That Summer Night I Went into My Brother’s Room

It’s been eight years since that night, and the memory still wakes me, in that borderland of sleep where you think you’ve buried everything already. I told no one. I couldn’t tell it. But sometimes I need to put it into words, even if only for myself, to understand what I was and what I am.

That summer we spent at my grandmother’s house, in a coastal town where the sea was three streets away and the air always smelled of salt and ripe figs. My brother Sebastián was twenty-two. I had turned nineteen in March. We hadn’t spent a summer together in a long time—he lived away, finishing university—and that week was a concession to our mother, who insisted the family had to get together at least once a year.

Grandmother went to bed early. By ten-thirty she had already turned off the light in her room, and the house began to breathe that warm silence only old houses know in summer, with the shutters half-closed and the fans humming in every room.

That afternoon we had been to the beach alone together. Mom had stayed behind taking a nap. Sebastián helped me with the clasp at the top of my bikini, because it had jammed, and his fingers took longer than they should have on my back. He said nothing. I didn’t either. But when I turned around, I looked him in the eyes a second longer than I should have, and he was the first to drop his gaze. Something broke there, or opened up, I don’t know.

Later, at dinner, our knees brushed under the table and neither of us moved them away. Grandmother was talking about a distant cousin who had come back from Argentina. I nodded without listening. I could feel the fabric of Sebastián’s trousers against my bare leg and I couldn’t think of anything else. Every time he shifted position, his knee opened a little wider and I felt the bulk of his thigh pressing against my knee, sliding up the inside of my leg, and I noticed my bikini bottoms getting wet, still on under my dress.

—Are you okay? —he asked quietly, while Grandmother got up to fetch dessert.

—It’s hot —I said, and it wasn’t a lie.

He didn’t answer. He just left his hand on the table, near mine, and kept his eyes fixed on some point in the tablecloth.

***

At midnight I was still awake. I tossed and turned with the sheet tangled around my legs, replaying every gesture, every silence, every millimeter of skin I’d learned to register during the day. The fan spun above my head and did nothing. The heat came from inside. My hand had slipped between my thighs without my noticing, squeezing, searching for some relief. I touched myself over my bikini bottoms and I was soaked through. I slid two fingers inside and arched alone in the bed, biting my lip, imagining it was him, imagining his mouth on my neck, his hard cock against my stomach. I pulled my wet fingers out and brought them to my mouth without thinking, and that was the moment I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold myself back.

I got up.

The tiled floor was cool, almost cold, and I walked barefoot down the hall with that mix of resolve and vertigo that comes when you already know you’re crossing a line you won’t be able to come back from. Sebastián’s bedroom door was ajar. Not fully closed. Not fully open. Just enough.

He left it like that on purpose, I thought. He knows I’m going to come in.

I pushed gently and the wood moved without creaking. I had studied that door during years of childhood; I knew it by heart.

Inside, the dimness was almost complete. Only a thread of blue streetlight came in from outside, drawing soft shadows on the wall. Sebastián was lying on his side, with his back to me, the sheet slipped down to his waist. The T-shirt he usually slept in was on the chair. He was naked from the waist up.

I approached without making a sound. Every step sounded like thunder to me. I felt as if the whole house could hear my pulse.

I sat on the edge of the bed, slowly, barely sinking the mattress. I waited. He didn’t move. Not really. But something in his breathing changed, became slower and more deliberate, and then I knew he was awake. He had been awake before I came in.

I reached out and brushed his shoulder with the tips of my fingers. His skin was warm. I was expecting something: a word, a gesture, a refusal. Nothing came. Only silence.

I slid my hand down his arm, slowly, tracing it all the way to his hand. And he, without fully turning over, caught my fingers between his.

That was what undid me.

—Seba… —I murmured, almost voiceless.

—Shh —he said, still without opening his eyes—. Don’t say anything.

He pulled me gently, and I let myself fall against his back. I felt the heat of his body through the thin T-shirt he was wearing. I pressed myself against him, draped my arm over his torso, and under my hand I felt the rapid breathing he was trying to hide.

Then he turned. Slowly. He faced me in the darkness, and for the first time his eyes searched mine. There was no surprise in them. No guilt either. Only a silent question that I answered by bringing my face closer to his.

The first kiss was clumsy. As if we had both forgotten how to kiss. Barely a hesitant brush, a trial. But he cupped the back of my neck with his hand and deepened the kiss, and after that there was no way to pretend anymore. He slid his whole tongue into my mouth and I sucked on it, and he let out a soft moan inside my mouth. We devoured each other, bit each other, drank each other’s saliva as if we’d been dying of thirst for years.

I bit his lower lip without meaning to. He made a low, rough sound that escaped from the depths of his throat. I pressed myself closer to his body. Through the sheet, I felt that he was aroused too. Very aroused. His cock was already rock hard under the fabric, a thick bulge pressing against my stomach. He’d been like that for a while.

He’d been waiting for me all night, I thought.

I ran my hand over his chest, over his stomach, feeling the muscles tighten under my touch. My brother. Sebastián. The two words kept repeating in my head like an alarm I could no longer hear. I slid my hand lower. I moved the sheet aside. I found it.

He was hard, thick, throbbing in my palm. I closed my fingers around him and he sucked in air sharply, as if I’d landed a light punch to the stomach. The tip was wet. I spread the moisture over the head with my thumb and started moving my hand up and down, slowly, tugging back his foreskin, feeling the pulse of the vein running beneath it.

—Fuck —he whispered—. Fuck, Marina.

I lowered my mouth to his neck, licked it, bit the lobe of his ear while I kept jerking him off. I could smell his skin, a clean soap scent mixed with sweat and with that other thing, the thick smell of an excited man leaking from his groin. I lowered my head more, kissed his chest, ran my tongue over a nipple, and he arched his back into my mouth.

—Wait —he whispered—. Wait a second.

I stopped. I thought he was going to send me away. I thought he was going to remember what we were.

—Are you sure? —he said instead—. After this, there’s no undoing it.

I looked at him. In the dim light he was little more than a pattern of shadows and highlights. But it was him. The one who had taught me to ride a bike. The one who had defended me at recess. The one who had held my hair back that night I threw up from my first drunk. And he was, in that instant, something else. A man. A body that wanted me and that I wanted with a clarity that was frightening.

—Yes —I said. And nothing in my voice trembled—. I want you to fuck me.

He kissed me again, with more urgency, almost with rage. He pulled my T-shirt over my head in one clean motion and my breasts were left exposed, my nipples already hard with sheer desire. He sucked one into his mouth, pulling with his lips, carefully biting the tip, and I had to cover my mouth with my hand so I wouldn’t cry out. He laid me back on the mattress and leaned over me. His mouth moved to my neck, my collarbone, my breasts. He wasn’t in a hurry. Every kiss left a mark of saliva and heat.

He licked my nipples slowly, one and then the other, sucking until they hurt, while his hand moved down my stomach to the elastic of my panties. He slipped his fingers inside. When he touched my cunt and found it drenched, he went still for a second and drew in a deep breath, as if even he couldn’t believe it.

—You’re soaking —he murmured against my chest—. You’re soaking, fuck.

—I’ve been like this all night —I confessed, and I bit my knuckle when he started stroking my clit with the pad of his middle finger, drawing slow circles, pressing just hard enough. He slid a finger inside me, then two, and started moving them slowly while his thumb kept working my clit. I opened my legs wider and wider, my hips lifting on their own to seek his hand, and the whole bed already smelled of wet cunt.

I buried my fingers in his hair. I closed my eyes. I tried not to think about who he was. I tried to think only about what he was doing with his tongue, his teeth, his hands. Sebas knew my body in an impossible way, as if he had spent years studying how to touch me, where to press, where to ease off.

When he went lower, when he yanked my panties off in one pull and spread my legs with both hands and kissed me there, I stifled a scream by biting the back of my hand. Grandmother slept three doors away. My mother, two. And we were doing that. That thing no one could ever know.

He licked me all over, from bottom to top, with his tongue flat, gathering all my wetness. Then he opened my pussy lips with his thumbs and slid his tongue inside, fucking me with it, and I thought I was going to die right there. He moved up to my clit and sucked it like it was candy, lips sealed around it, pulling gently, while two of his fingers went in and out of my cunt in a rhythm that sped up on its own. He slipped a hand under my ass, squeezed it, dug his nails in.

—Sebas, stop —I panted—, stop or I’m going to…

But he didn’t stop. On the contrary. He sucked harder, pushed his fingers deeper, curled them upward searching for that spot, and heat climbed up through my stomach, my chest, my face. I grabbed his hair with both hands and let myself go until the first spasm shook me all over. I bit my lip to keep from making a sound. My cunt clenched around his fingers in waves, soaking his hand, and I felt tears at my temples, not from sadness, but from something that had no name. He kept licking slowly while I trembled, stretching out the orgasm, drinking everything that came out of me.

He came back up. He kissed my mouth and I tasted myself on his lips, that salty, thick taste that made me want him even more.

—I want you inside me —I told him.

—I don’t have anything —he answered.

—I’m on the pill. It’s fine. Fuck me.

He looked at me for a second, as if searching for one last sign. I slid my leg over his hip and pulled him toward me. I grabbed his cock with my hand, hard as a rock, and guided it myself to my entrance, rubbing the head over my soaked lips, over my clit, wetting it all over with my arousal. When he entered me, he did it slowly, letting me feel every centimeter. He opened me up inside, filled me, and I could feel my cunt adjusting to him little by little, sucking him inward. I buried my face in his shoulder and stayed still, trying not to cry, trying not to laugh, trying not to die.

—Fuck, you’re so tight —he whispered in my ear, his voice broken—. Fuck, little sister.

That word, spoken like that, in that moment, with him buried to the hilt inside me, made me clamp down on his cock with my whole cunt, involuntarily. He groaned and had to stay still for a second, breathing hard against my neck.

We started moving together. It wasn’t frantic. It was slow, almost sad at times, almost tender. He pulled nearly all the way out and sank back in to the hilt, and I took every thrust by lifting my hips, pressing his back with my heels. The bed creaked softly. There was the sound of our breathing, the wet noise of his cock going in and out of my soaked cunt, the slap of our skin coming together. Nothing else. The whole house asleep around us, unsuspecting. He looked at me in the darkness and I looked back at him, and we both knew exactly what we were doing and what we were ruining forever.

—Look at me —he said every time I closed my eyes—. Don’t close them.

And I looked at him.

He made me turn over. He put me on all fours on the mattress, my face buried in the pillow to muffle the sounds, and got behind me. When he drove into me from behind again, all the way, a long moan escaped me that I had to bite into the fabric. He gripped my hips with both hands and started fucking me harder, deeper, slamming his pelvis against my ass with every thrust. I could feel his balls hitting my clit every time he went all the way in. He leaned over my back, moved my hair away from my neck, licked the nape of my neck.

—Do you like it? —he asked, almost inaudibly—. Tell me. Tell me you like your brother fucking you.

—Yes —I panted into the pillow—. Yes, yes, don’t stop.

He brought one hand around to the front, found my clit again, and started rubbing it in circles to the rhythm of his thrusts. With the other hand he lifted my breast, squeezed it, pinched my nipple. I was coming again, I could feel everything building, my legs tightening, my cunt clenching in spasms around his cock.

—I’m going to come —I warned him—, I’m going to come again.

—Come —he told me in my ear—. Come on my cock.

And I came. Face buried in the pillow, fingers dug into the sheet, cunt squeezing his cock in a convulsion that shot through me from top to bottom. He held on, never stopping, fucking me more slowly while I shook, drawing it out until I couldn’t take any more and had to beg him to stop.

He made me turn over again, onto my back. He wanted to see me. He settled himself between my legs once more and slid into me again, all the way, and I wrapped my legs around his waist and dug my heels into his ass, pushing him. Now he went fast, going for his own release, staring fixedly into my eyes with his mouth half open. I stroked his face, his hair, his neck. I ran my thumb over his lips and he sucked it.

—Inside —I whispered—. Come inside me.

When he finished, he did it inside me, with two, three deep thrusts that nearly lifted me off the mattress, and he stayed like that for a long while, cock buried to the hilt, trembling all over, emptying himself. I felt the heat of his cum filling me, pulse after pulse, deep inside. He pressed his forehead against my neck, breathing against my skin, and a muffled groan escaped against my ear. I stroked his back as if he were going to fall asleep, and in a way he did, for a few minutes, heavy on top of me, spent, with his cock still inside me, slowly softening, while I felt his semen leaking between my ass cheeks and onto the sheet.

***

After that, we didn’t say anything.

I got up carefully. I felt a thick drop sliding down my thigh and wiped it away with my hand, almost without looking. I picked up my T-shirt from the floor. I left the torn panties where they had fallen. He propped himself up on one elbow and watched me cross the room, naked in the backlight, without asking me to stay. I wasn’t expecting him to. Before I left, I looked at him one last time. He lifted two fingers in a tiny sort of goodbye. I smiled, with that strange smile you wear when you don’t know whether you’re going to cry or not.

I walked back down the hall to my room. I got into bed. I felt his smell on my skin and I didn’t want to wash. Not that night. I wanted to keep the proof. I could still feel him inside me, leaking slowly back out, and I slipped two fingers in myself to gather some of him and bring it to my mouth. I tasted him. I fell asleep like that, with my finger between my lips.

It took me a while to fall asleep. When I finally did, I dreamed confused things, of houses flooding and doors I couldn’t close.

***

The next morning, everything was normal.

Or so we pretended.

Grandmother made coffee. Mom remarked that she had slept terribly because of the heat. Sebastián came into the kitchen freshly showered, his hair still wet, and said good morning without looking directly at me. He passed me the milk when I asked for it. He asked if I wanted to go to the beach that morning. I said better in the afternoon. He nodded and spread some butter on toast.

No one noticed anything. No one could have noticed anything. We had been careful.

That afternoon we went to the beach together. We walked along the shore almost without speaking. At one point, near the rocks where no one came, he stopped and looked at me.

—We have to forget it —he said.

—Yes —I said.

—I mean it.

—I mean it —I repeated.

And we hugged for a second there, with the water around our ankles, like any brother and sister. Then we kept walking.

That same week he went back to his city. I stayed a few more days with Grandmother. We never spoke about it again. We have never spoken about it, in eight years. At family dinners we’re polite. We greet each other with a kiss on the cheek. We ask about work. When he got married, three years ago, I went to the wedding and danced with his wife, who is a good girl, and I smiled at her and was happy for him, truly.

But sometimes, in long goodbye hugs when no one is watching, he squeezes me for a moment longer than necessary. And I don’t let go right away.

And we both know.

And we both stay silent.