The Half-Open Door of My Cousin’s Room

My name is Mariana, and I grew up in one of those houses where the word “desire” did not exist. My family was deeply Catholic and conservative: talking about sex was unthinkable, just like having a boyfriend, going out with friends, or wearing a skirt above the knee. Everything the body asked for was pre-labeled as sin, and I had learned to keep quiet even before I understood what I was silencing.

I lived with my grandmother, a widowed woman with a steel will, two aunts, and an uncle. My mother had had me while single and had died when I was very young, so I grew up among other people’s prayers and warnings. At nineteen, I still went from home to university and from university to home, with mandatory Mass on Sundays. I did not consider myself ugly: I was of medium height, with a generous chest and wide hips, but I always dressed loose and dark. My grandmother did not want, in her own words, “a showy granddaughter.”

Also living in that house was Adrián, my cousin, two years older than me. Nobody forced anything on him. He could go out, come home late, have a girlfriend. And that difference in treatment was precisely the crack through which everything that came later slipped in.

That Sunday I woke up with a cold. My throat hurt and my body felt heavy, so my grandmother, grudgingly, agreed that I should stay home while the rest went to Mass and then to a parish fundraiser. I knew they would not be back until evening. Adrián had left early, before anyone noticed I was staying behind; he was going to see his girlfriend, a curvy girl named Renata.

I thought I would sleep through the whole afternoon. And I did for a while, until a noise jolted me awake.

At first I thought I was imagining it, that the fever was playing tricks on me. I pulled the covers over my head and closed my eyes again. But the noise came back, clearer this time: a dull, rhythmic удар against the wall. And between each удар, something I took a moment to recognize because I had never heard it so close before. Moans.

This can’t be. They’re all out.

Fear made me sit up in bed. Curiosity made me get up. I left my room barefoot, holding my breath, and moved down the hallway following that sound, which grew louder with every step. It was coming from Adrián’s room. The door was not completely shut: a strip of light leaked through the crack, enough to look without being seen.

I moved closer. And what I saw nailed me to the floor.

Adrián had her on all fours on the bed and was fucking her without mercy. Every thrust of his hips produced that noise against the wall that had woken me. He held her hair tied back in a ponytail and pulled it backward, forcing her to arch her back. With his other hand he spanked her ass, and her skin flared hot with each slap.

—Harder —Renata begged between gasps—. Don’t stop.

—I’m certainly not going to stop —he answered with a calm that prickled the back of my neck—. You’re a bitch, and bitches deserve to be punished.

I felt heat. A heat that began in my face and moved down my chest until it settled, thick and heavy, between my legs. I did not understand what was happening to me. For nineteen years I had been convinced that this was dirty, forbidden, condemnable. And yet I could not look away.

The room smelled of sweat and something sweet I could not identify. Adrián’s clothes were tossed on the floor, mixed with hers, as if they had both ripped everything off in a rush. Every detail burned itself into me: the way the sheets tangled around their legs, the reflection of the lamp on damp skin, the wet sound of bodies colliding. I had no idea sex could have so many sounds, so many textures, so much hunger.

***

Renata was wearing fuchsia lace lingerie that hid nothing, very high black heels, and around her neck, a leather collar from which a thin chain hung. Adrián held her by that chain like someone holding a reins. Every time he pulled, she moaned louder, and each one of her moans tightened something inside me.

I felt myself getting wet. I noticed it against the fabric of my underwear, a new, urgent dampness that embarrassed me and, at the same time, urged me to stay. I pressed my thighs together without thinking, and the sensation multiplied.

He turned her on the bed until she was lying on her back against the mattress. Then I saw what his body had hidden from me before: silver clamps biting her nipples. Adrián first brushed them with his fingers, slowly, and then pulled on them. Renata let out a long cry that was not pain, or not only pain. It was something else. Something I had no words for, and that my body, instead, seemed to understand perfectly.

Without realizing it, my hand had slipped over my underwear. I found it there, pressing, when it was already too late to pretend it had not been me who put it there. I was soaked. I frightened myself, pulled my hand away for a second, and the next second I put it back where it had been.

Adrián reached toward the nightstand and picked up an object that gleamed, elongated, with the base covered in small stones. He brought it to Renata’s mouth.

—Suck it —he ordered.

She obeyed without hesitation, eyes half-lidded, while he kept moving inside her mercilessly. The scene had something hypnotic about it: Renata’s absolute surrender, my cousin’s cold control, that choreography of order and obedience I had never imagined could exist. And I, on the other side of the door, discovered that the idea of being at someone’s mercy like that did not repulse me. It aroused me.

***

I had no idea how long I had been watching. Time had turned thick, just like the heat between my legs. My fingers moved on their own over the fabric, drawing clumsy circles, learning in real time something no one had ever taught me.

—Open your mouth —Adrián suddenly said, his voice broken.

Renata opened it. And then I saw him finish, still holding her by the chain, while she writhed on the mattress and touched herself with a desperation I recognized because it was the same one I was beginning to feel. The two of them collapsed onto the bed, panting, tangled together, unaware that a few meters away a shadow was spying on them, heart about to burst out of its chest.

That was the moment I reacted. I understood at once where I was, what I was doing, what would happen if Adrián turned his head toward the crack. Panic gave my body back to me. I moved away from the door as slowly as I could and went back to my room, stepping as if the floor were made of glass.

I closed the door. I leaned against it with my back and let my breathing settle. But the heat would not go away. On the contrary: now that I was safe, it grew, demanded, insisted. My body had seen something it could not forget and did not intend to let me sleep until I gave it an answer.

I stretched out on the bed. My heart was pounding in my temples and my skin had gone gooseflesh beneath my nightgown, as if my whole body had awakened from a long sleep. For the first time in my life I slipped my hand under my clothes, with no fabric between, and touched myself directly. The contact was so intense I had to bite the sheet to keep from making a sound. I had no idea what I was doing; I was only repeating, from memory, what I had just seen. The circles. The pressure. The rhythm.

At first I was clumsy. I would stop, hesitate, start again. But my body moved ahead of my head and, little by little, found its own rhythm. I discovered what point responded, how much force, when to ease up so the tension would grow even more. Every success sent a shiver through me that forced me to clench my teeth against the cloth.

I thought of Renata on her knees, of the chain, of my cousin’s voice giving orders. I thought of what it would be like to be in her place, surrendered, obeying, letting someone decide for my body what I had never dared decide for myself. Each image tightened a little more that invisible cord drawing taut inside me.

And then the cord snapped.

It was like a tingling that exploded from the deepest part of my belly and ran through me completely, a wave that folded me over myself and left me trembling, face buried in the sheet wet with saliva. I stayed very still, feeling my heart slowly come down from its sprint, amazed that my own body could hold something so immense without my knowing it.

Nineteen years of guilt and silence, and it had only taken one badly closed door to bring it all down. I did not feel shame. That was the part that surprised me most. For the first time I did not feel dirty or sinful, but simply alive.

That afternoon I did not only discover what an orgasm was. I discovered that inside that quiet girl who went from home to Mass and from Mass to home there was a whole desire waiting, patient, for someone to finally open the door for it. And I was never able to close it again.