Cousins

I dressed to provoke him, certain that this time I would be in control. I never imagined one look from him would be enough to bring all my confidence crashing down.

We had spent half our lives silently measuring ourselves against each other. Until the woman he pursued knocked on my door one August night and chose to stay.

He never imagined he would find the women in his family collecting a debt behind that door—or that he would end up enjoying every second.

The door was barely shut and inside someone kept saying yes, yes. I shouldn’t have looked, but I stayed frozen in the hallway, holding my breath.

When the lights went out and we were left suspended at the very top, my cousin stopped pretending to be innocent and told me exactly what she wanted to do to me.

My boyfriend went away for thirty days and I promised myself I’d resist. I lasted fifteen. What happened next turned me into someone I no longer recognize.

A single slip and some cruel laughter were enough for him to discover that shame, far from hurting, ignited something new and dark inside him.

I was soaping myself when the curtain opened and there she was, smiling, not a stitch on, determined not to leave even when I told her to.

We arrived at our aunt’s house to keep her company for the weekend. That night, the three of us in the same bed, she asked us a question that changed everything: could we keep a secret?

I never told her I liked women, or that she kept me up at night. But that midnight, alone by the pool, I was the one who dared to say what I felt.

Sofía was asleep with her back to me when the first moans came through the wall. I woke her with my hand between her legs: —Shut up and listen, I told her.

I had just enough budget, and my boyfriend offered me his aunt’s house. What I didn’t know was that his cousin would turn that week into something I never told him about.

The emergency door was locked and my wife was trapped on the other side with him. Only a plaster wall separated us. Then I started hearing.

She went down for water and found them laughing in the garden. That night, on her knees in the hallway, I decided to remind my husband who he belonged to.

That afternoon, with the fan roaring and the house empty, my cousin looked at me differently and said he had something to prove to me. I had no idea how far he'd go.

The moment he heard the key turn in the lock, Nico knew his cousin’s arrival was going to change everything, even if neither of them said it aloud.

He stayed on my sofa for a couple of weeks, polite and distant, until one Sunday afternoon he dropped the line that woke everything we’d buried in those summers.