My Brother Taught Me to Obey That Afternoon

My name is Renata and, if I’m being honest, it all started because of a shitty afternoon. I was nineteen, I’d been studying dance since I was ten, and that habit had left me with a slim body, long lines, which I’d learned to carry with a mix of pride and shame. I’m blonde, with dark eyes and very pale skin, the kind that flushes at the slightest thing. And that Friday I blushed like never before.

My older brother, Bruno, was twenty-two and exactly the opposite of me. Dark from so much sun, huge, with that back that had widened from carrying weight all day in the warehouse where he worked. In the neighborhood, he’d been half the world’s dream. I’d watched him grow up and never, ever, had I allowed myself to think of him any other way. Until that afternoon.

I came back earlier than usual. Class had been canceled and I was in a foul mood because my friend Carla, the one who claimed to be my best friend, had slept with the guy I liked. I walked in, tossed my bag down, and noticed no one was home. My parents were still at work. The whole house to myself.

I walked down the hall and Bruno’s bedroom door was ajar. I thought I’d tell him about Carla; he always listened to me, always wanted to look after me, that older-brother thing he never grew out of. I pushed the door open just enough to see if he was there.

He wasn’t. But the room spoke for him.

The lights were low. Clothes piled on the floor. The TV on with a video at minimum volume, two men and a woman in a scene that made me look away and then look back immediately. And a smell. A thick, masculine smell that hit me the second I crossed the threshold and left me rooted in place.

I don’t know how to explain what happened to me. I clenched my thighs without realizing it. I inhaled again, deeper, as if I wanted to keep that air for myself. I was wet, so wet it scared me. I didn’t care that it was my brother’s room. At that age my hormones always won out, and in that moment they won by a landslide.

I hiked my skirt up a little and touched myself over my underwear. Once. Twice. This is wrong, this is wrong, I kept repeating, and kept going.

A noise at the end of the hall, in the bathroom, yanked me out of the trance. I ran to my room half dead with fear that I’d be caught. In my nerves I left the door half open and pulled off my T-shirt to change into something more comfortable. I was down to my blue bra when I heard footsteps.

It was Bruno, of course. He was coming out of the bathroom and had realized I was home. He stopped right in the doorway of my room. He was shirtless, in shorts, and it was obvious he wasn’t wearing anything underneath. I looked down for a second and then back up right away, but it was too late: he had seen me look, and I had seen the way he was looking at me.

“What are you doing, Reni?” he said, leaning on the frame with a calm I didn’t like at all. “Just got back? I thought you were with Carla.”

“I left early,” I answered, trying to hold his eyes and only his eyes. “And no, not with Carla. She’s a traitor.”

He smiled to one side. A smile I didn’t know.

“And what did you need from me that you were spying on my room for?” he said slowly. “Or do you want me to tell you the name of the video, so you can finish what you started in peace?”

The floor seemed to tilt under me. He’d seen me. I didn’t know how, but he had seen me.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied, feeling my face burn. “The pervert here is you, watching that stuff in broad daylight.”

“Don’t play dumb, Renata.”

He said it without raising his voice, and that was the worst part. He stepped away from the frame and came in. The room suddenly felt small. He was so tall I had to tilt my head up to look at him, and I hated feeling so small in front of him, hated that I liked it.

“I saw you touching yourself while you watched TV,” he went on. “So stop acting innocent. And I have a better idea than fighting.”

“What?” Barely a whisper came out of me.

“That we help each other. Both of us.”

I lost my breath. Is this really happening? My brother was offering me exactly what I had secretly fantasized about without ever daring to name it. And my body reacted before my head could: my nipples pushed hard against my bra, and he noticed. Of course he noticed.

“Your body already answered me,” he murmured.

He grabbed my waist with one huge hand and kissed me. Hard, without asking permission, as if he’d wanted to do it for a long time. I didn’t know whether to push him away or go along with it. I was too hot to think. His other hand slid down, slipped under my clothes, and started massaging me slowly, and I melted right there against his chest.

“Not here,” I managed, pulling back just enough. “In your room.”

“Wherever you want,” he answered. “But from now on you do what I tell you. Understood?”

I nodded. I didn’t recognize myself nodding, but I nodded.

***

As soon as we got into his room he had me kneel with a single gesture, his hand on my shoulder. He pulled his shorts down and stood there in front of my face. That same smell from before, now multiplied, dense, like all-day sweat. It should have disgusted me. Instead I let out a sigh and slipped my fingers inside myself again, like a crazy person.

“Sorry about the smell,” he said, and he didn’t sound sorry at all. “I trained all afternoon. But it doesn’t seem to bother you, does it? Look at you, all wet.”

He grabbed the back of my neck and guided me. I took him into my mouth and started sucking him slowly, eyes closed, focused on the taste and on his breathing, which broke every time I went lower. Bruno took hold of my hair with both hands and set the pace his way, without asking. At times I couldn’t breathe and my eyes filled with tears, and still I didn’t want to stop.

“If I’d known you sucked that good, I would’ve asked ages ago,” he said, his voice rough.

That line, said like that, with that affectionate contempt, set me on fire. Something in me needed to be spoken to that way, needed someone else to make decisions for me. I let myself be carried away completely.

***

He flipped me over right there on the rug and put me on all fours. He yanked my underwear down. I felt his big hand part me, and then him, entering slowly. It hurt. It was too much, and I instinctively moved forward to get away from it, but he grabbed my hips with both hands and held me in place.

“Stay still,” he ordered.

And he pushed all the way in. A cry escaped me, along with a couple of tears, not from fear, from sheer intensity.

“You’re tight,” he said through clenched teeth. “Very tight.”

“Bruno, slow down,” I begged. “It’s a lot, wait.”

He didn’t wait completely, but he found a rhythm that let me breathe between thrusts. I couldn’t hold back my moans. I was afraid a neighbor might hear, that someone might come, and at the same time I didn’t want him to stop for anything in the world.

At one point he reached out, grabbed one of his shirts from the floor, and pressed it to my mouth to shut me up. The gesture humiliated me and lit me up in equal measure. His smell again, now covering my face, was too much: I came trembling, biting the fabric, my whole body shaking.

“You like it, don’t you?” he said, bent over my back, his mouth against my ear. “You kept this well hidden, little sister.”

“Yes,” I admitted into the fabric, too weak to lie. “I like it.”

“Good. Because now you’re mine. When I tell you, you come and do what I ask. Understand?”

“I understand,” I said, and I meant it.

***

He made me turn around so we were face to face. He wanted to see my face, he said. He squeezed my breasts as he moved, and I looked up at him feeling possessed in a way I’d never felt before. He spat in my face, slowly, measuring my reaction, and when he saw that instead of scaring me away I let out a moan, he smiled like a demon.

“You’re worse than I am,” he said.

He covered my mouth with his hand again. Pleasure surged up through me all at once, different, stronger, until I lost control completely and soaked everything, him included. Bruno froze for a second, staring at me as if only then he was finishing understanding who I really was.

“Fuck, Renata,” he murmured, and everything in him sped up.

“Not inside,” I managed to say, scared. “Bruno, not inside, please.”

He covered my mouth again, not really listening to me, and I felt his whole body tense. He pulled out at the very last second, pressed against my stomach, and finished there, with a long groan that seemed to empty him out.

We were both sprawled on the floor, panting, saying nothing. I was still shaking. He draped an arm over me as if none of what had happened before had happened at all, as if we were the same brother and sister as always.

***

I don’t know how long we stayed like that. Long enough for my heartbeat to settle and for guilt to start creeping in, the kind that always arrives late. I was about to say something when we heard the key in the front door. My parents were back.

I jumped up, gathered my clothes into a ball, and slipped out of the room in silence. In the hall I caught my reflection in the mirror: disheveled, marked, eyes shining. I didn’t recognize myself, and at the same time I had never felt more like myself.

“Hello, is anyone there?” my mother shouted from downstairs.

“I just got home, I’m changing!” I called back, with a voice that came out incredibly normal.

I closed my bedroom door and leaned against it. Across the hall, I heard Bruno go downstairs to say hello like any other afternoon, telling Dad something about weekend football. As if nothing had happened. As if everything between us hadn’t just changed.

I sat on the bed, still with my pulse racing, and understood that this had not been a one-time accident. I knew it by the way he’d said “you’re mine,” by the way I’d answered “I understand.” There was a new rule in that house, one only the two of us knew, and I already knew I was going to obey it.

That night, during dinner, my brother handed me the bread without looking at me. But under the table his knee found mine, just a brush, a promise. And I, while my mother talked about anything and everything, felt the heat rising inside me again, slowly, once more, knowing that what had happened that afternoon had been only the beginning.