The Dream About My Mother I Never Dared to Tell

Adrián jolted awake in the middle of the night, his heart hammering against his ribs and his cock so hard it hurt. The room was freezing, the thermometer on the nightstand showing barely seven degrees, and yet he was sweating as if he’d run for miles. He sat up slowly, perched on the edge of the mattress, and put both hands to his head, rubbing his temples as if that could erase what had just flashed through his mind.

It wasn’t the first time a dream had woken him like that. By then well into adulthood, he had learned to live with wet dreams, even to enjoy them. Some he had laughed about in bed with a partner; others he had kept for his lonely nights, jerking off slowly while he let the images run wild behind his eyelids. They had never seemed like a problem. They were his, they were harmless, they were part of the game.

But this one was different. It left him with a strange knot in his stomach, a mix of arousal and guilt he didn’t know what to do with.

It was her. My mother.

He stared into the darkness, trying to convince himself his brain had just thrown it together at random, that it meant nothing. And yet, against his will, he replayed the whole scene, frame by frame, like someone pressing on a wound to see if it still hurts.

In the dream, she was wearing loose shorts, the kind you wear around the house, and nothing underneath. She was standing there, distracted, and when she noticed him looking at her from the doorway she didn’t panic or cover herself. On the contrary. With two fingers she pulled the fabric aside, just a little, enough for him to see. Her clit was swollen, shiny, soaked, with the lips of her cunt parted like a split-open fruit, offered up without a single word.

Adrián, in the dream, didn’t resist. He crossed the room, knelt before her, and plunged his mouth between her legs. His tongue went straight into the slit, tasting that warm, salty wetness, and he began sucking her clit hungrily, pressing it between his lips, tugging gently, then licking it again from top to bottom. He heard her moan softly, then louder, felt her clutch the edge of the piece of furniture, felt a hand dig into the nape of his neck to shove his face even deeper into her cunt. He slipped two fingers inside her, curling them inward, while he kept sucking her clit without stopping, and he felt the walls tighten around them. Her knees trembled, her breathing came in broken bursts, until her whole body shook in a long orgasm and she came in his mouth with a hoarse moan he drank down in full. And at that exact moment, like a cable being cut, he woke up.

***

He switched on the lamp. The yellow light gave him back his usual room: clothes hanging off the chair, the half-full glass of water, ordinary reality. None of it calmed him. He was still hard, his dick throbbing against his stomach, still with the image stuck behind his eyes, and no matter how many times he told himself it was absurd, his body didn’t agree with his conscience.

He decided to do what he always did when something got into his head: find the source. Something had to have triggered that dream. You don’t suddenly fantasize about someone so forbidden out of nowhere unless there’s a crack somewhere, a buried memory the subconscious went digging up that very night.

He closed his eyes and dug. He stayed like that for a good while, sifting through stray images, until suddenly one came back with such clarity it stole his breath.

That afternoon. The movie.

He was already grown, a man through and through. One ordinary afternoon, the two of them watching television in the living room. She was sitting on the big sofa and he was on the floor, leaning against the base of the furniture, close enough to catch every movement she made, but at an angle where —he had assumed then and confirmed now— she couldn’t really see what he was doing. She probably thought he was asleep or absorbed in the screen.

The movie was long and boring. The two of them sat in silence, each in his own world. And at some point, when he turned his head purely by reflex to look at her, he saw it. Her hand was inside her shorts, under her underwear, and her fingers were moving with barely perceptible slowness over her clit. At first he thought he’d made a mistake, that he was imagining things. He looked again. And again. There was no mistake: the bulge of her hand showed clearly under the fabric, moving in small circles, and every so often it sank deeper, as if she were slipping a finger into her cunt.

He could have coughed. He could have made any noise to let her know he was awake, that he was watching, that this had to stop. He didn’t. He chose to stay still, holding his breath, while he watched her from the corner of his eye. Her face had changed: lips parted, wet, eyelids heavy, a concentration that had nothing to do with the movie. Her breasts rose and fell quickly under her T-shirt, and he, though he didn’t want to, could make out her hard nipples pressing against the thin fabric. Her fingers kept moving under the shorts, faster and faster, and Adrián watched them like he was hypnotized, feeling his own body respond without permission.

His cock had gone rock-hard inside his pants. It throbbed, trapped against the fabric, and without taking his eyes off her, he brought one hand down and started squeezing himself over his jeans, very slowly, terrified she might notice. The perversity of seeing what he shouldn’t, of being the invisible witness to something absolutely intimate, excited him far more than any magazine hidden under the mattress. He could see her wrist trembling, her elbow pressed to her ribs, and one of the times she adjusted her shorts he heard, crystal clear, the wet sound of her fingers sliding into her soaked cunt. That barely audible slosh engraved itself in his head forever.

He waited. Watched her tense, bite her lip so she wouldn’t moan, hold back a sigh, stay perfectly still for a few seconds with her hand buried to the knuckles between her legs. Then, with complete calm, she settled back into the sofa, pulled her hand out —her fingers shining under the blue glow of the screen— wiped them on the blanket over her lap, and sat upright again, serene, as if nothing had happened.

Neither of them said a word. He had completely lost track of the movie, and he doubted she had followed it either. She didn’t ask him anything, either. That afternoon was sealed in a silence that lasted years, until this night, when his mind decided on its own to go back and fetch it.

***

Adrián opened his eyes. There it was, then. The trigger. Not so mysterious after all. His head had taken an old memory, loaded with that forbidden perversity he had never dared name, and turned it into a dream where the boundary was finally crossed.

Because, if he was honest with himself, that had not been the only time his desire had fed on hidden watching. Since he was young he had been an observer. In the yard of the house where he had lived as a newlywed there was an old wall that faced the neighbors’ back patio. With the patience of an ant he had made a tiny hole, hidden among the cracks, and from there he spied on the women next door when they bathed. He remembered the pounding heart, the fear of being caught, the electric pleasure of seeing what he was supposed to keep from seeing: big tits streaming water, round asses lathered up, other people’s hands stroking between their legs as they thought they were alone.

And there were the adult swimming classes. While the rest of the men struggled to stay afloat and understand the instructions, he would submerge himself and look up. The instructor would periodically adjust her swimsuit with a quick gesture, and every so often, underwater, he could make out a tuft of pubic hair peeking out from the edge of the fabric, or the precise outline of her cunt lips pressing against the tight Lycra. Those stolen seconds lasted him all week. He learned to swim late and badly, but he learned something else long before everyone else did.

All his life, he now understood, he had been a silent collector. He gathered images, gestures, other people’s lapses, and stored them in some corner of memory that his lonely nights later pulled from, when he grabbed his cock and let the archive open by itself. The subconscious doesn’t invent: it recycles. It rearranges what you feed it. And for decades he had fed it an entire archive of furtive glances.

What threw him wasn’t the mechanism, which he understood well. It was the material chosen that night. Out of his whole collection, the dream had gone and pulled out the most uncomfortable piece, the one he kept under double lock, and put it front and center without asking permission.

***

He stayed seated for a long while, the lamp on and his breathing calmer now. He thought about getting up, drinking some water, distracting himself with anything until the image faded and he could go back to sleep as if nothing had happened.

But he didn’t. His body was still firm, insistent, his cock outlined beneath the sheet, and guilt, far from extinguishing desire, seemed to be fanning it. There was something in the forbidden that pulled at him, just as it always had: the hole in the wall, the water in the pool, that sofa that afternoon. His whole erotic life had orbited around what he wasn’t supposed to look at and looked at anyway.

He turned off the light. He lay back under the blankets in the freezing room and let the two scenes merge: the real one, the sofa and the fingers moving under the shorts, and the invented one, the dream the cold of dawn had interrupted. He licked his palm and brought it to his cock, wrapping his whole dick in a closed fist, and began to masturbate slowly, squeezing hard at the base and loosening at the head, spreading the sticky fluid already oozing from the glans with his thumb.

He imagined again kneeling in front of her, mouth pressed to his mother’s cunt, sucking her clit until she came. He imagined her turning around, bracing her hands on the piece of furniture, showing him her ass, asking with her eyes to have him fuck her. He saw himself standing behind her, gripping his cock, guiding it between those wet lips and thrusting all the way in with one hard shove. He felt it tight, hot, swallowing him to the balls. He started moving with more hunger, his hand sliding up and down his cock faster and faster, biting his lip so he wouldn’t make a sound in the empty house.

In his head he heard her moaning, heard her asking for more, harder, deeper, with that voice he had always known as his mother’s and that now, in the waking dream, was whispering filthy things in his ear. He grabbed her hair, yanked her head back, drove his cock all the way into her cunt. He heard her come again, with spasms that clenched his dick, and felt his own orgasm start rising from his balls, unstoppable.

He jerked off faster and faster, his breathing ragged, fully aware of what he was doing and choosing not to stop. He let desire take him, with the image of her offering herself in the doorway burned into him, with the shining fingers from the sofa afternoon, with the imaginary voice asking for more, and he gave himself over to it without further judgment. When he came, he did it biting the pillow to muffle the groan, and felt the hot spurts of semen splash onto his stomach and hand, thick, one after another, while his cock kept throbbing between his fingers. The heat finally beat the cold, and his body went slack against the sheets, damp and sticky with sweat and cum.

He wasn’t going to tell anyone. This wasn’t the kind of anecdote you shared laughing in bed. It was his and his alone, one of those truths you keep in the darkest place and only return to in the dark.

When he opened his eyes again, a gray light was already coming through the blinds. The dream had begun to blur, as all dreams do, but the memory of the sofa was still intact, sharp, waiting patiently for the next night when his mind decided to come looking for it again.