The Confession I Never Made to Anyone Until Today

I never told anyone. Not my best friend from school, the one I share all my secrets with, not the boyfriend I had back then, and certainly not anyone in my family. I’ve been carrying this for years, and the only way I could think of getting it out of me was to write it in a place where no one would know who I am. So here it goes, unfiltered and without makeup.

I was twenty that summer. My cousin Carolina was two years older than me, and I had always admired her for that mix of boldness and sweetness that I lacked. She moved through the world with a confidence that made me a little jealous and a little fascinated. I, on the other hand, still blushed when a boy looked at me too long on the bus.

That January, my aunt and uncle went away on a trip and invited me to spend two weeks with Carolina at the country house they had on the outskirts of town. I accepted without thinking. I wanted sun, a pool, a couple of books to read, and, above all, a break from college. What I didn’t know was that my cousin already had other plans for me.

The first day was normal. Pool, mate on the veranda, a long nap after lunch. But the second day was brutally hot. The kind of heat where clothes stick to your skin and you end up walking around the house with as little on as possible. I had put on an old T-shirt and panties, nothing else, and stretched out on the big bed in the main bedroom to read.

Carolina walked in without knocking. She had just come out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, her hair still wet and smelling of coconut. She lay down beside me as if nothing were strange and started reading over my shoulder.

—What’s it about? —she asked.

—A girl who falls in love with her sister’s husband.

—Ah, look at that. —She smiled in a way I didn’t understand at the time.

She started stroking my arm, slowly, with the tips of her fingers. I didn’t say anything. I thought it was one of those things cousins do, nothing more. Then her hand went up to my neck, then down my back, then stopped at my waist. I still had the book open, but I wasn’t reading anymore. I was focused on every one of her fingers.

—Does that bother you? —she whispered in my ear.

—No —I answered, and my own voice surprised me with how low it sounded.

What happened after that had never once been planned in my head in my entire life. Carolina rolled me over on the bed, kissed me on the mouth, and I kissed her back. It wasn’t a cousin’s kiss, it was a woman’s kiss. Long, with tongue, with a hunger I didn’t know I had and that she clearly did know.

She pulled off my T-shirt with such ease that, looking back now, makes me think she had rehearsed it a thousand times in her head. She kissed my breasts, then my navel, then kept going down. When she got between my legs, I was already wet in a way I was ashamed to admit. She laughed softly, almost in celebration, and started using her tongue with a precision no boy had ever given me up to that point.

I came fast, too fast, and asked her to stop. She didn’t stop. She told me she had the whole afternoon and that we weren’t leaving that bed until I couldn’t take any more. And that’s exactly how it was.

***

What I didn’t know, what she confessed to me days later, was that everything that happened that afternoon was part of a plan. While she licked me, while she kissed my neck, while she taught me what it was to be with a woman, Carolina was preparing me for something else. Something that had gotten into her head weeks earlier and that she needed me to agree to without realizing it.

After the first orgasm, she got up, opened the drawer in her nightstand, and took out a harness. I had never seen one up close before. It was black, with straps, and had a piece that looked like it came straight out of a movie. She picked it up without shame, like it was a hairbrush.

—Want to try? —she asked.

—I don’t know… —I hesitated.

—Trust me.

And I trusted her. That was the key phrase of the whole summer: trust. Every time I hesitated, Carolina said that same thing, and I gave in.

She put on the harness and lay back. She made me climb on top. The first time I felt something like that inside me, with her looking up at me from below, it seemed like one of those scenes you happen to see online and think you’ll never actually live through. But there it was. I moved slowly, then harder, then to the rhythm she set with her hands on my hips. I came again, this time with a muffled scream that bounced off the cement walls of the house.

What came next was what she had really been looking for. She made me turn over. Put me on all fours. And started touching me in a place no one had ever been before. I told her no. She told me to trust her. She took a tube of lubricant from the drawer, and with patience, with a lot of patience, she got me used to it. At first it hurt. I complained. I asked her to stop twice. But something, at some point, changed. The pain stopped being pain and turned into something else, a strange feeling, intense, unlike anything I knew. When I realized it, I was asking her not to stop.

—Good girl —she whispered in my ear, and that made me come again.

***

That night we had dinner together, in silence, a salad neither of us finished. I couldn’t look her in the eyes without blushing. She laughed now and then, as if she knew something I still didn’t quite understand.

The next day, after breakfast, she did the same thing. Back to the bed, back to the harness, back to the patience. I thought it was because she liked it, because repeating it turned her on too. Later I learned she was training me.

—Tomorrow some friends are coming —she told me while brushing my hair, late in the afternoon, on the veranda—. Diego and Tomás. Do you remember Diego?

—Yes, I saw him once at your mom’s place.

—Tomás is new, you’re going to like him. He’s skinny, tall, quiet. He’s got these killer green eyes.

—And what are we going to do?

—Whatever we feel like. I’m staying with Diego. You do whatever you want with Tomás.

She said it like someone planning a trip to the supermarket. I laughed nervously and told her not in a million years. I’d just met him, I wasn’t that kind of girl. Carolina squeezed my hand and answered:

—You are whatever you want to be. One night, that’s all. And if you don’t like it, you go back to your room and that’s that.

I trusted her again. And now that I’m writing this, I realize how easy it was for her to convince me.

***

Diego and Tomás arrived a little after eleven. They brought two bottles of red wine and a tray of empanadas left over from some birthday party. We sat in the living room, which had a long couch and a sofa opposite it. The light was yellow, warm, and the music Carolina put on gradually faded from something upbeat to something slower and more seductive.

We both had on short skirts and T-shirts. I also had on a pair of panties I had chosen with more care than I’m willing to admit. Carolina, at some point between the second and third glass, sat on Diego’s lap and started kissing his neck. I stayed on the sofa with Tomás, not knowing what to do with my hands.

—Are you uncomfortable? —he asked me softly.

—A little —I admitted.

—If you want, I’ll leave.

That sentence undid me. I wasn’t expecting a guy, at that hour of the night, to offer to leave. I looked at him, and then I finally worked up the nerve. I kissed him myself. Tomás was surprised for a second and then kissed me back with a calm I had never felt in a first encounter.

While we were kissing, I could hear my cousin’s moans on the other side of the room. I couldn’t see her, but I could hear her, and that sparked something in my head I didn’t know existed. Tomás was stroking my thigh slowly, with no hurry, and I was opening my legs a little wider without wanting to admit I was doing it on purpose.

He kissed my neck. Went lower. Pulled off my T-shirt. Pulled off my skirt. When he knelt on the floor and kissed me over my panties, I grabbed the back of the sofa and looked up at the ceiling. I thought: tonight I’m someone else. And instead of scaring me, the idea set me free.

Tomás took off his clothes. I watched him without hiding it. I took his hand, pulled him up onto the sofa, sat on top of him. I found him, guided him, and lowered myself slowly. When I had him inside me, I looked over toward the armchair. Carolina was on top of Diego, moving, her head thrown back and a grin from ear to ear. She caught my eye and winked at me.

***

What happened after that, even today, is hard for me to tell.

I was still on top of Tomás, riding him slowly, when Carolina got up from the sofa and came over. She came naked, her skin shining with heat and sweat, and knelt beside the couch. She started kissing my back, my shoulders, the nape of my neck. She was touching my breasts from behind while I was still on top of Tomás. It was the strangest thing, and at the same time, the most natural thing in the world. My cousin, a stranger, and me. And I didn’t want to stop.

Then I felt other hands. Diego’s. And that was when I understood everything.

I tried to get down, by reflex, but Carolina grabbed my face and kissed me. She kissed me hard, deeply, with an intensity that cut off my urge to run. While she was kissing me, I heard Diego opening a packet. I felt his hands on my waist. I felt the cold of the lubricant in a place my cousin had been preparing for two days.

—Trust me —Carolina whispered in my ear.

And I trusted her again.

I’m not going to go into every movement in detail, because there are things I’d rather keep to myself. But I can say this: I have never in my life felt anything like it. Being between two bodies at the same time, with my cousin kissing my mouth, with Tomás’s voice underneath me, with Diego behind me, was an experience that split me in two. I don’t know how long we stayed like that. I don’t know how many times I came. I know that at some point I stopped thinking and just existed. That my screams were probably heard all the way to the other side of town. That I felt both of them, almost at the same time, finish. That when it was over, I was left sprawled on Tomás’s chest, unable to speak, with Carolina stroking my hair like I was a little girl who had just fallen asleep.

***

The guys left around five in the morning, without a fuss. Tomás kissed me on the forehead before he went, as if we had been together for years. Diego left Carolina his address written on a folded piece of paper. Neither of them ever came back to the house.

Carolina and I lay together in the big bed, wrapped around each other, not speaking, until the sun started coming in through the shutters. The next morning, while we drank coffee in the kitchen, she confessed everything. That she had planned it from the first day of my vacation. That she had started training me on purpose so my body wouldn’t work against me that night. That she had told Diego and Tomás what each of their roles would be. That it was an old fantasy of hers and that with me, for some reason, she had felt she could actually propose it.

I got angry. I yelled at her. I told her she was completely out of line, how could she even think of that, I wasn’t some experiment. Carolina let me talk without interrupting. When I finished, she asked me only one thing.

—Do you regret it?

And I, after thinking about it for several seconds, had to tell her the truth. I didn’t regret it. Yes, I was angry about the manipulation. But that night had been one of the most intense of my life, and lying to myself wasn’t going to change the fact that, in a certain way, I had enjoyed every minute.

Several years have passed since then. Carolina and I are still close, though we never spoke about it seriously again. Sometimes, at some family dinner, she catches my eye and smiles in that way only I understand. And I smile back, with the certainty that we carry a secret no other relative, no partner, no friend will ever know.

Until today, of course. Because I decided to write it here.