I Found My Cousin’s Marked Underwear

My name is Marcos, I’m twenty-five, dark-haired, slim, and green-eyed. I’m finishing a master’s degree that’s proving harder to get through than I expected, and I live in a university city, sharing a flat so I can afford the rent. The flat has three bedrooms. Until that academic year, I’d lived with two girls who had already finished their degree, so I was looking for new people to split the expenses with.

The solution came by itself. My aunt called me to say that her son was starting university in my city, and to ask whether I knew of any place where he and a friend who was going to study the same thing could stay. I told her I had two free rooms exactly. One Saturday, the two boys came with their mothers to see the flat and choose the rooms. My aunt thought it was perfect that I was there, because then, according to her, I could keep an eye on her son and make sure he studied and behaved himself. That was what I expected. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but on the studying part, at least, she wasn’t wrong.

Let me introduce my cousin. His name is Dani; he’s a little taller than me, quite slim, and very fair-skinned, with light brown hair that turns almost blond in summer. His friend, Hugo, is also fair-skinned, more solidly built, somewhat toned, with dark hair. Both of them were exactly the right age to start university.

At first, I felt a bit uneasy about no longer living with girls. Men have a reputation for being filthy when it comes to cleaning, and unfortunately it’s usually true. But living with family had its good side, so I figured it couldn’t go too badly. The other thing on my mind was the possibility that Dani might find out I’m gay. In the family, almost nobody knows. It’s not that I hide it, but I don’t have any mannerisms or looks that give me away, so people assume I’m straight and I don’t bother correcting them.

They moved in in September, and we lived together without the slightest problem for several months. If there was any conflict, it was with myself: I was getting more and more turned on by spending all day surrounded by two eighteen-year-old guys who were hot enough to eat alive. Dani had always been cute, but when he started university, influenced by his friend and by the current trend, he began going to the gym. In a matter of months his arms and back became defined, and the ease between us grew to the point where we’d walk around the house half naked without thinking twice.

I learned his routine without meaning to. I knew what time he got up, I knew he left the bathroom door ajar when he showered, I knew that on Sundays he would stay in his underwear until mid-afternoon, reviewing notes on the sofa. I would sit at the other end with my laptop and pretend to correct papers, but every time he shifted position and the fabric tightened on him, I lost the thread of whatever I was reading. I had to clench my teeth and force myself to look at the screen, repeating to myself that he was my cousin, that I couldn’t even be thinking about this.

The funny thing is that the more I repeated to myself that it was forbidden, the more I obsessed over it. At night, in my room, I had trouble falling asleep. Through the wall I could hear him moving in bed, the creak of the bed frame, and my mind would invent what he might be doing on the other side. More than once I jerked off in silence imagining him, biting my lip so I wouldn’t make any noise, mortified the next day when I saw him having breakfast so calmly, with no idea of anything.

The worst part of the day was in the mornings. One of the two would come out of his room in his underwear to go to the bathroom, still half asleep, and the bulge of his morning erection showed through the fabric. I’d be having breakfast in the kitchen pretending to look at my phone, and my eyes would go there on their own. I was dying of shame, praying that in their half-dreamy state they wouldn’t notice where I was looking.

“Working early today too?” Dani would ask me, scratching his stomach.

“Yeah, morning shift,” I’d reply, without lifting my eyes from the coffee.

I couldn’t lift my eyes. If I did, it would show all over me.

I suppose that’s why I ended up doing what I did over the Christmas holidays. I stayed in the flat for almost the whole break, because besides the master’s I have a part-time job that helps pay for my studies, and I only go back to my parents’ house on the designated dates. My two flatmates, on the other hand, as soon as classes ended, packed their bags and left, leaving me alone in the empty flat.

***

That loneliness, together with the horniness I’d been building up for months, led me one afternoon to do something I would never have dared to do with them at home. I finished my shift, got back to the flat, and the silence felt strange. I poured myself a beer, switched on the TV, and after a while I found myself staring at Dani’s closed bedroom door.

I didn’t even know what I was looking for. I pushed the door open and went in. His room was the typical room of any guy his age: the bed unmade, a pair of sneakers thrown in one corner, clothes scattered between the chair and the edge of the mattress. The first thing that hit me was his smell. That scent of his, a mix of cheap deodorant and something more animal, made my cock start hardening in my trousers.

I felt a bit ridiculous, a bit dirty, but I couldn’t stop. I rummaged through his things without really knowing why. I picked up a sweatshirt he’d left on the chair and smelled it. I went over to the bed in case he’d left his pajamas there, but no luck. And in the end I opened the wardrobe. Between the clothes hanging up and the piles folded any old way, I found a cloth bag where he kept dirty laundry before putting it in the washing machine.

Since he was going to be away for a couple of weeks, the logical thing was for it to be empty. But I opened it anyway. Inside there was a set of clothes from the last time he slept there: a pair of socks and a pair of black underwear. As soon as I stuck my head in, a much stronger smell reached me, more masculine. I shoved the socks aside without thinking and grabbed the underwear. I turned them inside out so the inner side would be visible, and there it was: a couple of whitish, dried stains, the unmistakable sign that the garment had caught an emission.

I brought them slowly to my nose, almost afraid. I recognized my cousin’s smell instantly: a little sweat, a sharp note, and underneath it the unmistakable sweetness of dried semen. It wasn’t much. He had probably jerked off before going to bed and put the underwear back on, leaving that mark that now had my heart racing.

This is wrong. This is very wrong.

The thought flashed through my head and only made me even hotter.

***

I took the marked underwear to my room, knowing no one would bother me. I shut the door out of habit, even though there was nobody in the flat. I pulled my pants down to my ankles and sat on the edge of the bed. I was so hard it almost hurt, and I was sweating a little, more from nerves than anything else. Having something so intimate of Dani’s in my hand, a garment that had been pressed against his cock, turned me on in a way I couldn’t even explain.

I rubbed the tip with the fabric, slowly, right over the stain. The roughness of dried semen against sensitive skin sent a shiver through me. I closed my eyes and imagined him. I imagined his cock, which I’d never actually seen properly, only guessed at beneath the fabric of his underwear on those mornings. I imagined what it would be like to feel it in my hand, in my mouth, forcing its way into me.

I jerked off slowly at first, prolonging it, with the underwear pressed against my nose so I wouldn’t lose even a trace of his smell. Then I sped up. The bed creaked a little and I breathed deeper and deeper, trapped between guilt and a desire I’d never felt so strongly. I thought about Dani coming out of the bathroom with the bulge showing, about his new gym-built back, about his smell filling my head.

I came intensely enough to leave me shaking. I shot several hot spurts over my chest while still breathing in the scent of that underwear marked by my cousin. I stayed there for quite a while, lying down, breathing hard and the garment still in my hand, feeling guilt slowly creeping back as the arousal began to die down.

It wasn’t the first time, nor the last, that I did it that holiday. I went back into his room more than once, and on a couple of occasions I even put those underwear on myself, feeling the fabric against me as if it were a secret only the two of us shared, even though he knew nothing at all.

I don’t know whether Dani noticed anything when he came back from the holidays. All I know is that when he unpacked and put those underwear back into the dirty-laundry bag, there were more marks on them than he had left when he went away. And that every morning, when he came out of the bathroom in his underwear and scratched his stomach half asleep, I kept lowering my eyes to my coffee, knowing something he didn’t know.

To be continued…