Cousins

When I opened the door to my uncle that afternoon, no one else was home. What I confessed to him after that, on his sofa, I had never told anyone.

I arrived with my T-shirt stuck to my body from the heat, and she opened the door with that smile she had spent years pretending not to have.

I hadn’t seen her in years. When she got off the bus, she was no longer the girl I remembered, and that night we ended up sharing much more than a sheet.

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.

We’d been hiding our affair for years behind fake relationships, until the girl who was my cover told me she loved me and everything went sideways.

The moment I shook the newlywed’s hand, his wife held my gaze a second too long. That night she whispered to find her after the trip.

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.

We got home from the airport at eleven at night, with the house to ourselves and fifteen days ahead of us. Then she told me she hated sleeping alone.

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.

When I took her hands in the car, in front of the square, she already knew where I was taking her. I was still pretending I didn’t know.

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.

It had been five years since I’d seen her. The woman who stepped into the backyard that afternoon had nothing to do with the teenage cousin I remembered.