My Wife Got Stuck With My Cousin During the Lockdown

My name is Tomás, and I’m writing this because I can’t keep carrying it alone anymore. I’m thirty-nine years old and I work at an insurance brokerage, or I did, before the whole world suddenly stopped. My wife’s name is Carolina. She’s thirty-five, with sun-kissed skin that glows when she sweats, wide hips that always drove me crazy, and brown eyes that could undo me with a single look. We’d been married seven years. We argued like any couple, but I thought what we had was solid. Then the lockdown came and everything fell apart.

It was early that cursed year. The quarantine landed on us like a slab of concrete. We lived in an old building downtown, small apartments but charming, high ceilings and walls that, as I would soon discover, didn’t block out anything. My cousin Iván, twenty-eight, had moved into the apartment next door barely a month earlier. Iván is the kind of guy who looks like he stepped out of an ad: tall, broad-shouldered, tattooed arms built by years of lifting, hair shaved at the sides, and that confidence of a man who knows every woman is looking. He’d come for a contract on a construction site. The pandemic left him stuck there, in the unit right beside ours.

Carolina and I tried to survive working from home. She’s a freelance graphic designer and spent hours in front of her tablet, wearing those black leggings that clung to her like a second skin. I watched her from my improvised desk in the dining room and still felt the same old tingle. But one day, when the restrictions tightened, she decided to “help” Iván.

“Poor thing, he’s all alone and doesn’t even know how to boil an egg,” she told me in that soft voice that always melted me. “I’ll take him some food and show him how the basement dryer works.”

I nodded, confident. He was my cousin. My own blood. What could go wrong?

***

Fate decided to ruin us in the worst possible way. While Carolina was in Iván’s apartment, the building alarm went off. A neighbor from the third floor had tested positive and the manager locked the emergency door that separated the hallway. Our apartment ended up in one bubble and Iván’s in another. Carolina got trapped there, with him.

“Just a few days,” they promised us over the intercom. “Until the tests come back negative.”

At first it was bearable. Video calls, constant messages.

“Tomás, Iván is a disaster, but he makes me laugh,” she texted me.

I smiled at the screen, though I already felt a knot tightening in my stomach. Iván, with that gym-built body, locked in with my wife. I tried to convince myself it was all in my head. I worked, watched series, jerked off while remembering the smell of her neck just to calm the anxiety. But the days stretched into endless weeks. The tests kept getting delayed again and again. And then the laughter started on the other side of the wall. That husky, teasing laugh of Carolina’s, the one she only ever let out when she was really enjoying herself.

One night I couldn’t sleep. I pressed my ear to the plaster. First, murmurs. Then Iván’s deep voice.

“Come on, Caro, be brave.”

“Caro?” Only I ever called her that in private. Then her laugh again, lower now, thicker. The heat rushed to my face. Jealousy raw as an open wound, mixed with something filthy I didn’t want to name. I told myself it was my imagination. But I couldn’t stop picturing it: Iván shirtless, muscles shining under the dim light, handing her a beer, brushing against her “accidentally” as he passed.

The next day I asked her on the video call.

“Everything’s fine, love. Iván’s teaching me workout routines so I don’t go crazy cooped up here.”

Workout routines. Sure. I imagined his big hands on her waist, correcting her form in a squat, his hot breath on the back of her neck.

“Don’t be paranoid, Tomás,” she said, laughing when she saw my face. “He’s your cousin.”

But that night the noises changed. The bed creaking in a slow, steady rhythm. Sighs. Soft moans that tried to be discreet but cut through the wall like knives. I froze, listening, my heart pounding so hard I thought it would burst out of my chest.

***

I started spying. The balcony was shared, though we were forbidden to use it. I took the risk one afternoon. I peeked through the crack in the curtain of Iván’s apartment. I saw them in the living room: him doing pull-ups on a bar he’d installed in the doorway, shirtless, his muscles swollen and slick with sweat. Carolina, sitting on the sofa with a beer in her hand, staring at him fixedly. Her eyes had that glint. The very same look she used to give me when she wanted me.

I felt sick and, at the same time, betrayed by an erection. I ran back to my place, locked myself in the bathroom, and jerked off with fury, imagining it was her riding me. But the scene always ended with Iván coming into frame.

That image burned itself into me. The way she looked at him. The way her tongue slipped out to wet her lip when he came down from the bar, panting, sweat sliding down his abdomen. I knew that look by heart: it was the one she wore during the first nights we spent together, seven years ago, when we still couldn’t keep our hands off each other. It hurt to realize she hadn’t given it to me in months.

I stopped shaving. I stopped answering work emails. I spent hours with a glass in my hand, sitting on the floor with my back against the wall that separated us, waiting for the next creak of the bed to confirm what I already knew and, at the same time, praying not to hear it.

The days turned into hell. Carolina’s replies got shorter. “We’re watching a series,” “Iván cooked something delicious,” “he’s helping me with yoga.” Every message was a stab. One night I heard loud music, laughter, and then a long silence. Then moans. Clear, unmistakable.

“Iván… fuck… yes…”

I pressed myself against the wall like a wounded animal, listening to my cousin fucking my wife. I imagined every detail: him lifting her in his arms, her legs around his waist, thrusting her against the wall while she bit her lip to keep from screaming too loud. Her nails digging into those broad shoulders.

Rage consumed me. I punched the wall until my hands hurt. I cried in silence. And the worst part: I jerked off while I listened to them. I hated myself for it, but I couldn’t stop. It was as if my mind had split in two. One part wanted to kill them. The other wanted to watch them, wanted to hear her come screaming his name.

***

I tried to confront her by message.

“Tell me the truth, Carolina. Are you sleeping with him?”

“You’re crazy, Tomás. The lockdown is making you paranoid.”

But she was lying. I knew it. Her posts showed “home workouts” with Iván in the background, shirtless, smiling. She in little shorts and a sports top, sweat gleaming between her breasts. Her friends’ comments: “You two have such good chemistry.” Chemistry. The word burned inside me.

One night I heard them arguing. Then laughter. Then wild sex. She was screaming without control.

“Harder, Iván, please!”

I collapsed onto the floor, sobbing, while I listened to my cousin make her come over and over.

“Tomás never did it like this for me,” I heard her say between gasps.

That finished breaking me.

Almost three weeks passed. I lost weight, slept badly, barely ate. My thoughts were a sick loop: revenge, forgiveness, scenes that tortured me. Iván eating her out on the kitchen table, her on her knees in the shower, riding him on the sofa with her head thrown back.

***

Finally, one dawn, I couldn’t take it anymore. I sneaked out onto the balcony. Iván’s window was slightly open. I saw them in the bed: Carolina on top of him, naked, moving desperately. Iván held her by the hips, driving upward hard, the muscles in his arms and chest tense. She moaned with her eyes closed, hair stuck to her face with sweat. She leaned down and kissed him deep while she sped up the rhythm.

I stood frozen. I wanted to go in and destroy everything. Instead, I came in my pants without touching myself, humiliated, broken.

When they finally unlocked the doors, Carolina came home.

“Tomás, love, it’s so good to see you,” she said, hugging me.

She smelled like him. Like clean sweat, like recent sex. Iván slapped me on the back as he said goodbye.

“Take good care of her, cousin.”

***

Since then I’ve been living in hell. I sleep on the sofa. I look at her and see Iván’s hands roaming over her body. I try to forgive her, but every night I relive those sounds, those images. Everything slipped out of my hands. My marriage, my pride, the little sanity I had left. The lockdown didn’t just separate us physically. It destroyed us from the inside.

If you ever read this, remember one thing: sometimes the worst virus doesn’t come on a swab. It comes in the form of a muscular cousin and a wall that’s too thin.