What Happened That Summer with My Brother-in-Law

The stone house stood thirty kilometers from the nearest village, at the end of a county road the GPS never found on the first try. Sergio and his brother Marcos had inherited it from their parents three years earlier, and since then they had been coming here every summer, alone or with company, to do very little and rest a lot. Claudia knew it well: the hydraulic tile floor that creaked near the door, the stone walls that kept the inside cool even in July, the pool at the back of the garden with that artificial turquoise that took hours to warm up each morning.

What she did not know well was Sofía.

Marcos’s girlfriend had been with him for a little over a year, though Claudia had seen her at just two family dinners before that weekend. She was a woman in her early thirties, a lawyer in Seville, with the kind of body that does not announce itself but simply is there: wide hips, a back strengthened by years of swimming, a way of moving that did not require anyone else’s approval. When they arrived Friday afternoon, Sofía was sitting on the porch with a jug of lemonade and an open book on her lap, completely at ease in a house that belonged to other people.

—You’re late —she said, smiling—. Marcos is inside making dinner.

Claudia greeted her with two kisses and followed Sergio inside. In the kitchen, Marcos stood with his back to the door, stirring something on the stove. He was four years older than his brother, though he looked older than that: he had that particular calm of men who no longer need to prove anything to anyone, and who precisely for that reason are harder to ignore. When he turned around, he gave her a brief hug and asked about the trip with an attentiveness that lasted exactly as long as it should have.

Friday dinner was a long one. Sergio opened two bottles of local wine and the four of them talked until well past midnight. Claudia drank more than usual. When she turned off the bedside lamp, Sergio was already snoring, and it took her a long time to fall asleep, thinking about things she did not want to think about.

***

Saturday dawned clear, with that dry inland heat you can feel even before opening your eyes. Claudia went down to the kitchen before anyone else and found Sergio checking his phone, frowning.

—There’s a problem at the site in Cáceres —he said without looking at her—. I have to go. Three hours at most.

Claudia did not object. That was Sergio ever since he started the company: one call and the weekend stopped being his and became someone else’s. She kissed him on the forehead and he left before breakfast, with the keys in one hand and the phone in the other.

Sofía appeared ten minutes later with her hair tied back in a high ponytail, no makeup, wearing a tank top that emphasized her shoulders. She poured herself coffee without saying anything and leaned against the counter, looking out toward the garden. It was not rudeness; it was simply that Sofía did not need to fill silences with conversation.

Marcos came in a while later with wet hair and a relaxed expression that Claudia found, for some reason, more disconcerting than anything else.

—Pool? —he asked.

It was not exactly an invitation. It was more of a statement of what was going to happen.

***

The water was still cold when they got there. Sofía settled onto the farthest lounger with her sunscreen and a straw hat she put on without asking whether it bothered anyone. Claudia chose the lounger partly shaded by the big pine tree, and Marcos sat between the two of them with his sunglasses on and his arms crossed over his chest, looking at the water and doing nothing in particular.

For the first half hour they barely spoke. The sun climbed higher and the heat settled over the garden with that still weight of midday in Extremadura. Claudia tried to read on her phone and did not get past three lines in a row. She felt Marcos’s presence even without looking at him: the way he breathed, the moment he turned his head, the specific silence he created around himself.

Then, without warning, Marcos made a small gesture with his head toward Sofía. It was tiny, almost imperceptible, but Sofía caught it immediately: she sat up on the lounger, untied the top of her bikini with one hand, and let it fall onto the grass. Her tits were left bare, large, firm, with dark nipples already hardened by the morning air. She lay back down again, closed her eyes, and kept sunbathing exactly as before, as if what she had just done meant nothing at all.

Claudia looked at the pool water.

—Aren’t you? —Marcos said.

He was talking to her. In that voice that did not ask permission but simply stated what it expected to find. Claudia felt color rising up her neck.

—There’s more shade here —she replied, not quite knowing why she said that instead of anything else.

Marcos did not answer. He looked at her for a second and then back at the garden, as if the answer had seemed irrelevant.

Claudia held the closed book on her lap for ten minutes. Then, without anyone saying anything else, she untied her bikini and let it drop beside her. It was neither a natural gesture nor an especially comfortable one. It was something halfway between wounded pride and surrender, and neither of those made her feel good exactly, though not entirely bad either. Her nipples hardened immediately, not from the cold, and she knew it with an uncomfortable clarity. She felt Marcos’s eyes settle on her tits for a moment, measure them without haste, register the detail that her nipples had responded too, and then move away.

Marcos gave a slight nod. Just that minimal nod, like someone registering a fact he would find relevant later.

The hours that followed were slow and strange. Sofía dozed under the straw hat; Marcos read for a while and then got into the pool and swam ten silent lengths. When he got out, he dried himself unhurriedly and went back to his lounger. Claudia tried to think about other things and did not quite manage it. Once Marcos made a comment about the heat and Sofía laughed before Claudia could calculate whether it was the moment to laugh too. When she did, her own laugh came half a second late.

Sergio called to say he would be back for dinner. Claudia said perfect and hung up.

***

The afternoon stretched on without further incident. They played cards under the pergola, drank cold water, and Sofía prepared a salad while Claudia set the table without saying much. When Sergio arrived at eight with his sleeves rolled up and the look of a man who had solved the problem, the conversation flowed better than it had in the morning. They drank wine and Sergio told the story of the site foreman with the generous detail of someone who had won the battle.

After dinner, Sergio and Marcos put on a film in the living room. Sofía lasted twenty minutes before announcing that she was going to bed. She gave Marcos a brief kiss at the corner of the lips, with no particular charge, and disappeared down the hall. Claudia stayed on the sofa drinking the last glass of wine while the two men argued about the director of the film. At half past eleven she got up too and said good night.

***

In the bedroom, Sergio sought her out with more urgency than usual. Claudia responded because she wanted him, because three years of marriage do not erase affection even if they do change its texture, and because that night her body needed something concrete even if she could not name it precisely. Sergio yanked her panties down from under her nightgown and got between her legs without much preamble, biting one nipple while two of his fingers thrust suddenly into her pussy. Claudia was wet, wetter than she wanted to admit, and she felt how her husband’s fingers slid inside without resistance. He let go of her nipple with a wet sound and smiled.

—You’re soaked —he murmured against her neck.

Claudia did not answer. She grabbed his cock over the boxer briefs and felt it hard, familiar, the same cock as always, and that familiarity brought on a strange stab she decided not to examine. She pulled his boxers down with both hands and Sergio’s cock slapped against her stomach as it came free. She wrapped her hand around it and started stroking him slowly, pushing the foreskin back with each pass, feeling the head turn dusky and tense against her palm.

Sergio moved her hand away and climbed on top of her. He entered her in one thrust, all the way in, and Claudia arched her back with a gasp she did not even try to hold back. He started fucking her with that straightforward, uncomplicated rhythm of his, as always: long strokes in, short strokes out, hands braced beside her shoulders and his mouth seeking hers every two or three thrusts. Claudia hooked her legs around his hips and tried to focus on the sensation of his cock going in and out, on the smell of her husband, on the texture of his back under her fingertips.

And sometime in the night her mind went somewhere it should not have gone. She saw Marcos by the pool, that minimal nod, Marcos’s hand tugging her bikini down in a different way, Marcos’s voice saying “come on” with the same calm with which he had said it to Sofía the first time Claudia had been in the same house as the two of them. Her cunt clenched around Sergio’s cock in a way he noticed immediately and welcomed with a grunt, unaware of where it came from. Claudia shut her eyes tighter and came back into the room.

—Put me on top —she whispered.

Sergio withdrew from her and lay back. Claudia straddled him, took her husband’s cock in her hand, and slid it back into her pussy slowly, feeling every centimeter from top to bottom. She started riding him with her eyes closed, bracing both hands on his chest, rising and lowering at a pace she controlled, one that let her return again and again to the image she should not have been seeing. Now it was easier: with the control in her hips and her eyes closed, she could let the image stay, and let Marcos’s voice keep saying things to her that Sergio never said.

She pinched her own nipples. Sergio dug his fingers into her ass and started lifting his hips to go deeper. Claudia leaned forward, her tits hanging over his face, and he caught one nipple in his mouth and sucked hard while she rode up and down and started grinding against him with her hips, rubbing her clit against her husband’s pubic bone with each descent.

The orgasm hit her all at once, real and forceful. Claudia bit her own lip not to cry out and went rigid over him, her cunt throbbing uncontrollably around Sergio’s cock. He held out two more thrusts from below and came inside with a muffled groan, gripping her hips to pin her against his pelvis while she felt the warm jolts of his semen filling her.

She stayed like that for a while, impaled on him, breathing. Then she eased off slowly, feeling the thick trail running down the inside of her thigh, and lay beside her husband without saying anything. The path her mind had taken to get to orgasm was not exactly the one she would have expected of herself.

When Sergio fell asleep, Claudia lay on her back in the dark, listening to the house.

She recognized the exact moment Marcos entered the guest room: the creak of the third plank in the hallway was unmistakable. The door opened and closed silently. Claudia controlled her breathing and closed her eyes.

***

Sofía was asleep on her side, her hair spread loose over the pillow and the sheet pulled up to her hip. The room smelled of the lavender cream she always used at night. Marcos sat on the edge of the bed and ran one hand down her back, slowly, until it slid over the curve of her ass beneath the sheet.

Sofía shifted without fully waking.

—Let me sleep —she murmured.

—Later —he said.

Sofía knew that answer by heart. She knew exactly what it meant and what would come next. Part of her still wanted more hours of sleep; another part was already awake and paying attention, with her nipples waking against the sheet before the rest of her body.

Marcos pulled the sheet away in one clean motion. He took off her sleeping shirt over her head without further explanation and pulled her panties down to her knees, leaving them there, taut, without taking them off completely. Sofía protested once, more out of reflex than real conviction, and he gave her a dry smack on the ass that echoed through the room louder than expected. The red imprint of his hand marked itself at once on the pale skin of her ass. She held her breath.

—Come on —he said, with his usual calm.

Sofía obeyed.

He stood beside the bed and pulled his cock out of his pajama bottoms without taking anything else off. He was already hard, thick, the head gleaming in the dimness. He set himself on the mattress with the head hanging over the edge and the shaft fully stretched, in that position she knew well and that left her no option but to open up. Sofía let her jaw drop and he shoved his cock into her mouth to the hilt in one stroke, holding it there for a few seconds with her throat completely full. Sofía swallowed reflexively and felt the tip of his cock pressing against the inside of her palate, the swollen vein underneath against her tongue.

He began to move. He withdrew almost entirely, leaving the head resting against her lips, and drove back in with long, unhurried thrusts, letting her throat adjust, pulling out just when he felt Sofía needed air and going back in before she could ask for a break. Saliva started running down her cheeks into her hair in two shining trails. His hands found Sofía’s breasts, hanging from the position of her head tilted back, and worked them without any special tenderness, squeezing the flesh, tormenting her nipples between thumb and forefinger, pressing and releasing in a rhythm that was not kindness.

Sofía raised her hands to his thighs to balance herself. The little sounds she could not hold back were swallowed against the base of her throat; every time he drove to the hilt, a guttural, wet noise escaped her that he liked. He dug his fingers into her left breast and pushed once more, deep, and stayed there, his cock buried all the way in her throat, counting in his head until he saw her begin to wave her hands.

He withdrew. Sofía coughed, gulped air, a long thread of saliva slipping from her mouth to her chin. His cock, shining with saliva from top to bottom, remained hard against her face.

—Good girl —he said, without irony.

He turned her over on the mattress with both hands, like turning a bundle, and set her on all fours in the middle of the bed. He yanked her panties until he tore them off completely. Sofía braced herself on her elbows and lowered her chest, automatically lifting her ass. He spread her ass cheeks with both hands and took a second to look. Her pussy was open, gleaming, wet despite the initial complaint, with the swollen inner lips peeking out between the outer ones. He ran two fingers through the slit from top to bottom, soaking them, and then shoved two fingers into her cunt to the knuckles in one thrust. Sofía moaned into the pillow.

—You can’t lie here —he said.

He pulled his fingers out, took them to his cock, and coated himself with her slick. Then he set the head at her entrance and pushed in one stroke to the hilt, with the same methodical calm he had used for everything before. Sofía bit the pillow. He held for a second, impaled to the base, and then started fucking her from behind with long, deep thrusts, gripping her hips so she would not move more than he wanted.

The sound of his thighs striking her ass began to fill the room with a wet, rhythmic slap, impossible to disguise through the walls. Marcos ran one hand down her back with something that might have been tenderness if the other hand had not remained anchored to her hip to keep her on pace. He gave her ass another smack, then another, marking the beat of the thrusts.

Then he grabbed her hair and wound it around his fist. He pulled her head back, arching her spine, and kept fucking her like that, her neck taut and her expression lifted into the air. Sofía stopped biting the pillow because it was no longer near her. The moans escaped her open throat, unfiltered. He ran two fingers across the front of her and found her clit. He started rubbing it in circles, in the same cadence as he kept thrusting into her from behind.

—Come —he told her in her ear.

Sofía came a few seconds later, with a spasm that shook her whole back, clenching her cunt around his cock so hard he had to clench his teeth not to come after her. The sounds that came out of her throat when she came were long and uncontrolled. He waited for her to finish, his cock inside her, still.

Then he resumed the rhythm, faster this time, giving no respite to a cunt that was still throbbing around him. Sofía let herself be fucked without strength, cheek against the pillow and mouth open, letting out a fresh moan with every thrust.

When he reached the end, he pulled out abruptly, turned her with one hand, set her on her back, and climbed astride her tits. He grabbed his cock and jerked off three or four times over her, squeezing the head, and came in jets over Sofía’s breasts, throat, and chin. The warm spurts landed between her breasts, one long thread reached her neck, another stuck to her lower lip. Marcos kept shaking his cock until the last drop, then ran the head over her lips, painting them with what was left.

Sofía stuck out her tongue without opening her eyes and licked the tip.

—Good girl —he repeated.

He stayed still for a moment over her, catching his breath. Sofía remained motionless too, her cheek tilted against the pillow and her eyes closed, feeling the warm semen trickle very slowly down her cleavage.

Then he lay on his side, satisfied and calm, as always when the night had followed the order he had in his head.

Sofía went to the bathroom without turning on the light. She let the tap run and cleaned herself carefully, wiping her cleavage, her neck, her chin with a damp towel, removing the now nearly dry semen from between her breasts, listening to the house in silence. Then she heard the neighboring bathroom tap open at the same time, that thin stream of water used only when one does not want to make noise, and thought of Claudia on the other side of the wall, doing the same thing as she was, though for reasons that were not exactly the same.

She turned off the tap and went back to bed.

***

Sunday was quieter than the previous days. The four of them had breakfast with little to say to one another, and around eleven they began packing their bags.

Claudia took longer than necessary. She packed slowly, folded her clothes with an attentiveness unlike her usual self, and sat for a few minutes on the edge of the bed looking out the window: the pool already shining in the morning sun, the loungers in the same position as yesterday, the pine tree casting a long, narrow shadow over the grass.

She thought about Marcos’s gesture by the pool, about that minimal nod that had recorded her capitulation as if it were a fact to be used later. She thought about the moment in the night when her mind had gone where it should not have gone, and about how she had not known or had not wanted to stop it. She thought about the sounds she had heard through the wall, the rhythmic slap of skin against skin, Sofía’s moans that had felt no shame about being heard, and about how she herself had pressed her thighs together in the dark without being able to help it, her hand already sliding down her belly before she had decided anything.

She got up when she heard Sergio bringing the suitcases down the stairs.

Marcos was in the entryway with the keys in his hand. When he saw her, he put his hand in his shirt pocket and took out a paperback book.

—You left this by the pool —he said.

Claudia took it. Her fingers brushed his for a second.

—Thanks.

Marcos looked at her for a moment. Without the usual half-smile: with something more direct and more frank.

—Next time you come, stay longer —he said.

And he walked off toward Sofía’s car without waiting for an answer.

***

On the drive back, Sergio was driving with the radio low and his elbows resting on the steering wheel. Nearly an hour passed without them talking about anything important. Olive groves alternated with low holm oak and asphalt that shimmered on the horizon from the heat.

Near the highway, Sergio cleared his throat.

—You were weird this weekend.

—I was tired —Claudia replied.

—Yeah. —He paused—. Marcos was looking at you a lot too.

Claudia did not answer. She kept her eyes on the window.

—I’m saying it because I noticed —he added, in a voice trying to be neutral and not entirely succeeding—. That’s all.

The silence that followed lasted until the highway.

When Sergio turned the radio up louder, Claudia took her phone from her bag. She had a message from a number she recognized immediately, without needing to read the name.

It only said: Next time I won’t give you a choice.

Claudia read it twice. She felt how, without having decided anything yet, her cunt tightened in the passenger seat with a small traitorous spasm. Then she turned off the screen and stared at the fields flashing past the window, one after another, unable to decide whether what she felt at those five words was fear or something completely different.

Sergio turned up the volume on the radio.

The highway stretched straight toward Madrid, long and without curves, and Claudia thought that if she answered that message there would be no turning back. And she also thought that if she did not answer it, there wouldn’t be either.