I Started Secretly Desiring My Mother’s Boyfriend

There are desires that one carries for years without daring to name them. Mine began the summer I turned eighteen, and even today, when I remember it, I feel the same knot in my stomach. It is not exactly guilt. It is something more uncomfortable: the certainty that it marked me forever.

I grew up alone with my mother. I never knew my father, and she never once spoke to me about him. As a child I could already tell she was an attractive woman, one of those who made the neighbors turn their heads when she went out to hang the laundry, but for some reason I never knew her with a partner. Until he appeared.

It was a Saturday afternoon at the mall. We ran into a man who, at that moment, I guessed was around forty. His name was Marcelo. He was tall, much taller than us, easily over six feet, and had broad shoulders that even loose clothes couldn’t hide. Friendly face, thick beard, a smile that seemed sincere.

—So you’re the man of the house —he told me, and extended a huge, rough hand, the kind that squeezes without meaning to hurt.

I didn’t say much back. I was at that age when everything embarrassed me. He noticed, and instead of pressing, he bought me a couple of things and the three of us ended up at the movies.

My mother didn’t explain anything to me that afternoon, but there was no need. As soon as we started walking through the stores, they took each other by the hand. They drew attention as a couple: neither of them was ugly, and they complemented each other well. Especially because of Marcelo’s height, which towered over her by more than a head. Beside him, she looked small and happy.

He drove us home in his car, stopping first to buy food so my mother wouldn’t have to cook. When they said goodbye, they shared a short kiss, the kind that only barely brushes. It was the first time I had seen her kiss someone, and to my surprise it didn’t bother me. I didn’t care at all. I got out of the car with the bags and went inside whistling.

***

From then on, Marcelo became part of our weekends. My mother told me, with some caution, that they were boyfriend and girlfriend. I didn’t give it much importance. The only thing that mattered to me back then was that at last we could travel, see places we had never been because we didn’t have a car. And that was enough for me.

Until, after a few months, we went to the beach. And I saw him without a shirt for the first time.

Marcelo picked us up early, wearing long sleeves despite the heat. The drive was long. Halfway there we stopped to fill up with gas and buy something to snack on, and he came back to the car without his shirt, only a tank top. He had big, well-built arms and a chest that pulled the fabric tight. I had already started feeling things for a classmate, so I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with what was happening to me. But that morning, watching him flex his arm to adjust the mirror, I was left dazed in a whole new way.

We arrived at a beautiful beach. It was my first time facing the sea. While my mother and I changed in a little tent, Marcelo went ahead. When I came out, he was already standing at the water’s edge in short shorts that left his legs on display, hairy and firm. But my eyes went straight to his abdomen: defined, covered by a thin layer of hair that fell from his chest and disappeared beneath the waistband of the shorts.

It was the first time I had seen a man like that up close, in the flesh. And I loved it. I wasn’t the only one looking: several women turned as he passed by. When he came out of the water, dripping, brushing his hair back with both hands, I felt my face burn and had to look out toward the horizon to hide it.

The afternoon was great, though it was impossible for me not to keep looking for him. Every time he lay back on the sand with his arms behind his neck, I had that torso a meter away and didn’t know where to put my eyes. That night we slept in a hotel with a pool, and my mother insisted so much that the three of us ended up in the water. Under the excuse of teaching me to swim, Marcelo held me by the waist. The only thing I learned was to float; the rest of the time I spent watching him head-on, wet skin shining under the lights, holding my mother as she laughed.

***

After that trip I got more comfortable around him. We started talking, he taught me to play on the console, he paid attention to me in a way I wasn’t used to. And little by little, he started staying the night.

I never heard anything strange from their room, no noise, no moans. I fell asleep early because I had class the next day. But there was one foolproof sign: on the nights Marcelo stayed over, we ate differently, dishes he cooked himself. And he cooked without a shirt. It was common to see him come out of the kitchen sweaty, a dish towel over his shoulder, and that gave me a mix of heat and embarrassment I didn’t know how to handle.

It also became routine for him to stop by after the gym and stay around for a while in a tank top, helping my mother move furniture or fix whatever needed fixing. Marcelo was always respectful with me. I wasn’t respectful with him, at least not in my head. Every time I saw him in those short gym shorts, it was impossible not to imagine what he would look like completely naked. The clothes didn’t help: the thin fabric outlined a bulge that appeared and disappeared with each movement, and an ass that stole my attention in a way that scared me.

And so about three months went by, between nights he stayed over and visits that stretched into the early morning. Until one dinner my mother announced that Marcelo was going to move in with us. Three days later, he was already settled in.

I couldn’t say a single bad thing about him. Not one thing. He was the kind of man anyone would want nearby: kind, affectionate, hardworking, respectful. He hardly drank. And on top of that, he had the body and face of someone who should not exist in real life, only on a screen.

***

Living under the same roof didn’t change him at all. He behaved as if he were my father, and that was precisely my problem: I didn’t see him as a father. I saw him as a man I would have liked to be with in another life. And living together only made things worse, because I began seeing him with less and less clothes on.

Using the excuse that we were already a family, and that between men there was nothing to hide, he started getting around in lighter clothes. At first just a tight T-shirt and boxer briefs, nothing else. Everything showed. My mother didn’t say anything, and for me it was the best thing in the world to see him crossing the living room like that, barefoot, as if nothing.

One morning I ran into him coming out of the bathroom in white boxer briefs, small, his skin still damp. I stood there hypnotized. For the first time I had him so close and so naked that not a single word came out. When he passed by me, I brushed his arm by accident, and that height of his, the way he had to lower his head to look at me, left me trembling for the rest of the day.

On another occasion he came bursting out of his room, also in boxer briefs, with a garbage bag in his hand, because the truck was already turning the corner. He asked me to take it out. I couldn’t help noticing that the fabric was marking him more than usual. And that same afternoon, rummaging around to make room for another bag, I found among the trash a condom wrapper, knotted, still smelling of latex.

That discovery changed something in me. Without meaning to, I became a collector of clues. I started waiting for the time when I would see him in boxer briefs, but I also started going through the trash from his room. I kept seeing him in his underwear many times: sometimes the bulge was only a discreet outline, other times it looked heavier, and once he came out almost fully erect, angled to one side, the thick silhouette visible under the snug briefs that outlined his legs. But what always ended up trapping me was not that. It was that trail of hair that came down from his navel and disappeared beneath the waistband.

From the trash I rarely got anything. Once I found a condom with only a little residue at the tip; another time, one more loaded, which for some reason I ended up squeezing between my fingers until it became sticky. Other times they were too old and dirty, and I didn’t even touch them. I was surprised that all the time we lived together I never heard a single sound from his room, and yet those traces were the mute proof of a sex life I could only imagine.

I took advantage of every opportunity to see him like that, with the small sleeping bulge or tense and awake, and I devoured him with my eyes without him knowing. I never stopped imagining what he would look like completely naked. To my bad luck, that image never came to be: a few months later, my mother and Marcelo split up, and he left the house one ordinary morning, with the same huge hands and the same smile, never suspecting a thing about what he had awakened in me.

I never saw him again. But for years, every time a tall man with a thick beard crossed my path, something in my chest tightened the same way it had that first summer by the sea.