The Afternoon My Aunt Rubbed Cream on My Back

Dear Aunt Renata:

Just a few hours ago I left you at the station, and already I feel an overwhelming need to write to you. Sitting at the desk in my new room, with the air still smelling of fresh paint and unpacked suitcases, I confess that the distance weighs on me more than I had imagined.

I’m doing well. The university center you chose for me with such good judgment far exceeds what I expected. The classrooms are spacious, the library seems like a temple, and the classmates I’ve exchanged a few words with are friendly, almost shy. I have everything any student could wish for. The only thing I lack is you.

Consider, Aunt, that this is the first time we have truly been far from one another. Before this, in the nineteen years I’ve been breathing, we had never been separated for more than a few days. And although I can fend for myself—you taught me that—there’s a part of me that is already counting the weeks until I see you again.

I’ve missed you so much in these hours that I’ve started to mentally go over every memory I have of you. And among them all, there is one that has risen above the rest. You know which one. I’m sure you remember it too.

It was that afternoon, after the student retreat. I had just turned eighteen, and you had insisted that I spend a few days away from home, at that mountain camp organized by the school. You said it was time I learned to be without you. The truth is, it only took me three days to discover that I preferred your company to anyone else’s in this world.

I came back sunburned. I remember that clearly. My back was burning as if someone had placed a hot iron between my shoulder blades. When you saw me come in through the door, you dropped the kitchen towel and brought your hands to your face with a mixture of horror and tenderness.

—But child, how did you let yourself get like this? —you said to me—. Go up to my room. I have a cream that will soothe you.

I went up the stairs two at a time. I didn’t even stop to think how strange it was to go to your room to undress. Back then you were, for me, a second mother, an authority replacing the one life had taken from me too soon. There was nothing else in my mind yet but blind trust.

Your room smelled of jasmine and something else, something warm I couldn’t name then and later learned to recognize as your skin. I went in, sat on the edge of your bed, and waited. You came in with a small jar in your hands, sat on a low stool, and gestured for me to take off my shirt.

I did it with my back turned, with some modesty, not because I suspected anything, but because you were my aunt and I wasn’t used to exposing myself before you like that, without the adolescent armor I used to protect myself from the world.

—The bra too —you said in a neutral voice—. The cream will stick to the fabric.

I obeyed. I felt the clasp give way and the cups fall onto my thighs. My tits were left bare, white, with the nipples a little hard from the cool air in the room, and although I was turned away I knew that you, from the stool, had seen them in profile. I remained motionless, waiting.

Your hands arrived then like a relief. Cold at first from the cream, warm afterward from your own skin. You began to spread the salve across my back with long, undulating, almost musical strokes. I remember how the burn of the sun gradually subsided, how every caress returned a stolen piece of my body to me. Your fingers slid under my armpits, brushed the start of my breasts along the sides, and came back to the center. Every time they rose to my shoulders, your thumbs slid down my spine until they disappeared inside my pants, and that touch, Aunt, that touch was the first I ever felt as something other than an innocent caress.

You never stopped talking. You told me a thousand things at once: that the neighbor on the second floor had gotten married again, that the washing machine was making a strange noise, that you had thought of painting the hall a different color. But I barely heard the words. I was too busy feeling your hands. My cunt, Aunt, my cunt was already dampening under my clothes without my understanding yet why; I felt a small, stubborn pounding between my lips, as if down there someone were knocking to be let in.

And then, in the middle of a trivial sentence, you said something I have never forgotten.

—You’re a very beautiful woman, Lucía.

You said it without raising your voice, almost as if it had slipped out of you unintentionally. Then there was a long silence that I had the prudence not to break. Your hands kept moving, but something had changed in the way they traveled. They were slower. More aware. They traced the same skin, yes, but every finger left a different, charged mark.

Then you asked me to turn around.

I did it slowly. When I was facing you, I saw that you were avoiding my breasts. Your eyes were fixed on my face as if you had imposed a rule on yourself. And yet your hand reached forward with the cream and spread it between my breasts, touching that strip of pale skin the sun had not reached.

My nipples stood up at once, so hard they hurt. You didn’t look at them, but your fingers did brush them, first as if by accident, then with a persistence that was no longer coincidental. You circled them with the pad of your thumb, in slow circles, spreading cream where it wasn’t needed at all, and every pass tore a shiver from me that I tried to hide by clenching my teeth. I looked at yours too, beneath your thin blouse, and knew they were responding to something unspoken as well: they stood out pointed and dark beneath the fabric. Your fingers slid with the cream over the curve of my tits, held them for a second from below as if weighing them, and my breathing grew slower, longer, as if each inhalation had to travel a much greater distance to reach my lungs.

I said nothing. I smiled. I enjoyed those caresses that, now I know, were the first ones you consciously offered me as a woman and not as a niece. I felt a warm thread running down the inner side of my thigh and I didn’t know whether it was cream, sweat, or my own juices escaping without permission.

Then you had me turn again. I was once more with my back to you, this time standing in front of the stool where you were seated. My waist was level with your face. I felt both your hands settle on my hips, smear me again, glide down the curve of my ass with the same premeditated slowness with which they had traveled up my back. You had lowered my pants to halfway down my thighs without my noticing. My ass was bare in front of your mouth; I could feel your breath hitting the skin between bone and crease, a broken breath that was not that of an aunt caring for her niece.

***

I’ve read back over what I’ve written and I have to laugh at how I describe all this with the coolness of someone recalling a bus ride. The truth is, I’m warm, Aunt. I’m writing to you in my nightgown, barefoot, with one hand between my legs rubbing my clit slowly while the other holds the pen, and I can feel the paper dampening under the edge of my hand. Don’t stop me. I need to say it, if only so I never forget it.

That afternoon, while your hands moved down my ass, I closed my eyes. Your nails traced an invisible pattern over my skin. I imagined that caress was writing something on me, something only you would be able to read later. My thighs began to press against each other, not out of modesty, but to hold on to a tension I didn’t know how to relieve. My cunt was soaked; I could feel it sliding inside my underwear, could feel my lips swelling and parting on their own, searching for whatever was about to come.

And then it happened. One of your hands, the right one, ventured between my thighs. It was not an ambiguous brush. It was a decision. It moved in with certainty and closed over my sex through the thin fabric that still covered me. You immediately noticed how soaked I was. The fabric clung to your palm, and your fingers, almost involuntarily, settled into the groove of my cunt and pressed. One of them, the middle finger, found the entrance to my vagina and sank half a centimeter over the edge of my panties, just enough for me to understand that something, someone, you, could go inside there. Another finger, higher up, found my swollen clitoris and pressed it softly against the bone. It was not an accident, Aunt. You knew exactly where it was.

There it stayed, just for an instant, but an instant that split my life into before and after. I felt my cunt beating against your hand like a small, furious heart, and I also felt your fingers trembling, felt you tightening your grip so it wouldn’t show too much.

Your other hand stopped too. Your chatter, which had been a distant murmur for half an hour, fell silent. The whole room went quiet. I wasn’t breathing. Neither were you. We were two statues holding between us a secret too big.

When I finally turned to face you, your expression startled me. Your cheeks were flushed as if you had been in front of a fire for hours. Your lips were parted, shining, wet with your tongue. But what struck me most were your eyes. For the first time in my life I saw them like that: dark, deep, as if a flame had caught behind your pupils. I couldn’t look away. They were looking all the way through me, as if they meant to reach the very center of my belly, which had not stopped pounding since you started touching me. I also saw, Aunt, how your nipples marked the fabric and how, between your thighs, when you shifted your weight, an unconscious movement slipped out of you, a tightening of the legs, the same sign I had between mine.

You stood up, took a large blue cotton towel, and wrapped me in it like someone wrapping a fragile object. Before closing the towel, you ran your tongue over your index and middle fingers, those two fingers that had just been against my cunt, and sucked them without taking your eyes off me. It lasted half a second. That was enough.

—There —you said—. Enough.

Your voice was trembling slightly. I nodded without quite understanding what had ended, whether the treatment, the innocence, or something deeper.

***

You’ll remember, Aunt, that that same afternoon you went off to the city center. You took a long time to come back. You arrived when night had already fallen, with a light step, perfumed, still made up as if you’d come from a date. I welcomed you with a hug and asked if you wanted a drink. I poured you a glass, poured myself another, and we sat on the sofa in the living room, facing each other, with the low lamp lighting us only halfway.

I looked at you as I had never looked at you before. That beauty of yours, which I had always admired with the innocent admiration of someone wanting to resemble her model, had changed into something else. It was desire. I recognized then the look I had seen in men for so many years when they crossed paths with you in the street: that disguised hunger, that magnetism you didn’t even know you exerted and yet handled like no one else.

I don’t know at what point you realized that my look had changed. But you did. I knew because you set your glass on the table, stood up, and said something I remember word for word:

—If I saw you naked today, for the first time, as an adult woman, then it’s only fair that you see me.

You didn’t wait for me to answer. You began to unbutton your blouse with that serenity only women have who have spent their whole lives managing their own bodies. One by one the buttons gave way and the fabric opened, showing first the black lace bra, then the flat stomach, then the small navel. You pulled the blouse off your shoulders and let it fall to the floor. Then you let the skirt fall. You stood in black underwear for a moment, looking me up and down, and with both hands you pulled the bra up and off over your head. Your tits bounced once when freed, heavy, white, with dark, erect nipples like two fingertips. Then you lowered the thong down your legs, very slowly, and stepped out of it as one steps out of water. When you stood there on your heels, naked, perfect, with the hair of your pubis trimmed into a dense, dark triangle pointing toward the open line of your cunt, I didn’t dare even breathe.

Your body, Aunt. Your body was a cathedral. Your thighs were slightly crossed and the line of your hips drew an S in the air that hurt me with its perfection. Your breasts rose and fell almost imperceptibly. Your dark, firm nipples were two magnets that kept me from looking anywhere else. Between your legs, whenever you shifted your weight, a wet shine could be glimpsed in the inner crease of your thigh. You were wet too. You too had been waiting for this moment for hours.

This can’t be real, I thought. This can’t be happening.

I stood up to look at you better. I circled you slowly, without touching you, longing, indecently eager. When I reached your back, your ass was a hand’s breadth from mine. It was perfect. Smooth, round, with that promising cleft dividing two universes. I saw, crouching just a little, the start of your cunt peeking out between your thighs, the inner lips a little darker, protruding slightly, shining with moisture. Anyone else would have buried their face there. Anyone else would have started licking you with their tongue, sucking you until you screamed. I didn’t dare. I was too dazzled. I was worshipping you.

I came back to your front, found you standing still, still motionless, and threw myself onto your mouth.

Your mouth. It was my first lesson. Not in kissing—those I had received before, clumsy, hurried, from boys who didn’t know what they had in their arms—but in love. Your tongue entered mine with the unhurriedness of someone who had time. Your teeth gently bit my lower lip. Your hands settled on my nape with the calm firmness of someone finally introducing me to the woman I was going to become. One of those hands then slid down my back, slipped under the light skirt I was wearing, found that I had nothing underneath, and closed over my bare ass with a squeeze that drew a moan from me inside your mouth. The other went up to my tit and found the nipple through the blouse, pinched it softly, rolled it between two fingers until my knees bent.

I dared too. I let one hand slide down your belly, that flat belly I had admired in silence for years, and reached your pubic hair. I felt it dense, warm. One finger, only one, slipped between your lips and found your soaked cunt. Your clitoris was so swollen I recognized it at the first touch, a hard little button throbbing under my fingertip. I heard you moan softly against my neck while you kept kissing me, and I felt your hips pushing toward my hand, asking for more. I traced your cleft up and down, smearing my fingers with what came out of you, and when my middle finger found the entrance to your vagina it sank all the way in, to the knuckles, without any resistance. You were open. You were waiting for me. Your cunt closed around my finger and squeezed it twice, as if asking me never to pull it out.

We stayed like that, mouth against mouth, my finger inside you, your hands kneading my ass and nipple, moving only slightly, a small, deep rocking unlike anything I had ever imagined. I felt your cunt contracting faster and faster around my hand. I felt your mouth stop kissing me to breathe into my ear. And when you came, Aunt, when you came over my fingers with a long, silent tremor, clenching your teeth against my shoulder, I understood once and for all that that body of yours, that cathedral, had just given itself to me for the first time.

Nothing else happened that night. Nothing else needed to happen. That truth was enough for both our bodies. The rest came later, drop by drop, during all those blessed months we spent together before I left for this distant university where I’m writing to you now: the nights in your bed with my tongue between your legs until dawn, the mornings when you woke me by slowly sucking my nipples, the afternoons spent face down while your fingers went in and out of me and I bit the pillow so the neighbors wouldn’t hear, the times you made me come with just the tip of your tongue on my clit, the times I made you scream my name with two fingers inside you and my thumb pressing your ass.

Forgive me for this long memory, Aunt. I had to write it down. Somehow, by writing it, I have you with me in this room. I’ve just come over my own hand thinking of your mouth, and my nightgown is stuck to my thighs.

I love you as I have never loved anyone. I kiss you slowly, on the eyelids, as you taught me to do.

Lucía.