary people. Kind people.

What happens to all of that, behind a closed door?

What's underneath it?

My hands were still shaking when I grabbed the notebook off my desk. The one for lectures. Still blank. Still smelling like new paper.

I didn't think. I just opened it and started writing before I could talk myself out of it.

Day One.

I stopped. The two words looked too small on the page.

I couldn't stay sitting. I stood up, walked to the mirror above my desk, and stared at my own face like I was searching for evidence. My eyes looked the same. My mouth looked the same. Nothing on the surface had changed.

I lifted my hand and touched the side of my neck, then my lower lip, as if the heat still burning under my skin might show. It didn't.

For a second I wondered if other people would be able to see it on me the way I had seen it on her. If something had cracked open inside me, and it was already visible.

I went back to the bed, picked up the pen again, and wrote one more line under Day One:

People change when they think no one is watching. I need to understand how.

Then—

A knock at my door.

Three sharp raps, close together. Not soft. Not casual.

Then nothing. A silence that stretched a second too long — the kind that told me whoever was on the other side was listening just as hard as I was.

My whole body went still. The pen froze against the page. I realized, a beat too late, that I'd stopped breathing.