Playing Charades in Miami

by Lola Koi

"Mami... take off your clothes," he told me in Spanish as soon as we had escaped from the tropical heat. His voice wavered nervously, as if asking a question, but his eyes devoured me confidently. I realized that no amount of required Spanish classes in high school or college would have been sufficient to teach me the vocabulary that I wanted to know at that moment. Between kisses, he anxiously whispered something that I couldn't quite understand about letting him know if he were to do anything that I didn't like. I liked everything so much that I couldn't come up with the few words I knew and instead moaned and screamed like a histrionic telenovela star until we finally collapsed, naked and sweaty, onto the hotel bed. As we lay drifting toward a nap, I became acutely aware that a graduation ceremony being held in the atrium below our room probably heard everything, and sex with someone who doesn't speak your language is a lot emptier and louder than in your fantasies.

6S

Lola Koi, a criminal defense lawyer from Miami, has been called a math goddess, a grammar nazi, and a tiger in bed.