The Night I Slept in the Same Bed as My Aunt

My name is Diego, I’m thirty-four years old, and for months I’ve been turning over whether to tell this or not. I’m a psychologist. I teach at the university and see some patients in private practice. My specialty isn’t family therapy, but I know the literature on Oedipal complexes well. What happened with my aunt Catalina puts me in an uncomfortable position: it isn’t just the taboo, it’s that the psychologist who is supposed to help people understand these impulses ended up giving in to his own.

My aunt Catalina is a journalist. She isn’t one of the familiar faces on television, but her work on documentaries has a certain prestige. She’s fifty-eight years old, just over five foot seven, and has a body that age hasn’t managed to tame. She was widowed four years ago. Her only son, my cousin Sergio, lives in Santander with his wife after a work-related move, and since then I became, in her own words, her second son. My parents died in the pandemic, so it was mutual: each of us filled the void life had opened in the other.

We live in different flats in the same building. I go up to her place several times a week. We have dinner together, watch movies, talk about her work and mine. Until a few months ago, that was exactly what it was: the predictable affection between aunt and nephew.

Catalina’s latest documentary was about incest. Taking advantage of having a psychologist for a nephew, she interviewed me. We spent two afternoons talking, nearly an hour each time, about sex between mothers and sons, about the weight of prohibition, about what anthropology had to say on the matter. I answered as a professional. She took notes as a journalist. The documentary aired on a pay channel and had a good response. After that, in some circles, they started calling her “the incest journalist.”

In an interview on another program, a panelist asked her, half joking, whether she had ever had a similar experience. Catalina smiled. It was a long smile, too long, before she said no. That smile was what began to unsettle me.

One afternoon, in the faculty bar, two students at the next table were talking about the report. They were talking about my aunt without knowing she was my aunt. One said she was hot as hell, a textbook mature woman, that he’d put his cock in her mouth without hesitation. The other answered that the smile with which she had answered the question was a confession in disguise, that the woman had written on her face that she had fucked someone from her own blood. I listened to everything in silence, with my coffee cooling between my hands.

That night I got home trying to convince myself it was just student bullshit. I couldn’t manage it. I started looking at Catalina differently. I began noticing her legs when she crossed them on the sofa, the way her blouse fit when she leaned down to pour coffee, the round shape of her ass under her skirt when she went to the kitchen, the gesture with which she brushed her hair back from her forehead. She was beautiful. She always had been. But until then it had been a beauty I registered the way one registers the weather: a fact without consequences.

One night I went up to her place to fix a leak under the sink. She had gone out to buy groceries. I took the chance to look into her office. I don’t know what I was searching for, but I found a folder with a title that took my breath away: “Mother-Son Incest, a Relationship Tolerated by Society?” Inside were movie titles, screenshots from porn sites, quotes from short-story magazines. I turned on the computer. There was no password. The history was full of searches made after the documentary had been completed. “Mother sucks son’s cock,” “son cums inside mother,” “mature woman seduces nephew.” Catalina was still researching the subject long after having delivered the documentary, and by then she was no longer researching it as a journalist.

When she came back from shopping, dinner was as always. She talked about a new program on the municipal elections in Cantabria. She told me she had to travel to Santander the next day and, without thinking too much, she offered to take me along. I had days off at the faculty and could move ahead with a thesis on regressive hypnosis. I accepted before I had time to think about it.

That night I masturbated thinking about her for the first time. I went down to my flat, locked the door as if someone could be watching me from inside, and lay on the bed with my cock already hard, pushing against my pajama pants. I took it out. Catalina’s image imposed itself on me, effortlessly. I saw her sitting in the armchair in the office, legs crossed, her skirt riding up her thigh, looking at me while I hypnotized her. In the fantasy I asked her increasingly intimate questions and she answered in that low journalist’s voice, unfiltered, telling me she stuck two fingers in her cunt every night, pulled them out shiny and sucked them while thinking about Sergio, about me, about any man from her bloodline. I gripped my cock hard, spat into my hand so it would slide better, and started moving with the rhythm the fantasy imposed on me. I imagined Catalina unbuttoning her blouse one button at a time, taking a heavy breast out of her bra, round and soft, the dark nipple already hard. I imagined sucking it whole, burying my face between her breasts, feeling the hot weight in my mouth. I imagined her kneeling between my legs, looking up at me with that journalist’s face that asks uncomfortable questions, pulling my cock out of my pants and taking it into her mouth all the way to her throat. Her tongue circling the glans, her hand moving at the base, her watery eyes holding mine while she sucked me. I imagined cumming in her open mouth, seeing the semen gather on her tongue before she swallowed. I sped up. My closed fist moved violently over my cock, squeezing my glans every two or three strokes. A moan slipped out of me in the silence of the flat. I felt the release climbing up from my testicles and there was no turning back. I came in four thick spurts that landed on my belly and chest, my jaw clenched so I wouldn’t shout. I stayed there for a while staring at the ceiling, with my cock still hard and pulsing in my hand, breathing badly, feeling dirty in a new way. I fell asleep uncomfortably, with the sensation of having crossed a private line I could no longer uncross.

***

Catalina picked me up at the building entrance at four in the afternoon. She was wearing a dark chiffon dress that slipped backward every time she changed gears. I offered to drive and she agreed. She closed her eyes as soon as we left Madrid. I tried to keep my eyes on the road. I kept looking back at her legs. The road. Her legs. At some point the dress rode up to the edge of her panties and I spent five kilometers with my cock hard against the seam of my pants.

After forty minutes it started to rain with a violence I hadn’t seen in years. After ninety minutes, as we climbed the pass, the drops turned to snowflakes. In less than an hour the highway was a white soup through which we moved at twenty miles an hour behind a caravan of cars with their hazard lights on.

—Diego, this isn’t going to hold out much longer —Catalina said, awake now, gripping the door handle.

A sign passed by. “Motel La Veleta, next exit.” I took it without thinking. The motel was in an industrial estate that, covered in snow, looked like an abandoned village. I parked as close to the entrance as possible. We ran the twenty yards through the snowfall and went in soaked.

Inside it was nicer than the façade had promised. Wood, white walls, a reception desk with dried flowers. Catalina shook the snow out of her hair while I went up to the counter. The receptionist, a woman of about fifty with thick-framed glasses, greeted us with a smile that made me suspicious.

—Do you have a reservation? —she asked.

—No. We need a room for tonight. Or two, whatever you have.

—I only have one left. For the night or by the hour?

Catalina looked at me. I looked at the signs on the wall. “Live an intimate moment.” “Suites with jacuzzi for couples.” “Discretion guaranteed.” I swallowed.

—For the night —I said.

The room was at the end of a hallway decorated with prints of half-naked women. When I opened the door, we both stopped in the doorway. A huge bed with white sheets, a padded headboard, a metal bar overhead, a giant mirror on one wall and another on the ceiling, surrounded by colored lights. On the nightstand there was a brochure with the room service menu and, underneath, another with the toy catalog.

—Well —Catalina said, trying to laugh—. At least we’re dry.

She went into the bathroom. I sat on the bed, listened to the shower and tried not to think about anything specific. I imagined her naked on the other side of the door, with hot water running over her mature woman’s big tits, over her soft belly, between her thighs. When she came out, she was wearing the motel’s white robe and her hair was tangled, still damp. Her clothes, including her underwear, were spread over the bathroom radiator. The door was open. I saw the black panties hanging from the edge, the matching bra, the cups large enough to make my breathing quicken. I looked away too late.

—I’ll go —I said, standing up.

I closed the bathroom door and leaned on the sink. In the mirror there was a man I didn’t quite recognize. Thirty-four years old, dark circles under his eyes, the look of a teenager who’s just been caught. My cock, half-hard inside my pants, pulling at the fabric. I washed my face. When I came out, Catalina had already ordered dinner. We ate on the little table by the entrance. A hamburger for me, a salad for her. The robe had slipped a little off her shoulder, revealing the clavicle and the round beginnings of a breast without a bra. She didn’t notice. Or she did.

—I’m wrecked —she said, pushing away the half-finished plate—. I’m going to bed.

—I’ll stay up reading for a bit.

I took out my thesis notes. A hypnosis technique called MILDFUNES, a way of inducing in the patient a state of consciousness from which they can access repressed memories. I reread the same paragraph three times without understanding a thing. Catalina was already breathing deeply on the other side of the bed. I turned off the bedside lamp, slipped under the sheet trying not to brush against her, and then the noises started.

***

They came from the room next door. A woman moaning. A man talking loudly. Loose phrases slipping through the wall as if the wall were made of paper.

—Harder. Like that. Keep going.

—You like cock like that, huh? Tell me how you like it.

—Yes. Put it all in. Don’t stop. Fuck me.

—You’re soaking wet. You’re dripping. Look how your cunt’s dripping.

—Shut up and shove it in all the way.

The headboard on the other side started banging against the partition with an obscene rhythm, three knocks a second, dry. The wet smack of flesh against flesh could be heard, her moans growing higher and higher, his breathing like an animal close to your ear. At one point the woman let out a long scream and kept asking for more.

—Deeper. More. Break my cunt.

—You’re going to make me come, slut. You’re going to make me fill you up.

—Come inside. Inside. All inside.

I closed my eyes and tried to think of something else. Catalina didn’t move. She slept deeply, her back to me, with the robe hiked above her knees and the belt loosened. The sheet covered her up to the waist. In the wall mirror I could see the reflection of the whole room. The bed. The two bodies. Mine, rigid. Hers, surrendered to sleep.

The moans on the other side rose in pitch. The woman started saying more specific, dirtier things, describing with a loosened tongue every single thing being done to her. She asked him to lick her ass, to put two fingers in her while he ate her out, to spit in her face before fucking her again. I could feel the pressure pushing against the pajama pants and I couldn’t find a way to stay still. My cock had gotten so hard it hurt. I thought about getting up and going to the bathroom. I thought that from the bathroom nothing would be heard. I thought that if I went to the bathroom it would take me hours to fall asleep. It probably took me a minute to decide, though it felt much longer.

I pulled my pants down to my knees with the obsessive care of someone who knows any noise can ruin everything. I grabbed my cock and held it there for a second, feeling its weight in my hand, hot, pulsing to the rhythm of my heart. It was already wet at the tip. I spread the pre-cum with my thumb and started moving slowly, sliding the foreskin up and down with my hand closed in a ring. The woman’s voice on the other side kept giving me instructions that weren’t meant for me but seeped in as if they were. His voice, more panting now, more animal by the second. I tried to look at the ceiling, but the mirrors in the ceiling sent my image back to me: the bed and Catalina. I clenched my teeth.

I lifted the sheet a little higher. The robe had opened at the top in her sleep and in the wall mirror I could see the beginning of a breast. Just the beginning, but enough. I bit my lip. I sped up, rubbing my thumb over the glans every time my hand reached the top, squeezing hard on the way down. I could feel my heartbeat in my temples.

—Are you asleep? —I whispered.

She didn’t answer. She was breathing with that deep cadence that can’t be faked. I gave her shoulder a gentle tap. Nothing. I tugged two fingers at the robe lapel, barely a millimeter, just enough for the reflection to give me more skin. The whole curve of her breast appeared in the mirror. The nipple was dark, dense, much more striking than my imagination had managed to build. A thick nipple on a mature woman, the size of a coin, the areola wrinkled, the tip standing up from the cold or from something happening in her dream. Blood rushed to my head and to my hand and everything became one single place.

I jerked off staring at that nipple. I started fantasizing concrete, filthy things, images that went through me one after another. Opening the robe all the way, pulling that whole breast out and taking it into my mouth, sucking it hungrily, circling the dark areola with my tongue, biting the nipple between my teeth until she let out a moan. Going down to the soft belly, licking her navel, going lower still. Finding my aunt’s cunt, a fifty-eight-year-old woman’s cunt, with the pubic hair already mixed with gray, the lips thick and parted. Putting my tongue between the folds, licking her whole, feeling in my mouth that taste of a mature woman I had been imagining for months. Seeing her wake up with my tongue inside her, looking down at me with that long smile from the interview, whispering for me to keep going, that she had been waiting for me since the documentary.

I glanced at her again through the mirror. The robe had opened a little more with the movement of her breathing. Now I could see almost all of her breast, heavy, soft, falling to one side with her position. The dark shadow of the other nipple showing through the fabric. My hand moved faster and faster, completely wet now, making a low, obscene sound that terrified me and excited me at the same time. Take advantage, I thought. Take advantage because you’re never going to have this moment again in your fucking life.

On the other side of the wall, the man let out a long, deep grunt, a roar that ended in panting. The woman answered with short phrases, with those “yes, yes, yes, come, come inside” that say nothing and everything. They both came almost at the same time. By then I could barely hear them. I left my left hand resting on the sheet, at Catalina’s hip, without touching her yet. My little finger’s tip touched the robe fabric. One centimeter more and it would touch her skin. My right hand was moving so fast my wrist was burning. I felt the heat rising through my belly, that tension in the testicles that allows no turning back. I knew it was almost over.

I fantasized the finish in quick images, one after another. Fantasized kneeling on the bed with my cock in my hand, finishing over those tits of my sleeping aunt, watching the semen run down her cleavage and slip into the fold between her breasts. Fantasized putting it into her open mouth and cumming inside, watching her swallow without opening her eyes. Fantasized turning her over, hiking the robe up her back, sliding my cock into her from behind while she slept, feeling her mature cunt closing around my shaft, fucking her like that until I came inside and saw it run down her thighs. Each of those images lasted a second before jumping to the next, and together they took me to the edge.

At the last second I pulled my left hand away. I didn’t want to touch her like that. I didn’t want to think afterward that I had touched her like that. The release hit me with my eyes fixed on her reflection, on that dark nipple peeking out from the robe lapel. A first spurt landed on the robe, at hip level, a thick white dollop that stood out against the pale fabric like an accusation. Two more, intermittent, one landed near her thigh, the other stained my own hand and dripped onto the mattress. The last one, already spent, onto the sheet, between the two of us, drawing a slow line toward the fold of the fabric. I felt my cock throb three or four more times in my hand, as if it still wanted to keep releasing semen without having any left.

I was breathless. I breathed slowly, listening to whether her breathing changed. Nothing. It stayed the same. A second after the guilt came the panic. If she woke up, if she saw the stain, if she suddenly opened her eyes, I was finished. Getting up could also wake her, but staying there was worse.

I slid out of the bed with absurd slowness. I went to the bathroom. I took a handful of tissue, wet a piece, came back. I cleaned the sheet first, then the robe, with the pulse of a surgeon and my eyes fixed on her face. Catalina was still breathing deeply, lips parted, oblivious to everything. When I finished, I flushed the paper down the toilet, pulled the chain with one finger, and crawled back under the sheet on the side farthest from her that the bed allowed.

I didn’t fall asleep right away. I spent a long time listening to how they finished in the next room, how silence settled in the corridor, how the wind pushed snow against the glass. I thought about Catalina’s long smile when she answered that question on television. I thought it hadn’t been accidental.

***

Her voice woke me, far too early.

—Diego, wake up. We need to talk.

I opened my eyes with my heart in a thousand places at once. Catalina was standing there, already dressed in the clothes from the day before, arms crossed. I sat up slowly.

—What’s wrong? —I said, trying to keep my voice from breaking.

—Look out the window.

I got up. Snow covered everything. More than a meter, I figured. The cars in the parking lot were white mounds. The road could not be distinguished from the field.

—The news says everything’s been shut down until further notice —she added—. We’re going to have to stay here another night.

I looked at her. There wasn’t the slightest trace of suspicion on her face. Only tiredness, annoyance, and the practical idea that we were going to spend another twenty-four hours locked in that room with two mirrors and a bed.

—Okay —I said, swallowing—. Another night.

I smiled, I don’t know why. Catalina held my gaze a second too long and smiled back. It wasn’t the same smile as in the interview. Or maybe it was. I couldn’t decide then. I still can’t decide now.