Forbidden

It had been eight years since I last saw her. She came back as a woman with one idea in mind: to provoke me until I gave in.

I thought it would be a quiet afternoon in front of the TV, until my stepsister’s bare foot started climbing my thigh and one question changed everything.

He was more than twice her age and her mother’s man. But when they were left alone in the house, Carla understood he’d wanted exactly this for months.

Andrés was always the strong brother, the one who brought food home and slept with his girlfriends. Until one night of withdrawal he came looking for me in the dark.

The perfect daughter by day, my own mother’s lover by night. I learned to fake it in front of everyone, until my sister came back and I had to choose between them.

The first time I saw him naked, it was only for a few seconds, but it was enough to awaken a forbidden curiosity I no longer knew how to extinguish.

I went down determined to confront him about his affair. I ended up on his lap, with my robe lifted and my body burning for something I should never have felt.

I’d spent months avoiding coming back, but that afternoon my sister put a video on the screen and nothing in our family was ever the same again.

Six months of freedom ended with one call: the father was coming home. And under the same roof, they’d have to hide a fire they no longer knew how to put out.

I thought the whole house was mine that night. Then the lock turned, he looked at me from the doorway, and I was still naked on the sofa.

I walked barefoot down the hallway thinking I’d find a movie. What I saw behind that half-open door changed everything between the three of us.

I had never seen my mother naked. The day her arm was broken, someone had to put her in the shower, and that someone was me.

When the plane jolted and she suddenly fell onto me, I felt her hips press against my body. Neither of us said a word, but something had changed.

I grew up listening to her through the wall, hating every man who passed through her bed. That dawn, with the house silent and the national team on TV, she was the one who closed the distance.

He hadn’t touched anyone in months when I started looking at my aunt differently. She prayed every night; all I could think about was how to bend her without guilt.

I only meant to tell him to turn the porn volume down. I never imagined that argument would end with the two of us on his bed, with nothing between us.

When Greta opened the bathroom door and found us like that, I knew the lockdown was only just beginning to drag all our secrets into the light.

I called my psychologist because I’d been burning all day. Her voice convinced me that no desire was a sin, not even what I felt for Diego.

When she twisted her ankle, my aunt didn’t look for another chair: she sat right on my lap in front of the whole family and started moving slowly.

I built the pool for the family, not for this: for my son’s girlfriend to spy on me from the window while I pretended not to notice her trembling hands.