What I Heard from the Nephew Who Came to Live in My Apartment

It had been a long time since I’d sat down to tell anything. Life had filled up with schedules, training sessions, and silence, and sorting all that out takes calm. But what happened during the last academic year deserves the time it takes to put it in its place, detail by detail, because there are few times in life when one is lucky enough to enjoy oneself as much as I enjoyed myself.

It all started when my sister and her husband called me one summer afternoon. Their son, my nephew Bruno, had just turned nineteen and wanted to study a degree that, in the whole country, was only offered in a couple of cities up north. They live in the south, in Cartagena, and the boy had nowhere to stay. The conversation lasted five minutes: of course, he should come live with me.

My name is Marcos, I’m thirty-seven, and I work as a coach. I got my permanent position some time ago at a municipal sports center and, on top of that, I coach two teams of young boys, one for swimming and one for athletics. I’m nearly six foot three, I weigh little for my height, and by now I have more gray in my beard than on my head. I’ve lived alone since I came to this small, quiet northern city six years ago.

I got the apartment with the right to buy from day one. It’s central and comfortable: kitchen, living room, a large bathroom, and three bedrooms. Mine, the biggest one, and two smaller ones, one empty and the other that I’d been using, for the moment, as storage and an ironing room. I’m almost always alone at home, so my habit is to wander around with nothing on, free, calm, enjoying my body anywhere I feel like it. I suppose that happens to anyone.

But I don’t want to bore you with my own life. Let’s get to the point, which is Bruno.

When summer ended, I took the car and drove down to Cartagena to pick him up. We loaded his things into the trunk, said goodbye to the family, and set off on the return trip, just the two of us, toward what was going to be our life together during the school year. We talked for hours on the road. We were always a very close family, and with him everything flowed effortlessly.

I have to describe Bruno to you. Dark-skinned, with curly brown hair that was always tousled, six feet tall, lean from all the running. He has a very expressive face and brown eyes that say more than he thinks. He dresses in tracksuits every day, skinny jeans and sweaters, nothing formal. And he has an ass that could drive a man out of his mind: two perfect curves, nicely separated, where the seam of the pants sinks in, and that sway with every step in a way that is not fair to anyone walking behind him.

On the way, we agreed on the obvious: at home we’d be comfortable, in boxers and T-shirts, no formalities. He was a tidy, responsible, very affectionate kid, so the idea seemed completely natural to me. Too natural, I’d think later.

We arrived at dusk. We carried everything upstairs and I settled him into the room next to mine. In fact, the headboards of our beds were separated only by the partition wall, wall to wall. His room was spacious, with a study desk and everything he might need. I left him unpacking while I got comfortable and made something for dinner.

***

We had dinner quietly, and then I got the first sign that this academic year was going to be a test of my patience. Bruno appeared in the kitchen wearing nothing but very tight black boxers. The fabric outlined a generous bulge and the weight of something big underneath. He sat down opposite me with his legs apart, and while we talked he absentmindedly stroked himself over the fabric, with no apparent ill intent, or so I wanted to believe.

I nodded at everything he said, but I was hardly listening. My own blue boxers were starting to feel too small, and I was grateful for the loose T-shirt covering me. We finished dinner as best I could, I cleared things away quickly, and we went to bed. The next day we had to get up early to visit the faculty, handle paperwork, and let him get familiar with the city before I had to go back to work.

“Good night, uncle,” he said from the doorway of his room.

“Good night, Bruno. Rest well.”

I closed my eyes in the dark and tried to think of anything else.

I couldn’t.

***

The next morning was another ambush. Bruno came into the kitchen while I was making breakfast, kissed me on the cheek the way he had since he was a child, and then I saw it: the boxers were at their limit, the tip forcing the waistband’s elastic, and a damp patch that betrayed the fact that the night had given him more action than sleep. I served him coffee while pretending to be calmer than I was.

When he went into the shower, I couldn’t help peeking. It was only an instant, but I saw him completely, from behind, stretching under the water. I stepped back to get dressed with my heart racing, and when I came out into the hallway, I crossed paths with him, naked, going back to his room without a trace of shame, still half asleep. I had to lean against the wall for a second. That boy was going to drive me crazy, and I knew it.

We spent the day out: the faculty, the paperwork, a long walk through the center so he could get his bearings. We ate on a terrace, laughed a lot, and for a while I managed to treat him as what he was, my nephew, and nothing more. At night we repeated the routine: dinner, conversation, and bed.

But I wasn’t sleepy. I had a strange, almost physical need to hear something, to know what that boy was doing on the other side of the partition. I lay on my back, alert to the slightest noise, with my ear pressed to the wall like a teenager.

It didn’t take long to start.

***

First there were soft knocks, spaced out. Then, a steady rhythm, no pause: the headboard of his bed hitting the wall, right on the other side of mine. The sound went through me. I stayed motionless, holding my breath, until I couldn’t stand it anymore and started touching myself slowly, following his rhythm as if the two of us were doing the same thing separated by a few inches of brick.

The pounding didn’t let up. Faster and faster, harder and harder. I imagined what was happening a handspan from me and my head felt like it was going to explode. I needed more than sound. I got up, with nothing on, and stepped out into the dark hallway, careful not to make the floor creak.

His door was ajar. A sliver of light slipped through the half-raised blind, and that pale brightness gave him to me in full. He was face down, the pillow clenched between his legs, ramming into it with a furious motion. His ass tightened and released with every movement, and his whole body worked with a total commitment that admitted no rest. He looked like a sculpture brought to life, shining with sweat, lost in his own pleasure.

I stood frozen in the doorway, holding my breath, not daring to move even an inch. I don’t know how long I was there. A long time. Enough to memorize every detail, every ragged breath, every time he buried his face in the mattress to smother a moan.

The rhythm turned diabolical, as if the bed were about to break. And then, a hoarse growl, half-contained, announced the end. Bruno collapsed onto the pillow and lay still, panting, his back rising and falling slowly.

I slipped back into the ironing room just in time. I heard him get up, go into the bathroom, turn on the tap. Through the crack I saw him cross the hallway, still dazed, and go back to his bed a few minutes later to drop onto it and fall asleep instantly, with the ease only nineteen-year-olds have.

I went back to my room with my pulse racing. I lay down, closed my eyes, and with the image of him still throbbing behind my eyelids, it took only two strokes for me to finish too, biting my lip so I wouldn’t make a sound.

***

Afterward I stayed there a good while staring at the ceiling, my breathing gradually returning to normal. I knew perfectly well the line I was walking. I knew this was mined ground, that I had to control myself, that he was my nephew and I was the responsible adult his mother had entrusted him to. I repeated it to myself several times, like a promise.

But I also knew, with an uncomfortable clarity, that I was going to go back out into the hallway. That the partition separating our beds had become the thinnest thing in the world. That every night from then on, I was going to lie there waiting for the first blow against the wall like someone waiting for a signal.

The school year had only just begun. We had many months of living together ahead of us, of boxers at dinner, showers and early mornings, of walls far too thin. And I, who had slept alone in that apartment for six years, knew that very same night that nothing was going to be quiet anymore.

What came after deserves its own account. And I promise you that what I heard and what I saw in that first stretch was only the beginning.