What I Discovered About My Brother One Rainy Night

That March afternoon, rain was falling sideways through the downtown streets, thick and steady, as if the sky were in a hurry to empty itself before nightfall. I had gone out to eat alone at a new little diner that sold chicken soup and liter-sized juices for almost nothing. I ordered passion fruit. I finished it down to the last ice cube, convinced I’d make it home without any trouble.

I was wrong after three steps.

The moment I crossed the restaurant door, my bladder started pressing with the familiar insistence I knew all too well. And, like always whenever I really have to go, I got an uncomfortable bulge in my pants. It’s not that I get fully hard: it’s more like a tension, a pressure pushing from inside that anyone could notice if they looked at me for too long.

Half a block later, I saw the sign for a small shopping center, the kind that barely survives among Chinese shops and cheap hair salons. I went in, wiping my face with my sleeve. Under the awning, waiting for a taxi, there was a mature woman holding a large box against her chest. She was holding it badly, resting it on her forearm, and the pressure lifted one breast above the neckline of her dress. I suppose it wasn’t intentional. But I kept looking a few seconds longer than I should have, imagining that dark nipple peeking out another centimeter, and my urge to pee got mixed up with something else: my cock pushed against the fabric of my pants, half swollen, uncomfortable.

—The bathroom? —I asked the guard at the entrance.

—Closed for maintenance, young man. Sorry.

I left muttering curses under my breath. Four blocks to home, counting the puddles. By the second traffic light I was trotting, my hair plastered to my forehead and my shoes making that obscene sound of wet cloth against the sole.

I got there with my hand trembling on the lock. Mateo was sprawled on the sofa, in boxer briefs and a white T-shirt that had ridden up to his navel. He was watching a match with the volume very low, as if he didn’t want to disturb anyone in a house where there was no one else. He looked up when he heard me come in, and that half-smile I’ve known since I was a kid formed on his face, the one he wears when he’s about to mock something. I glanced, without meaning to, at the soft bulge outlined under the fabric of his boxers, and quickly looked away.

—Did you shower with your clothes on? —he said.

—I need to piss, don’t fuck with me —I shot back, and crossed the hallway almost running.

I shut the bathroom door with my back. I yanked down my wet pants, sat on the cold toilet seat, and without thinking, I settled myself the way I always do.

I don’t know when that habit started. Years ago, I guess. I sit down, tuck my cock between my tightly pressed thighs, and let the stream fall downward, as if it belonged to someone else. I like the silence that forms, not hearing the noisy splash of water against porcelain. And I like—I’m not going to lie—the feel of my thighs squeezing me from both sides, that warmth running from my crotch to my knees while I pee, the skin of my dick rubbing between the hot flesh of my own thighs.

I usually think it’s just a quirk. Other times I suspect it’s something more, something I still haven’t dared to name.

When I finished, I wiped myself, flushed, and opened the door quietly. It wasn’t a conscious decision. I came out in silence because that’s how I always come out. And that’s why I caught him.

Mateo was still on the sofa, but his posture had changed. He had one hand inside his boxers, under his T-shirt, and from the hallway I caught, for an instant, the movement of his fist under the fabric, a bulge rising and falling with the unmistakable rhythm of a slow wank. He pulled it out too quickly when he saw me appear, but I had already seen the head of his cock peeking out for a second above the elastic, red, swollen, the skin drawn back. The match was still on the screen, but the volume was even lower than when I came in. Almost mute.

—Better? —he said, far too casually.

—Much better —I replied, and went to the room to change out of my soaked clothes before my face gave me away. In the hallway, my cock was already pushing hard against the fly of my wet pants.

***

That night, like every night since we moved into the apartment together, we ended up in the same room. We’ve shared a room since we were kids and, when our parents died, it never occurred to us to change the habit. Two beds, separated by a bedside table with an old lamp and a couple of books neither of us ever opens. And the routine of stripping in front of each other without thinking, as if we were invisible to one another.

That night was no different. Or yes, but only barely.

Mateo took off his T-shirt first. His chest is broader than mine and a little hairier, with a dark line running down from his navel and disappearing into the elastic of his boxers. He pulled them down standing beside the bed, and for an instant he was completely naked under the lamp’s yellow light. I looked at his cock hanging between his legs, thick even soft, with his heavy dark balls under the patch of hair, more relaxed than mine after the shower, and I felt a familiar prick in my throat and another, hotter one, between my legs. Then he got under the sheets.

—Turn off the light —he said, and I obeyed, grateful for the darkness.

I lay down with my upper body bare, staring at the ceiling, listening to him settle on his side of the room. We talked for a while about nonsense: the match he’d watched, a cousin who was getting married the following month, the leak on the balcony. His voice came to me from two meters away, low and even, and I answered with monosyllables while I felt my cock growing under the sheet, hardening against my stomach, the tip already wet and sticking to my skin.

It wasn’t the need to pee this time.

It was something else, that thing that had been ambushing me for months whenever I knew Mateo was naked in the bed next to mine. Knowing his chest was uncovered. Knowing he could hear my breathing too. Knowing there was only air and a thin sheet between us, and that either of us could cross the room in three steps if we felt like it. Knowing his cock was there, two meters away, maybe swelling under the fabric too.

—Good night, brother —he said after a while, and rolled onto his side.

—Good night.

I waited. I waited until his breathing evened out, that slow, deep rhythm I know by heart. I waited a little longer, just to be safe. Then, slowly, I slid my hand under the sheet and took hold of my cock.

***

Whenever I touch myself with him in the room, I imagine the same thing. That we’re not in two separate beds, but in one bed, mine, which is bigger. That he comes up behind me without warning and slides a hand over my side until he finds my cock. That he grips it with that calm firmness he has when he grabs anything, without hesitation, closing his whole fist around the hard flesh, and starts moving slowly, pulling the skin back until I’m fully exposed, wetting my head with the sticky liquid already leaking out. That I half-turn to touch his chest, that area where the hair closes in on the sternum. That my hand keeps going down, over his stomach, until it finds the hair growing over his pubis, and lower still, my brother’s cock, thick, hard, burning, with a vein standing out along the shaft. That I take the whole thing in my hand and give it the first long stroke, feeling him shudder against my back. That he breathes into my ear and says, in that rough just-woke-up voice: —Suck me, asshole, suck me like I know you want to.

Don’t stop me, Mateo.

That night I imagined all of it in more detail than usual. I imagined the whole scene, uninterrupted. I imagined slipping under the sheet, crawling between his open thighs, and finding Mateo’s cock rigid against his stomach, his balls tight in the sac. I imagined running my tongue over its whole length, from bottom to top, tasting the salty flavor of the skin, and then taking the whole head into my mouth. I imagined sucking it slowly at first, lips pressed against the flesh, feeling it fill my palate, the tip touch the back of my throat and make me cough a little. I imagined my brother’s hand settling on the back of my neck, not squeezing, just guiding, and his deep voice saying: —Like that, like that, swallow the whole thing. I imagined licking his balls one by one while I stroked the cock wet with my saliva, the way his stomach would twitch every time I passed my tongue over the taut skin of his scrotum.

Then I imagined him turning me face down, spreading my ass cheeks with both hands and dragging his hot tongue over my hole, licking me slowly, pushing it inside until I was trembling against the mattress. I imagined his saliva-slick fingers opening me, one first and then two, going in and out with a rhythm that pulled muffled moans out of me against the pillow. I imagined the tip of his cock pressing against my entrance, nudging in slowly, and Mateo whispering in my ear: —Take it, little brother, take it while I put the whole thing in. I imagined the burning and the pleasure at the same time, my brother’s cock forcing its way inside me, centimeter by centimeter, until he had it buried to the balls. I imagined his hips starting to move, fucking me slowly at first, then harder, the mattress squeaking with every thrust, his hands gripping my waist, his stomach slapping against my ass, and his voice in my ear saying filthy things: —What a tight ass you’ve got, asshole, what a sweet cunt-ass, I’m going to fill you with cum.

I was wanking with my right hand under the sheet to the rhythm of that fantasy, squeezing my cock hard, pulling the skin back and forth, wetting my palm with the liquid streaming from the tip. I touched my balls with my other hand, squeezed them softly, ran my fingers behind them, over that soft area between the balls and the ass, and shuddered all over. I imagined Mateo coming inside me, filling me, and me coming over the sheets without him even touching my cock.

I came in silence, biting my lower lip so as not to make a sound. I felt the spasm travel through me, from my crotch to my shoulders, and the semen gush out hot beneath the sheet, the first shot long and thick, then two or three shorter ones, splattering my stomach and hand. I stayed there breathing quietly, listening to the room, my cock still hard and throbbing in my sticky fist.

And then I heard it.

At first I thought it was a hallucination, that soft, almost imperceptible friction on the other side of the bedside table. But no. It was him. Mateo was wanking under his own sheet, with the same obsessive care I had given myself a minute earlier. The brush of his palm against flesh, the barely audible creak of the mattress every time his hip moved, the breathing catching in his throat.

I don’t know if he woke just when I finished. I don’t know if he’d been pretending to sleep for a while, waiting for me to finish before starting himself. What I do know is that his hand was moving with the rhythm of someone who’s been at it for a while, someone who knows what he’s looking for. And I knew, with a cold certainty that tightened my chest, that he was thinking of me. That he was holding his cock and imagining me naked, imagining the same thing I was, or something like it, or worse.

I lay motionless, my own cum still sticky on my thigh, listening to my brother wank thinking about me. The rhythm sped up, the sheet rustled louder, his breathing became more and more broken. I didn’t dare turn my head to look. There was no need. The cadence of his breathing changed, broke twice, a low, contained gasp slipped out, and a while later it stopped with a long sigh. I imagined the cum shooting out beneath the sheet, the cock throbbing in his fist, semen staining his stomach and fingers. I heard him wipe himself with something, maybe the T-shirt from the previous day. Then a long silence, different from the kind that comes when someone is sleeping.

—Are you awake? —he said very softly, almost in a whisper.

I didn’t answer him. I closed my eyes tight and let my breathing seem steady, like his had half an hour before. I felt him turn over in his bed. I felt the silence fill back up with all the things neither of us was going to say.

That night it took me hours to fall asleep, my cock once again half-hard against my thigh, the smell of semen still on the sheet. And when sleep finally took me, I already knew two things. That tomorrow we would greet each other like nothing had happened at breakfast. And that sooner or later, one of us was going to cross the two meters separating our beds.