I Unbuttoned Her Nightgown While Her Mother Slept

Years have gone by, and I still remember the heat stuck to my back that night, the air hanging still against the wall, and the constant hum of the hallway fan. It was the dead of January in the south of the country, and the wood of the house creaked whenever the thermometer dropped a degree. That weekend house smelled of salt, jasmine, and something else I learned to recognize that night.

There was Mariela, lying on her side on the sheet, wearing her white nightgown printed with lavender flowers. The fabric barely reached past her hips, and the hem had ridden up a little as she bent one leg. Beneath it, a mint-green cotton panty was outlined, with a design so innocent it contrasted with the shadow of the hair faintly visible beneath. Her legs were long, tanned by the summer, with a thin sheen of sweat that gave them a moist bronze shine.

Above the panty, her belly moved with the rhythm of a breathing that refused to calm down. It rose and fell too quickly, as if she had been waiting for me for a while without saying a word. Higher up, two large breasts pressed against the cotton, spread by the way she was lying, and the nipples made two hard points through the print. Her eyes were open, fixed on the ceiling, bright; her lips pressed together, as if holding back any sound. In the next room her mother was sleeping, and the shared wall was barely a sheet of plaster that let even the click of a switch through.

“Are you sure?” I whispered.

She nodded בלי looking at me. That was all the answer I needed.

I ran my thumb over the first button of the nightgown and let it go. The second. She closed her eyes. The third. The base of her breasts was exposed, a sun-browned mestiza skin, with a couple of tiny beads of sweat nested in the cleft. I paused. I brought my hand over the fabric and laid it on one of her breasts; it was firm and yet yielded under my palm, as if the cotton had been pressing it and my hand had come to free it.

“Keep going,” she begged, almost voiceless.

I pinched her left nipple through the cotton and felt it swell between my fingers. I lowered my head to confirm with my mouth what my hands already knew. The fourth button, the fifth. The areola appeared first, darker than the rest of the breast, and then the nipple itself, such a deep brown it looked black in the yellow light of the bedside lamp. It must have been the size of an olive pit, I thought, and I didn’t bother hiding my stare.

They won’t believe me if I tell them.

I lowered my head and kissed it. Then I opened my mouth and took it in fully, sucked on it as if I wanted to tear something from it. Her hand grabbed my hair with a force I hadn’t expected. She bit the pillow to keep from making a sound. I switched to the other breast and repeated it; I wanted to memorize the texture of each one, the way my tongue tangled around the hard nipple, the heat rising in her chest every time she drew breath.

I undid the last button without moving my mouth away. The nightgown fell open from side to side, two panels of fabric draped over her body, like curtains. I sat up for a second to look at her. There she was, fully there, exposed to the waist, breathing hard and glassy-eyed, and I still had the best part left.

***

I went down until I was kneeling between her legs. The mint-green panty was now a map of my next move. Her lips showed through the cotton so clearly it looked wet in the center. There was a darker, round stain right in the middle. I brought my nose close and pressed it to the fabric.

The smell hit me like a slap. It wasn’t perfume or soap. It was her, pure, fermented in hours of waiting and desire. My eyes shut on their own. My tongue moved ahead of my brain and I licked the fabric. I tasted her through the cotton, salty and alive. On reflex, Mariela arched her hips and let out a moan too long to hide. I covered her mouth with my free hand.

“Your mom,” I whispered.

She pressed her lips together and nodded, her eyes full of complicit panic.

I traced the outline of her lips with my index finger, still over the fabric. With my other hand I squeezed the bulge through my pajama pants, not for pleasure, but so my body would understand it had to hold on. I knew it was going to cost me.

“Take it off?” I asked.

She nodded again. Her chest was blotched red, the way it gets when someone laughs too much. I took the elastics at her hips and started lowering her panty with a slowness that surprised even me. I wanted it to last. I knew that night would never happen exactly the same way again, and I’d rather strip her over a century than in one yank.

The belly. The first hair, sparse and dark, like the beginning of a drawing. I went a little lower and the pubis opened before me, thick, neat, with that inverted-heart shape skin gets when a girl has only recently become a woman. The fabric kept giving. When I reached the upper edge of her lips, she drew in a sharp breath and held it. I stopped. Her sex was shining. A glassy thread stretched from the center to the mint-green cotton, as if the fabric refused to let her go.

I lowered the panty a little more. Another pause. Then to the knee, to the ankles, and finally she kicked it free gently so it wouldn’t brush the wall.

“Open,” I told her.

“I’m embarrassed.”

“No one’s looking at you but me.”

It took her a while to obey. She began to part her legs a couple of inches, then a couple more. When she reached about forty-five degrees, she stopped and covered her face with her forearm, red all the way to her neck. I settled between her legs. The view was exactly what I had imagined and, at the same time, nothing like it. The lips were thick, dark, almost violet at the edges, closing over a deep pink shining with their own moisture.

***

I brought my mouth close and kissed her there as if it were a kiss anywhere else, on the lips, slow, with as much contact as I could manage. I heard her choke back a cry against her arm. I tasted her. It had a flavor hard to describe, a mix of something metallic and something sweet, with a bitter undertone that made me want more. I ran my tongue along her, from bottom to top, and slipped it into the place where she opened widest, where she was hottest. I circled with the tip. Her hand closed in my hair. The other kept covering her mouth.

I went up to the clit. I found it first with the flat of my tongue, found it and left it alone for a second. Then I pressed it with the tip. Then I sucked it. Each thing made her shudder in a different way. Mariela breathed through her nose, frantic, trying to hold everything in, and I could feel her body starting to cramp with the effort of not screaming.

At the same time I brought up a hand and grabbed one breast. I squeezed it. I pinched the nipple without asking permission. She came against my face before I could prepare myself. I felt her lips pulsing against my mouth. Then a hot spurt came out, too much, as if she had been saving that response for years. I swallowed what I could. The rest soaked my chin and neck.

It pulsed two more times, three, four. I didn’t move my mouth away. I didn’t want it to end and, at the same time, I felt stupidly proud of having driven her there. When she finally relaxed, I kissed the inside of her thigh and slowly moved up, without wiping my face, tracing her belly, skirting her breasts so I wouldn’t arouse her again right away, until I lay down on top of her.

“I’m never going to forget this,” I said.

“There’s more,” she answered.

***

She was right. The bulge in my pants had been asking for air for a while, and I’d ignored it because the priority had been her. I pulled my pajama bottoms down to my knees and had it out. It was too hard, already with a thick drop of clear fluid hanging from the tip. Mariela propped herself on her elbows and looked at me. Then she stretched out her hand and grabbed me.

“Come here,” she said.

She guided me. The tip barely touched the entrance and I was already trembling. The heat was unreal. The next step was to push and let the body do the rest. I started to push.

I didn’t make it.

Her hand gave me two motions up and down, I suppose to position me properly, and that was all my body needed after so much buildup. I felt that dry jerk from the waist up that tells you there’s no turning back. I tried to think of something else. It was pointless. I came in her hand, on her belly, on the crumpled cotton of the nightgown, everywhere but where I should have come.

I squeezed my eyes shut. My face felt hot, not from pleasure, but from shame.

“Forgive me,” I murmured.

She laughed silently, a soft vibration in her chest, and tugged at my shoulders so I would hold her. I sank against her neck. She smelled of sweat and her own body, all mixed together.

“It doesn’t matter,” she whispered in my ear. “You’re still going to be my first time. Tomorrow we’ll try again.”

I stayed there a while, resting on her, saying nothing, listening as her mother turned over on the other side of the wall. The bedside lamp made the open nightgown look like a giant lavender flower spread over the sheet, with her in the middle. Tomorrow, she had said. Tomorrow there would be a second night, and a third. But none of those would be this one.