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 now, when I remember it, I feel that same knot in my stomach. It’s not exactly guilt. It’s 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 kid I already realized she was an attractive woman, the kind who made the neighbors turn their heads when she went out to hang the laundry, but for some reason I never knew her to have a partner. Until he appeared.

It was a Saturday afternoon, at the shopping center. We ran into a man who, at the time, I figured was around forty. His name was Marcelo. He was tall, much taller than us, easily over six feet, with a broad back 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 said, and held out a huge, rough hand, the kind that squeezes hard without meaning to hurt.

I didn’t say much back. I was at that age when everything embarrassed me. He noticed, and instead of pushing, 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 shops, they took each other by the hand. As a couple, they drew attention: 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 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, dressed in 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 T-shirt, just wearing a sleeveless top. He had big, worked arms and a chest that strained the fabric. I had already started feeling things for a classmate, so I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with what was happening to me. But that morning, watching him flex his arm to adjust the mirror, I was struck dumb in a new way.

We arrived at a beautiful beach. It was my first time in front of 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 swim trunks that showed his legs, hairy and firm. But my eyes went straight to his abdomen: defined, covered in a fine layer of hair that ran down 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 they passed. When he came out of the water, dripping, running his hands back through his hair with both hands, I felt my face burn and had to look out at the horizon to hide it.

The afternoon was great, though it was impossible not to keep searching for him with my eyes. 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 pretense of teaching me to swim, Marcelo held me by the waist. His hands were big, firm, and when he adjusted me so I’d float properly, the contact ran through me completely. The only thing I learned was how to float; the rest of the time I spent watching him face-on, his wet skin shining under the lights, hugging 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 being treated. And little by little, he began staying the night.

I never heard anything strange from their room, no noise, no moans. I went to sleep early because I had classes the next day. But there was one infallible sign: the nights Marcelo stayed over, we ate differently, dishes he cooked himself. And he cooked without a shirt on. It was common to see him come out of the kitchen sweating, a dish towel over his shoulder, his chest damp from the steam, and that stirred up in me a mix of heat and shame I didn’t know how to handle.

It also became routine that, after the gym, he’d swing by the house and stay a while in a tank top, helping my mother move furniture or fix whatever needed fixing. Marcelo was always respectful toward me. I wasn’t toward 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’d look like completely naked. Clothes didn’t help: the thin fabric outlined a bulge that appeared and disappeared with every movement, and an ass that stole my attention in a way that scared me.

And so about three months went by, with nights he stayed over and visits that stretched into the early hours. 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. He was the kind of man anyone would want around: kind, affectionate, hardworking, respectful. He almost never drank. And on top of that, he had the body and face of someone who shouldn’t 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 exactly 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 started seeing him with less and less clothing.

Using the argument that we were already a family, and that among men there was nothing to hide, he started dressing lighter. First a tight T-shirt and boxers, nothing more. Everything showed. My mother said nothing, and for me it was the best thing in the world to see him crossing the living room like that, barefoot, as if nothing mattered.

One morning I ran into him coming out of the bathroom in white boxers, small, his skin still damp. I was left hypnotized. The cotton clung to his thighs and to his bulge, drawing every contour under the wet fabric. For the first time I had him that close and that naked and 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 shaking for the rest of the day.

On another occasion he came rushing out of his room, also in boxers, with a trash bag in his hand, because the garbage truck was already turning the corner. He asked me to take it out. I couldn’t help noticing the fabric outlined him more than usual. And that same afternoon, poking around to fit another bag in, I found among the trash a condom wrapper, knotted up, 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 I’d see him in boxers, but I also began checking the trash from his room. I kept seeing him in underwear many times: sometimes the bulge was only a discreet relief, other times it showed more heavily, and once it was almost fully erect, pressed off to one side, its thick outline under the tight briefs that framed his legs. But what always ended up catching me wasn’t that. It was that trail of hair that ran down from his navel and disappeared beneath the waistband.

From the trash I rarely found anything. Once I found a condom with only a little left in the tip; another time, a fuller one that, for some reason, I ended up squeezing between my fingers until it turned 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 once heard a sound from his room, and yet those traces were the mute proof of a sex life I could only imagine.

That was the worst part: it wasn’t just seeing him. It was imagining him sliding that big, hot cock into a cunt while breathing deeply, or gripping the base to put on the condom, tense, self-assured. I got hard thinking about the way those boxers filled out, how the skin of his dick must feel when it got half-erect under his clothes, heavy and alive, brushing his thigh as he walked. And the more I saw him, the dirtier my thoughts got.

I started fantasizing about the sound of a load, about seeing him come, about that white cum running down his abdomen or staining his hand if he touched himself alone. Sometimes I locked myself in my room and jerked off thinking about him, not as a blurred image, but in brutal detail: his shoulders pinning me to the bed, his mouth on mine, his huge hand sliding down my back to grab my ass, those fingers slipping between my cheeks while he forced me open. I hated myself for it and at the same time I didn’t want to stop.

I took every opportunity to see him like that, with the bulge small and sleeping or tense and awake, and I devoured him with my eyes without him knowing. I never stopped imagining what he’d look like completely naked. My bad luck was that image never came to pass: a few months later, my mother and Marcelo broke up, and he left the house one ordinary morning, with the same huge hands and the same smile, unaware of anything 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.