The Jealousy I Invented Led Me to My Sister

The jealousy began as a harmless game between Andrés and me, a private way of keeping alive the flame we had been tending for two years. I cultivated that imaginary jealousy because each day I became more certain that he desired me with the same intensity as in our first month, and that certainty fueled everything else.

Andrés was almost never genuinely jealous. I was the jealous one, which was why I needed to invent jealousy for him. I needed that pulse of tension, that faint suspicion that made Andrés more territorial, more possessive, more mine.

My sister Renata became the perfect focus for the game. We had lived in different countries since university and only saw each other at weddings, birthdays, or family anniversaries. Andrés had never met her. I barely knew what she was like now, at thirty-two, a reserved professional who lived alone in the capital of a neighboring country, with no romantic traces beyond a distant relationship with a mature man she had never wanted to discuss.

When Andrés began insisting that he wanted to see a photograph of Renata, I reacted with carefully measured anger. It was pure theater. I was testing him, arousing him, slowly leading him toward a place where he became more aggressive, hungrier. In the middle of making love with Andrés, I would often mention my sister, tell him how beautiful she was, how lonely she seemed, and watch him grow aroused until he drove me toward an ending that wasn't our usual one.

What I never knew was what he imagined in those moments. Probably nothing specific. The fantasy was mine. It was my feigned jealousy that kept the fire burning.

And yet, one night, the game took a turn.

I found a photo of Renata, enlarged from a passport, and handed it to Andrés without ceremony. He looked at it without saying anything, without a single comment, and gave it back to me. I was almost disappointed. Later, in bed, in the middle of a long kiss, he said:

—You look alike.

Those two words sent an electric current through me. I answered with another lie woven into the game: that Renata had a wilder body than mine, more untamable, that she would surely be hotter in bed. Andrés moved over me with renewed vigor and, somewhere between the lie and the truth, I found myself imitating what I imagined would be the way my sister surrendered herself. A different way. A way I had never used before.

Andrés seemed to notice. He took me with a new rhythm, as though he were with another woman, and I let him. That afternoon neither of us confessed anything. Perhaps it seemed dangerous. Perhaps we thought the fantasy would deflate on its own if we didn't give it a name.

It didn't deflate.

The following Wednesday, in my empty bed, I caught myself thinking about Renata. Not Andrés. Her. The way Andrés sank into her inside my imagination, the shameless way I believed she would give herself to him. I began touching myself with an urgency I couldn't remember, not quite knowing whether the orgasm rushing toward me was mine or hers, whether I was myself or she was lending me her body. I slid one hand between my legs, opened myself with my fingers over my clothes, then underneath them, feeling how the dampness had already soaked my crotch before I even touched myself the way I wanted. I rubbed my clitoris with short, brutal movements, squeezing my thighs against my own hand, imagining Andrés's mouth buried in Renata's cunt, his tongue licking her until she trembled. The more I thought about it, the harder I came: first a shudder, then a hot wave that left me panting and my belly taut, while I kept touching myself until the second tremor tore a muffled moan from me.

The most exciting thing about it was that Renata had no idea. And I could never tell her. We had no intimacy on that level.

On Saturday, amid the usual heat, while Andrés kissed my neck, I heard him whisper:

—Renata.

It was as if a lit match had fallen into my belly. My hips went out of control, my breathing broke apart, and he, no longer holding himself back, said it again and again while he moved in and out of me with a rhythm we had never reached before. I felt him sink all the way inside, hard and eager, as though my body belonged to someone else and I was letting her take my place. He spread my legs wider, gripped me by the waist, and began fucking me with an almost furious insistence, striking against me with a wet, dull sound that kept me on the edge. I clung to his back, dug my nails into him, told him yes, to keep going, to give me more, and when he asked me to think of her, I obeyed. I thought of Renata with her mouth open, Renata beneath him, Renata gasping as she was pushed against the mattress. That image split me in two and made me come violently, convulsing around his cock until Andrés released a low growl and emptied himself inside me, hot and thick, filling me with a long ejaculation that made me tremble from head to toe. Afterward, resting, we kissed for a long time without urgency, like two accomplices who had just done something and still didn't dare name it.

We made a pact of silence without ever agreeing to it. But the silence was beginning to weigh on us.

***

Last night, at our usual restaurant by the sea, while Andrés held a wineglass with the elegance that undoes me, he dared to ask:

—Doesn't it make you jealous when I call you Renata?

Just hearing it sent a shiver between my thighs. I told him yes. I told him I had beautiful jealousy. Intoxicating jealousy. Jealousy I wanted to multiply, because every time he transformed into that new lover, I felt like someone else too. I told him that jealousy made me want to be both of us. Both of us for him. To possess him from every angle.

Andrés grew more and more aroused. I could tell from the brightness in his eyes, the way his lips parted unconsciously, the warm hand traveling beneath the table toward my thighs. His fingers found my bare skin, pressed against the edge of my underwear, and began stroking me with a brazen slowness that made me squeeze my legs together. His thumb grazed the dampness already gathering between my folds, and I had to take a sip of wine so I wouldn't moan. And then, without having fully planned it, I said:

—Leave her to me. I'll know how to convince her.

I didn't know how. I didn't know what to say to Renata or how she would react. I only knew it was inevitable.

***

Three weeks later, I was sitting across from my sister at the highest restaurant in the city, the one with endless windows overlooking the estuary. We had ordered an appetizer and were talking with that slightly distant air women sometimes pretend to have when they don't need anyone.

But it wasn't comfort. It was anxiety. I alone had gotten myself into this challenge, and I was beginning to understand the distance between a fantasy you nurture in the privacy of your bed and the reality of having the woman you want to put in it sitting right in front of you.

During my sleepless nights, burning with desire, everything seemed simple. I imagined the phrases I would use to convince Renata, the pauses, the glances, the moment when she would agree. But now she was there, with her usual reserved naturalness, and she gave me not the slightest opening to approach her.

Or perhaps she did.

Because the more I looked at her, the more different I found her. Something about her had changed. Or perhaps I had never really looked at her before. There was something in the way she tilted her head, crossed her legs, ran her little finger along the corner of her mouth—a new sensuality I didn't remember in her. An almost provocative sensuality.

After a brief silence, she was the one who spoke.

—Come on, Camila. Tell me about Andrés. Is he still the center of your life?

She surprised me. Renata had never shown any interest in my love life. But there, in a barely perceptible gleam in her eyes, was a new curiosity. And that curiosity was the only branch I could cling to.

I heard myself speak without any preamble. I told her that my relationship with Andrés had entered a different stage, the stage of mature lovers, the kind who have no turning back. I told her that once prejudices were left in the past, the two of them could walk naked and hand in hand through a parallel world where anything was possible.

Renata said nothing, but her whole attitude urged me to continue. And I did.

I told her that, since Wednesday, my body was already beginning to wait for him. I told her about the caresses I gave myself to put out the fire while I waited for Saturday, caresses I had never told anyone about, had never even seen described in a book. I told her how I chose my lingerie, how I bathed, how I prepared myself so Andrés could take it off me afterward with the slowness of a ritual. I described how I got wet just thinking about his hands, how I slipped my fingers between my lips to taste myself before seeing him, how I remained with my nipples hard beneath my bra, rubbing myself against the sheet until my body demanded more. Renata kept glancing toward the neighboring tables, as though making sure no one was listening. She wanted to be the sole recipient of that confession, and I understood.

So I went further.

I told her that on some Saturdays Andrés and I had lunch in a private room at the beach restaurant. I told her that there, heated by wine and conversation, we ended up standing, pressed against the wall, with his hand inside my underwear and my body opened without reservation. I told her that some of the best orgasms of my life had been given to me by the risk that someone might walk in. I told her how he pulled my panties down to the middle of my thighs, how he slipped in two fingers and then three, plunging them in with brutal precision until he found that exact spot that made me tremble. I told her how he licked the dampness from his fingers afterward, how he laughed against my mouth when I begged him for more, how he pushed me against the wood of the private room and made me open myself wide for him. As I spoke, I was arousing myself too. And I could have sworn Renata was aroused as well. She didn't say so. But I know women. I know how to recognize that way of pressing one's knees together beneath the table, that tiny gesture of squeezing one's thighs, that breathing which grows shorter and deeper at the same time. If Renata hadn't wanted to hear more, she would have stopped me. She didn't.

Suddenly she asked for the check.

—Let's go—she said.

***

Walking behind her through the restaurant hallway, I discovered something I hadn't seen in thirty years. Renata moved with an almost imperceptible sway that only another woman could decipher. Each cheek rose and fell with a life of its own beneath the tight dress, and I couldn't stop looking. The hallway felt far too short.

We went out onto the avenue and walked in silence. It was a hot afternoon, the kind that weighs on the nape of your neck, and we entered a movie theater because it was the only cool place in sight. The film had already started. I asked Renata to give me her hand so I could guide myself through the darkness.

Her hand was cold. Mine was burning.

What surprised me was that, once we were seated, she didn't let go.

At first I pretended to pay attention to the movie. But after a few minutes I abandoned any intention of watching the screen. I began caressing the back of her hand, slowly, with a timid thumb that gradually grew bolder. Renata accepted everything without moving, without withdrawing anything, without saying a word.

Her hand responded. It settled on my knee with a new confidence and moved up my thigh without asking permission. My short skirt left far too much skin exposed, and every inch she covered drew a broken breath from me. It was the first time a woman had caressed me. And that woman was my sister.

I was burning alive on a pyre I had lit myself.

My free hand, almost as though defending myself, sought one of my breasts over my dress, and I began squeezing my nipple until it hurt. Renata watched me from the corner of her eye. Then, taking advantage of the empty row behind us, she lowered her neckline a little and freed one of her own breasts to imitate what I was doing.

It was a beautiful breast, white in the dimness of the theater, with a dark, distended nipple, almost insolent, pointing forward because she had leaned back slightly in her seat. She held it at the base, offering it to me, and the blood drained from my body.

I leaned toward her without thinking. My mouth, hungry. My lips, searching. My tongue finding that foreign nipple as though it were my own. And when I took it into my mouth, a surge rose from my belly with such force that I had to bite down to keep from screaming. Her hand had found its way between my legs. Through the thin fabric of my underwear, I gave her every pulse, every spasm, every detail of an orgasm that collapsed over us like a long, silent wave. She opened my thighs with two fingers, rubbed me without delicacy over the wet fabric, then slid her hand beneath it, touching my already swollen, slippery cunt while I sucked her desperately and felt the trembling rise through my whole body. When she pushed a finger between my lips, I moaned so softly I barely recognized myself. She continued, slow and certain, until I came against her hand, soaking it, my heart pounding in my throat.

When I caught my breath, Renata whispered in my ear:

—That's how you feel with him, isn't it?

I didn't answer her. There was no need.

Jealousy no longer mattered to me. It had done its job. Now all that remained was Saturday.