Cousins

I thought it was a secret date with my girlfriend’s cousin. What I didn’t know was that the phone beside the bed was streaming everything live.

She was 20 and had never had a real orgasm. That sticky January night, with half a bottle of rosé, my French cousin decided it was time.

We were alone that March siesta, and she was still in her uniform. I don’t know how we went from tickling on the sofa to something else.

Twenty years old, zero experience, and a cousin who looked at him like she knew exactly what was on his mind. The summer was going to be long.

They were cousins, they rarely saw each other, and that night they were alone in the living room while everyone slept. Nothing should have happened. Almost nothing did.

She had never been with anyone. I was her cousin. What began as a family gathering ended at dawn when she whispered that she had been waiting for me all night.

When I opened the door to my uncle that afternoon, no one else was home. What I confessed to him later, on his sofa, I had told no one.

I was masturbating thinking about her when she pushed the door open without warning, fresh from the shower and not a stitch of clothes on. What happened next shouldn’t be told.

She arrived at my apartment with her cheek still bruised. That same night she stepped into the bathroom wrapped in a towel and dropped it when she saw me.

When she clung to me in the water and I felt her breathing change, I knew the summer we turned eighteen would be unlike any other.

I booked the same Airbnb where I first made love to my cousin. This time we weren’t alone: each of us brought our partner, and all four of us knew it.

When the screen came on, my sister-in-law was welcoming her two relatives in the living room with a smile I’d never seen at Sunday lunches.

He took my jaw in one hand and looked me straight in the eyes. He was my cousin. We were family. And neither of us backed down.