I Fell in Love with My Own Daughter and I Don’t Know How to Tell Her

My name is Carmen and I’m forty-nine years old. I’m not writing this so that anyone understands me, much less so that they forgive me. I’m writing because I need to get it out of me before it consumes me. What I’m going to tell is what I feel for my daughter Lucía, and I still don’t know how it’s going to end.

We live in a town on the Cantabrian coast that I’d rather not name. I’m tall, with olive skin, long blond hair already streaked with a few hidden gray hairs, and hazel eyes. I inherited my mother’s body: wide hips, narrow shoulders, and large breasts that aren’t what they used to be but still show under any blouse. I studied medicine and practiced for a few years, but my parents’ inheritance let me retire early and devote myself to reading, tending the garden, and raising my daughter without hurry.

I’ve never slept with a man. Since I was a teenager I knew it was women who made my whole body beat, and over the years I learned to live with it naturally. I’ve had occasional lovers, the odd steady partner, a five-year relationship with a philosophy teacher that ended in a French harbor without much drama. I’ve had my cunt licked in hotel beds, on nudist beaches, and in the back seat of a car in a parking lot in Biarritz. I’ve fucked married women in their forties, college girls who debuted with me, a widow who screamed so loudly the neighbors knocked on the door. But never, in almost fifty years, had I wanted anyone the way I want Lucía now.

My daughter is nineteen and is in her second year of medical school. She’s shorter than I am, with chestnut hair that falls in waves to her shoulders, very light blue eyes, and a small, slight body with small, firm breasts. I decided to become a mother on my own, went to a fertility clinic in Barcelona, and chose an anonymous donor. The only thing I know about him is that he was tall, blond, and had light eyes, and from that she got that look of hers that always seems to be asking forgiveness for something.

Lucía is the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. Affectionate, attentive, brilliant. She calls me several times a day just to tell me silly things from university. When she comes back in the afternoons she sits beside me on the sofa and rests her head on my shoulder, and I stroke her hair without daring to breathe too loudly. She’s always told me I’m her role model, her best friend, the woman she admires most in this world. And I, for years, was only that: her mother.

I couldn’t say when everything changed. It was gradual, like a river overflowing without anyone noticing until it’s already inside the house. Maybe it started last summer, when I saw her come out of the sea in a bikini with the fabric stuck to her cunt and her nipples hard against the wet bra, and I kept staring for more seconds than a mother should. Maybe it was earlier, when she moved from the children’s room to the guest room and started leaving the door ajar, and one night I saw her from behind changing, her naked ass, young and round, outlined under the yellow light of the bedside lamp. Or maybe it was any random night, watching a movie in the dark living room, feeling the heat of her thigh pressed against mine and noticing my panties getting soaked on their own.

The fact is I haven’t slept for months. Months imagining her naked, legs spread for me, with my tongue deep inside her cunt. Months locking myself in my room to masturbate thinking about her mouth sucking my nipples, her small, hard breasts against my face, the strip of blond pubic hair that shows when she stretches in the morning and that I dream of licking centimeter by centimeter until I bury my tongue in her clit. Months coming silently, biting the pillow, with my fingers smeared in my own lubrication while I whispered her name. Months wondering if I’m a monster or if I’m simply a woman who fell in love with the wrong person at the worst possible moment.

***

This morning, before going down to the kitchen, I decided I couldn’t take it anymore. That the situation was poisoning me from the inside. That I had two options: get away from her for a while, invent a conference in Lisbon or Rome and let the desire die down with distance; or, on the contrary, gamble everything and find out whether what I feel is only mine.

I went downstairs to make coffee. Morning light came in at an angle through the window and drew golden stripes across the wooden floor. I filled the coffee maker, put bread in the toaster, and listened to Lucía’s barefoot steps coming down the stairs.

—Good morning, Mom —she said with that sweet voice still thick with sleep.

—Good morning, my love. Coffee and toast?

—Yes, please.

She was wearing a white cotton T-shirt and mint-colored panties, almost transparent. No bra. Her nipples showed through the fabric, small and hard, and the shape of her pubic hair could barely be made out, a pale shadow between her legs, promising the pink, narrow cunt I’d been imagining for months. I forced myself to turn my back and gripped the edge of the marble counter with both hands so they wouldn’t tremble, clenching my thighs because my panties were already getting wet.

You can’t keep going like this, Carmen. You can’t.

—Sweetheart —I said without turning around—, I was thinking we could go to the country house this weekend. Do you want to?

Lucía took a sip of coffee before answering.

—I’d love that, Mom. I don’t have anything this week and I miss that place. We could walk on the beach and have dinner in town.

—We’ll go to the Mirador, if you want. That restaurant I took you to two years ago.

—Yes, I really liked that one. I’m in.

When I finally turned around, she was buttering her toast with serious concentration, looking at the plate as if it were an exam. A lock of hair had fallen over her cheek. I thought about brushing it away, about running my thumb over her lower lip, about telling her everything right there, at breakfast, with her in her panties and me in a robe. I thought it would be the worst possible moment. I thought the weekend, in that house facing the sea, was my last chance to do it right.

—I’m going to shower —I said—. When you’re done, we’ll pack.

—Okay, Mom.

***

The hot water did me good. I closed my eyes and let the stream run down my nape, down my back, down the curve of my ass. But Lucía’s image wouldn’t leave me. Her nipples under the T-shirt, so small and so hard it made my mouth water just imagining them between my lips. Her thighs crossing slowly when she sat on the stool, and the pale shadow of her cunt showing through the thin cotton. The way she sucked her thumb after tasting the jam, not realizing I was watching her from the far end of the kitchen and imagining that same wet thumb sliding down her belly until it sank into her own cunt.

Without thinking, I ran my hands over my breasts. I pinched them, squeezed them, felt my nipples harden almost to the point of pain. I twisted them between my fingers the way I know I like them twisted, and imagined it was her twenty-year-old mouth biting them, sucking greedily, treating me like a lover and not like a mother. I slid my right hand down my belly, over my navel, over the soaked hair of my mound, and slipped it between my thighs. I was drenched. Not from the water. From her.

—Lucía —I whispered, and my own voice made me ashamed. But I didn’t stop.

I parted the lips of my cunt with two fingers and found my clit. It was swollen, throbbing, slippery. I started rubbing it in slow circles, pressing hard, the way one punishes herself with a pleasure that shouldn’t exist. With the other hand I grabbed a breast and mashed it against my chest, twisting my nipple until a rough moan escaped me.

—My daughter —I panted—, you drive me crazy, you have me so hot, fuck, you drive me crazy.

I imagined it was her touching me. I imagined her pale pink painted nails, her small clumsy hands probing between my legs, learning my cunt the way one learns a new language. I imagined her mouth telling me in my ear that she’d spent years waiting for me to ask, that she touched herself thinking of me, that she shoved her fingers all the way in whispering mom, mom, mom. I slid my fingers slowly into my cunt, one first, then two, then three, and felt my inner walls close around them, sucking, asking for more. I pulled them out dripping and brought them to my mouth, sucking my own flow, imagining it was hers.

I went back down again. This time I fucked myself mercilessly, with the brutal rhythm I’d been holding in for months, going in and out with three fingers while my thumb pounded my clit. I spread my legs even wider, set one foot on the rim of the tub, and let the stream of water fall directly onto my open cunt. The combination of the water hitting my clit and my own fingers sunk to the knuckles made me let out a long moan that bounced off the tiles.

—Lucía, daughter, come lick it for me, come lick your mom —I murmured, beyond all shame, biting my arm so I wouldn’t scream louder.

I imagined her kneeling between my legs, that young pink mouth devouring my cunt, the tongue going in and out, sucking my clit like it was candy. I imagined fucking her face, grabbing her brown hair and grinding my cunt against her mouth, coming on her tongue, forcing her to swallow my juices to the very last drop. Then I imagined pulling down her mint panties, spreading her legs, finding that narrow, virginal woman’s cunt I knew no college boy had ever touched properly, and burying my tongue deep inside it, licking her clit until she came screaming my name.

I found that spot I always find alone, high and deep, and started pressing with hook-shaped fingers while my thumb kept pounding my clit. My thighs were shaking. My cunt was making obscene sounds, wet slapping noises that mixed with the sound of the water. I felt the wave rising from very low, from my legs, climbing through my belly, until it burst between my thighs with a spasm that almost knocked me to the floor.

—I love you, my daughter, I love you, I love you —I said through clenched teeth, with water running down my face, and came with a dull tremor, a warm stream running down the inside of my thigh, biting my lip so I wouldn’t cry out.

I stayed like that for a while, with my fingers still inside my cunt, feeling it close around them in spasms, feeling my clit still throbbing against my thumb. I pulled them out slowly, dripping, and brought them once more to my mouth. They tasted like me, they tasted like months of repressed desire, they tasted like her even though I’d never tasted her. Leaning against the tiles, panting, I realized that even that brutal orgasm hadn’t calmed me. On the contrary. Now I needed her more than ever.

And not because of what I had done —I’d done that many other times— but because of the calm certainty that had settled inside me: this weekend I was going to tell her. I was going to lick her cunt on the terrace of the country house even if it cost me my relationship with my daughter. I couldn’t keep going like this one more day.

—Mom, how much longer? —Lucía’s voice sounded on the other side of the bathroom door.

I jumped so hard I almost slipped in the shower tray.

—Five minutes, sweetheart.

—Okay, I’m packing the bags. Should I bring my swimsuit?

—Yes, my love. Bring it.

I turned off the faucet. The silence was suddenly enormous. I wrapped myself in the towel and looked at myself in the fogged mirror: a mature woman with her hair plastered to her face, bright eyes, lips still swollen from biting them, nipples showing hard through the towel. A woman who had already made a decision and wasn’t going back.

***

We loaded the car by midmorning. Lucía had put on a short blue linen dress, flat sandals, and enormous sunglasses that covered half her face. She got into the passenger seat, put her feet up on the dashboard like she’s done since she was a child, and put on one of her playlists with songs I didn’t know. The dress rode up to mid-thigh and I pressed my fingers against the steering wheel so I wouldn’t reach over and run my hand along her leg.

—Tell me something, Mom. You’ve been weird all week.

—Weird how?

—Absent. Like something’s wrong and you’re not telling me.

I gripped the wheel. The road skirted the sea and the waves broke on the left with stubborn rhythm, white against gray.

—I’ll tell you at the house —I said—. When we get there.

She looked at me for a few seconds, serious, without smiling.

—Is it something bad?

—I don’t know, daughter. That depends on you.

Lucía didn’t answer. She lowered her feet from the dashboard, crossed her legs, and stayed looking at the landscape. I glanced at her from the corner of my eye: the profile so much like mine and yet so much her own, the curve of her small ear, the tiny freckle beside her neck that I’d been wanting to kiss for years. I thought that maybe in a few hours everything would break. That maybe she would stand up from the table and call me sick and leave. That maybe she would never speak to me again.

Or maybe not.

The town sign appeared in the distance. The house was three kilometers from the center, on a rise from which the entire beach could be seen. I accelerated a little. My heart was pounding at two hundred. Lucía lowered the window and let the air tangle her hair, and she smiled without looking at me, as if she knew something she didn’t even know yet herself.

In a few hours we would be alone in that house facing the sea, with no witnesses but the seagulls and the constant sound of the waves. In a few hours I was going to tell her what I’d been keeping silent for months. And for the first time in my life, I had not the slightest idea what was going to happen next.