What I Saw Through the Ajar Door That Early Morning

My name is Bruno, and I’m nineteen years old. I’m brown-haired, fairly skinny, and for a long time now I’ve dragged around a fixation on sex that borders on obsessive. I like everything about women, from their hair to the way they tie their shoes. When one of them catches my eye on the street, I try to memorize every detail, because later, alone in my room, those details work for me.

It’s not that I have much experience. Shyness eats me alive when it comes time to make a move, so my sex life has mostly been a matter of imagination and hands. But imagination, when you feed it well, can be more intense than anything you’ve ever really lived.

There are four of us at home. My parents, who are in their fifties, my sister Marina, who is two years older than me, and me. With Marina I have a strange kind of closeness, the sort where we tell each other almost everything. I know more about her love life than about my own, because she really has had affairs and, when she comes back from one, she lowers her voice and gives me details that get her going even as she tells them to me. She’s blonde, slender, with an ass she’s clearly proud of: she wears pants that show it off and skirts that sway as she walks. Of course I’ve noticed. It’s impossible not to. But I had never crossed that line in my mind.

There had been little to say about my parents until that night. My father is the kind who comes home from work, talks for a while, reads, and falls asleep in front of the TV. My mother is something else: she watches what she eats, goes to the gym three times a week, and despite her age has a presence you can’t ignore. Her black hair is always shiny, her legs are firm from all that training, and she has a big chest that strains her clothes without her even trying. Writing it down makes it hard for me, but it’s the truth: my mother is an attractive woman, and that night I learned what that could mean.

***

I have trouble sleeping. I’m one of those who lie there turning over exams, pending things, nonsense. In those half-awake hours the house becomes a map of sounds: a car engine in the street, a pipe, the click of the thermostat. And, almost always, my mother’s footsteps in the hallway. She makes a quiet round before going to bed, pauses for a second at my door to check whether I’m still awake, and then at Marina’s. Then silence returns and, sooner or later, I fall asleep.

That night there was no way. My mother made her usual rounds, I heard her head toward her room, and just when I was expecting silence, another noise came. A low, rhythmic hissing that I couldn’t identify right away. It was coming from the far end of the hallway. It was like the rustle of sheets when someone turns over in bed, but more constant, more deliberate. I stayed still, holding my breath, trying to make sense of it.

It didn’t take long. My feverish brain connected the dots before my common sense did. They’re fucking. The thought hit me with a mix of discomfort and curiosity I couldn’t quite measure. I slowly threw back the sheet and put my feet on the cold floor.

***

I slipped out into the hallway with the stealth of someone who knows he shouldn’t be doing what he’s doing. My parents’ room was just a few meters away, and their door, as almost always, was left slightly open. The light from a streetlamp filtered through the slats of the blind and cast silhouettes in the dimness.

I peeked my head in, my heart pounding against my ribs. And there it was. My mother riding my father, moving on top of him with deliberate slowness, sliding forward and back. I don’t know whether they had just started or whether they were going slowly so as not to make noise, but the sway of her body cut out against the scant light was one of the most disturbing images I had ever seen.

Little by little the motion changed. She settled her knees at the sides of the mattress and began going up and down, also without hurry. With each rise I could just make out my father’s cock, hard, appearing and disappearing. My mother rested her arms on the bed and let out distant sounds, more deep breaths than moans, as if she were taking the utmost care not to wake the house.

I felt the familiar tingling, the warning that my body had decided on its own. In seconds I was hard, straining against the fabric of my pants.

My father slid his hands up her back and then down to her ass again. He lingered there, playing, until he brought one finger to the center and tried to push. My mother, without breaking her rhythm, gently moved his hand away, took the fingers to her mouth, and did it herself. I watched with absurd clarity as she worked herself with saliva and slowly penetrated herself, in little circles, while her breathing quickened and an occasional gasp finally escaped her. My father remained silent, joining only with his chest rising and falling.

***

And then my mind ran wild. Leaning against the doorframe in the darkness, I started imagining what I would never dare to do. What if I went in right now? What if I joined them? The idea was insane, I knew that, but once it appeared there was no way to drive it off.

In my head, my mother was startled to feel me behind her, turned her face halfway, and said my name in a thread of a voice, and I didn’t answer, I just kept going. Her first protest melted into a moan, and my father, far from stopping, smiled at the sight of his woman trapped between the two of us. “But son, what… what are you doing…”, and the sentence broke apart in the middle of each thrust. I pushed harder, watching that body bounce, while she clutched her breasts with both hands and asked for more, always more.

It was a filthy, impossible fantasy, born from a mind as twisted as mine that early morning. But I lived through the whole thing behind that door, and my body responded to the fantasy as if it were real. Without thinking I had lowered my pants and had myself in my hand, hard as a rock, demanding movement. I started slowly, as best I could, in a position that wasn’t comfortable but that I wasn’t about to abandon for anything in the world.

***

That was when, at the other end of the hallway, Marina appeared.

I turned my head sharply. She was staring at me wide-eyed, her arms open in a mute gesture of “what the hell are you doing?”. She had frozen in place. I, instead of running, motioned with my chin: come look at this. Marina connected the dots at once — my stance, the direction of my gaze, the hissing sound — and understood what was happening inside that room.

She came over on tiptoe, with a mix of curiosity and embarrassment written on her face, and carefully peeked over my shoulder. The moment she saw the scene she pulled her head back, covered her mouth with her hand, and looked at me as if I were completely insane. She brought two fingers to her temple and twirled them, her way of telling me I’d lost my mind. I answered with a gesture that could only mean one thing: this is incredible.

Curiosity won out over hesitation. Marina leaned in again, and this time she stayed.

***

Inside, my mother kept moving on my father, helping herself with her finger, completely unaware that two shadows were spying on her from the hallway. I, as if my sister weren’t inches away, closed my hand over my sex again and resumed what I was doing.

Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Marina’s hand going to the waistband of her pajama pants. At first it was clumsy rubbing over the fabric, then little circles, increasingly focused. I looked up at her and saw that she was no longer paying attention to me: her eyes were fixed on the bed, biting her lip. Her hand paused for an instant, found the elastic edge, and slipped inside.

At that moment she looked at me. She shook her head slowly twice, as if to say I can’t hold it, I’m getting too worked up, and kept going, now with her hand under the fabric, drawing circles that made her breathe through her mouth.

From the room came my mother’s stifled voice.

—I’m almost there —she whispered—. Put it in as deep as you can.

And she went all the way down, staying still, pushing downward as if she wanted her husband to run straight through her. Then, in a strange echo of what I had imagined a minute earlier, she took both hands to her chest and squeezed it.

—There, there, leave it there —she said.

***

I sped up the rhythm of my hand, and I think Marina did too. At some point she stopped looking at the scene and leaned back against the wall, looking for a more comfortable position. She spread her feet a little, and in the dim light I could see her alternating circles with deeper movements. Her head was thrown back and her lips were pressed tight.

Suddenly she brought her free hand to her mouth, almost violently, and closed her eyes. She was close. But before she got there, she opened them again, and instead of looking at our parents she looked at me, at my hand, at what I was doing. She closed them again at once, and a shiver ran through her body from top to bottom; she slid a little down the wall, contracting in small spasms that she could barely muffle with her palm over her mouth.

When she was done, she stood there for a moment staring at the floor, catching her breath. Then she looked up, searched for me one last time, and gestured toward her room: I’m going. I nodded. She walked away down the hallway in short, silent steps, and left me alone with the scene.

***

I was on fire. I focused again on the room, on my mother still with her hands on her chest and her head thrown back, and I felt that heat rise, warning me there was no turning back now. I put my hand in front to catch everything, and that was that: I finished in silence, eyes locked on the crack in the door, on an image that by then had turned blurry and feverish.

I went back to my room with the same stealth I had used to come out, mostly to clean myself up and to let my parents finish in peace. They hadn’t caught me, and I wasn’t going to tempt fate. While I was drying my fingers I heard, far off, a deep “aaah” from my father. He had finished. My mother, I guessed, had too.

I got into bed and then, yes, I fell asleep almost at once, with a stupid smile on my face.

***

The next morning my parents were having breakfast like any other day, going over the schedule, commenting on the weather, completely unaware that the night before they had had an audience. Marina and I kept exchanging looks over our cups and laughing under our breath, accomplices to a secret only we knew.

But something stayed turning over in my head for the rest of the day, and I still wonder about it. Would Marina have wanted to do something with me that night? Because, if I’m honest, I think I would have.