My Son’s Rival Waited for Me on Christmas Eve

My husband had been in Singapore for three weeks when Christmas Eve arrived. His year-end meetings always ran long, and I had learned not to count the days. The house smelled of rosemary, melted butter, and that artificial pine tree we’d been dragging out for too many Decembers. My neighbor had taken her dog, her husband, and her usual comments with her. It was just Lucas and me left, and the dinner I’d spent all afternoon preparing.

Lucas was twenty-two and had just enough patience to put up with his mother for two hours straight. He was no longer the boy who used to sit on my lap to open presents: he was a broad-shouldered college student, disheveled, with his attention drifting between his phone and the console. Even so, that night he had promised not to disappear until after dessert.

The doorbell rang at nine on the dot.

“It’s Mateo,” Lucas shouted from the sofa, not even getting up. “I told him to come by for a while.”

I dried my hands on my apron and opened the door feeling more nervous than made any sense. Mateo was my son’s eternal rival from college: the one who beat him at padel, the one with better grades, the one who laughed at him at every birthday dinner without the joke ever quite ceasing to be a joke. He was twenty-four, dark-haired, shorter than Lucas but compact, with that insolent confidence you learn when no one has ever told you no.

“Good evening, ma’am,” he said, giving me two kisses that came far too close to the corner of my mouth. “I brought wine. Lucas told me you cook like an angel.”

“Come in, go on,” I replied, pretending not to notice how his eyes dropped for a second to the neckline of my dress.

I was wearing a red dress, yes. One my husband had never seen. I had bought it for a company dinner that ended up being canceled, and since then it had hung in the wardrobe like an unkept promise. That afternoon, as I pulled it over my head, I had decided the promise was for me.

Mateo came in with the bottle in his hand and the easy confidence of someone who already knows the house. Lucas threw a cushion at his face in greeting. Mateo tossed it back, hooked an arm around his neck in a wrestling hold, and within seconds the two of them were rolling around on the sofa, insulting each other through laughter. It was their usual ritual: fighting, provoking, measuring who could hold out longer. Only that night, when Mateo got up from the sofa with his hair tousled, his eyes went straight to mine over my son’s shoulder.

I held his gaze a second longer than necessary.

“Daniela, want help setting the table?” he asked.

Lucas snorted from the sofa.

“Dude, my mother is Mrs. Alarcón to you.”

“Call me whatever you want,” I said without thinking, and immediately realized how that had sounded.

***

Dinner was long. Mateo drank little, told stories about university, and laughed every time Lucas tried to contradict him. I served the lamb, the nougat, the coffee, and between courses I found myself looking for excuses to lean close to him. When I filled his glass, his fingers brushed mine for an instant. When he laughed, he looked at me, not Lucas.

My son noticed nothing. Or maybe he did, and preferred not to notice.

At half past eleven, Lucas stood up yawning.

“Mom, I’m going to bed. Mateo, lock up when you leave, okay?”

“Don’t worry, champ,” Mateo replied, not looking at him. He was looking at me.

Lucas went upstairs and, as soon as the door to his room closed above us, the living room became a different living room. The fireplace was still crackling, the carols played softly from the speaker, and I was standing by the table, clearing plates with hands that suddenly no longer obeyed me.

“Leave that,” Mateo said.

He had gotten up. He was on the other side of the table, with the glass still in his hand, looking at me as if he had spent the entire night waiting for that moment.

“Mateo, don’t...”

“I haven’t said anything yet.”

“You don’t need to.”

He set the glass down carefully, came around the table, and stopped in front of me. He smelled of cologne and fireplace smoke. He was shorter than my husband, shorter than Lucas, but he had that way of planting himself on the floor that seemed to occupy the whole room.

“You’ve been looking at me all night,” he said quietly. “And I’ve been looking at you for two years.”

“I’m Lucas’s mother.”

“I know.”

I leaned back against the edge of the table. The dress rode up a little when I moved. I made no move to pull it down.

“What do you want, Mateo?”

“What you want.”

I closed my eyes for a second. I thought of my husband, in Singapore, of the plane that would land in three days. I thought of Lucas, asleep upstairs with his headphones on. I thought of how absurd, unforgivable, perfect that silent living room was.

When I opened my eyes, Mateo was still there.

“If I kiss you,” I said, “tomorrow we can’t go back to acting like nothing happened.”

“We already can’t.”

***

His mouth tasted of red wine and something newer, younger, more impatient. He kissed me as if he had been rehearsing that kiss in his head for months. His hands did not go where I expected; first he took my face, then the back of my neck, then he held me by the waist as if he were afraid I’d pull away. I didn’t pull away. I bit his lower lip and felt a low, rough growl slip from his chest, an animal sound from something that had been tied up too long.

I dragged him toward the sofa, away from the staircase, away from the noise. The tree lights stained our skin red and green. I yanked off his shirt in a hurry, certain that if I didn’t take it off right then I would regret it. Underneath, he was exactly as I had imagined him at every birthday dinner: broad shoulders, defined abs, a line of hair running down to the buckle of his belt. I unbuttoned his pants without asking permission, slid my hand inside, and grabbed his cock over his boxer briefs. It was rock hard, throbbing against my palm, thick and hot. I let out a silly little gasp at the size of it.

“Come here,” he said, and sat me on top of him.

The red dress rode up to my waist. He took my hips and set me against him, slowly, letting me feel what he’d been hiding all night. The bulge pressed right against my cunt through the wet fabric of my panties. I rested my forehead against his and tried to breathe.

“Daniela.”

“What?”

“Look at me.”

I looked at him. His eyes were not the eyes of some kid who came to mess with my son. They were the eyes of a man who knew exactly what he was doing.

“We’re not going to rush,” he said. “I’m going to fuck you all night, Mrs. Alarcón. Slowly. Until you forget your husband’s name.”

A moan escaped me just from hearing him say it. I sank my nails into the back of his neck and started grinding over his cock, circling my hips over the hard bulge, soaking his pants with how wet I was. He squeezed my ass with both hands, guiding me, forcing me to keep the rhythm he wanted.

***

He pulled one strap of my dress down with his teeth. He kissed my neck, slowly, where my husband never kissed me anymore. He found the zipper at my back with his fingers and drew it down vertebra by vertebra. I let him do it while I undid him in turn: the belt, the buttons of his pants, the heat of his skin beneath my hands. When the dress fell to the living room floor, I was left in black underwear, astride him, with the tree lights flickering over my skin.

“Fuck,” he muttered. “I’ve been thinking about this for years and I still underestimated it.”

He unclasped my bra in one hard tug and my tits fell heavy against his face. He wasted no time. He took one nipple into his mouth and sucked it hungrily, biting at it, tugging with his teeth until I gasped. He moved to the other breast, licked it all over, grabbed it in his hand and squeezed as if he wanted to memorize the shape. I pushed his head against my chest, arching my back, silently begging him not to stop.

“You’ve got amazing tits,” he murmured against my skin. “You can see the blue veins. It drives me crazy.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“No? Then how should I talk?”

He pinched both nipples at once and I let out a sharp whimper.

“Talk however you want,” I panted. “Talk.”

He gave a low laugh and laid me back on the sofa, faceup. He knelt between my legs, ripped off my panties in one motion, and tossed them to the floor. He opened my thighs with the palms of his hands, without ceremony, exposing me completely. My face burned. I wasn’t used to being looked at like that, so close, so shamelessly.

“Look at you,” he said, running a finger along the lips of my cunt. “Soaked. And I haven’t even touched you properly yet.”

He bent down and kissed me down there the same way he had kissed my mouth: long, wet, unhurried. He ran his whole tongue from my asshole to my clit and I clamped my legs around his head on pure reflex. He pried them open again, held them against the sofa, and set about eating my cunt for real. He sucked my clit, took it into his mouth, tugged at it with his lips. He put his tongue inside, pulled it out, lifted it again. He slid in two fingers and started moving them upward, searching for that spot my husband had never found.

“Fuck, Mateo, fuck...” I whispered, biting my hand so I wouldn’t scream. “Don’t stop, don’t stop, please...”

“Come in my mouth,” he said, lifting his face for a second, his chin shining with me. “I want to feel it.”

He plunged back in with his tongue and a few seconds later I came, both hands tangled in his hair, pressing his face to my cunt as my whole body convulsed. He didn’t move away. He kept licking slowly, gathering everything up, until I pushed at his forehead because I couldn’t take any more.

We went down to the floor, onto the rug, beside the tree. I finished taking off his pants and boxers with a single yank. His cock sprang heavy against his abdomen: long, thick, the head already gleaming. I stared at it for a second, incredulous. I lowered my head and took it into my mouth without thinking. I sucked it all the way down, as much as I could, letting him touch the back of my throat until my eyes filled with tears. I pulled off with a sudden gasp, took in air, licked him from balls to tip, got him good and wet, and swallowed him again. Mateo rested a hand on the back of my neck, not forcing, just accompanying.

“That’s it, sweetheart,” he murmured. “Suck me like that, fuck. You’re so good at it.”

I sucked his cock with hollowed cheeks, looking him in the eyes, feeling his thighs tighten beneath my hands. I licked his balls, kissed them one by one while I stroked his shaft with my hand. When I could feel he was about to slip, he pulled me off with a gentle tug of my hair.

“Stay still. Not yet. I’m going to come inside you.”

He laid me back on the rug, positioned himself between my legs, and opened my thighs as wide as they would go. He guided his cock with his hand and started pushing it into me slowly, centimeter by centimeter, watching my face with every thrust. I bit his shoulder to hold back a scream when he slid all the way in. He filled me completely, to the very bottom, and I could feel every vein throbbing. He stayed still for a second, buried balls-deep, looking at me as if he were recording the moment.

“Are you okay?”

“Don’t stop.”

He didn’t stop.

He began slowly, as if he wanted to prove he knew how to wait. He withdrew almost all the way and pushed back in with calm, letting me feel every inch scraping along the walls of my cunt. Then, when he understood I couldn’t stand waiting any longer, he changed pace. He lifted my hips, pulled me against him, and drove into me harder, faster, until I started hearing the wet slap of our bodies colliding under the tree lights.

“Tell me you like it,” he panted in my ear. “Tell me you like the way your son’s friend fucks you.”

“I like it,” I moaned. “I like it, fuck, don’t stop, fuck me...”

“Not too loud, you’ll wake Lucas.”

The mere thought of my son sleeping two floors above while his friend was wrecking my cunt in the living room made me even wetter. I covered my mouth with the back of my hand and dug my nails into his back with the other. Mateo noticed and smiled with that insolence of his.

“Turn around.”

He put me on all fours on the rug, with my face almost against the gifts under the tree. He drove into me again with one hard shove and held me by the hips. He started fucking me brutally from behind, delivering dry, sharp slaps to my ass that made me bite the rug to keep from screaming. He bent over my back, grabbed one breast with a hand, and slipped the fingers of his other hand into my mouth. I sucked them while he kept pounding into me.

“What an ass you’ve got, Mrs. Alarcón,” he murmured against my ear. “I’ve been looking at it for two years. Two fucking years.”

He pulled his fingers from my mouth slick with spit and ran one over my asshole. I lost my breath. My husband had never touched me there. Mateo noticed and didn’t force it, just left it there, pressing now and then while he kept drilling into my cunt.

“Another day,” he said. “Another day for that hole too.”

I didn’t answer because I was coming again. My elbows buckled, I fell onto the rug with my ass up, and screamed against my arm as I shook all over. He kept pushing, slower now, letting me wring out every last tremor. When it passed, he turned me faceup again.

“I want to see your face when I come.”

He positioned himself between my legs again, climbed on top of me, and shoved in with two thrusts. He took my hands, pinned them into the rug above my head, and started fucking me while staring straight into my eyes. Each thrust shook my tits, stole my breath, made me clamp my thighs around his hips. I told him things in his ear I shouldn’t repeat to anyone: to fill me, to leave his load inside me, that it had been years since anyone had fucked me like that. He growled, clenched his teeth, his jaw tightening.

“I’m coming,” he panted. “Fuck, Daniela, I’m coming.”

“Inside. Come inside.”

He sank to the hilt and stayed there, trembling over me, his forehead against my neck while he whispered my name as if he’d just learned it. I felt him throbbing inside me, filling me in hot waves with his cum. I locked my legs over his ass so not a drop could escape. I came a third time just from feeling it, squeezing my cunt around his cock while he emptied himself completely.

He stayed inside me for a long while, until he began to soften. When he slipped out, I felt the cum stream warm down my thigh, staining the rug beneath the Christmas tree. It made me laugh and blush at the same time.

***

We stayed on the floor for a while without speaking, listening to the crackle of the fireplace. The tree lights still flickered. Upstairs, Lucas slept through everything. I was thirty-eight years old, had a husband in Singapore, and had the absurd feeling that I had recovered something I hadn’t even known I’d lost.

“You have to go,” I told him.

“I know.”

He dressed slowly. I put his shirt on over me and walked him to the door. In the entryway he kissed me again, softer this time, almost asking permission to come back. He slid his hand under the shirt and put two fingers into my cunt, still soaked with him, just for a second. He pulled them out, brought them to his mouth, and sucked them slowly.

“So I remember,” he said.

“Tomorrow?” he asked after a beat.

“Tomorrow is Christmas.”

“The day after.”

I didn’t answer, but I didn’t tell him no either.

When I closed the door, I stood against it for a moment. I smelled of him, of wine, of fireplace smoke. I went upstairs barefoot, peeked into Lucas’s room, and saw my son asleep with his headphones on, oblivious to everything. I closed the door carefully.

In the bathroom mirror I barely recognized myself. My cheeks were flushed, there was a red mark on my neck, my hair was a mess, and a white thread was drying on the inside of my thigh. I washed my face with cold water, stared at myself for a while, and realized I was smiling on my own.

Happy Christmas Eve, I told myself.

And, for the first time in a long time, I meant it.