Forbidden

Nadia had spent years alone, training so she wouldn’t have to think. Her nephew was the only one who looked at her as a woman, and that hungover afternoon they both stopped pretending.

I came home and she threw her arms around me in front of everyone. No one suspected that kiss on the cheek was hiding the desire we’d been holding back all week.

“If you open that box, I won’t be the boy you protect anymore,” I warned her. My older sister held my gaze for a moment, then tore the red paper.

I asked for a foot massage almost as a joke. I never imagined that night, by the fire and with wine in me, my father and my cousin would stop holding back.

The steam came out with her wrapped in a tiny towel, and for the first time in months I felt like picking up a brush. What came next should never have happened.

I agreed to my husband’s fantasy on one condition: I would choose how, where, and with whom. What he didn’t know was that I already had someone in mind.

With the house all to ourselves and him turned away among the rose bushes, I knew that afternoon I wouldn’t be satisfied with just watching him from the window.

For days I’d had my eyes covered and only recognized people by their perfume and their voice. That night, her hands were nothing like a nurse’s.

When the study door creaked behind me, I knew we were not alone, and that the woman hidden in the shadows did not plan to leave.

I put my finger where no father should ever touch and felt him tremble. He said no, that he was my father. But that night I learned what a man becomes when he denies what he wants most.

I saw his silhouette outlined against the fridge light, barefoot on the cold tile, and I knew that night I hadn’t come down for a glass of milk.

Her father watched her from the edge of the water, and for the first time she wondered what was hiding behind that gaze that followed her with every stroke.

I went into his room to tidy up like any mother. I came out knowing my own son desired me, and that part of me had been waiting for exactly that for months.

Marisa walked around the house in a tight dress, never imagining that that night her daughter-in-law would turn the family dinner into something none of them would forget.

When I saw her come down through the building entrance at six in the morning, with a suitcase bigger than she was, I knew that summer wouldn’t be like any other.

The mattress creak in her parents’ room wasn’t sex: it was theft. Sabina padded down the hall barefoot until she pressed her eye to the crack in the door.

My mind told me never to go back. My body remembered those lips and wouldn’t let me sleep. On the third day I dialed his number.

When she asked me for coffee on my knees, I knew something between us had changed forever and there was no going back.

One lie was enough to make my father stop looking at us with rage. My sister saw it before I did, and signaled me to keep going.