What My Aunt Caro Confessed to Me That Night

My name is Lucía, though almost everyone has called me Lu for as long as I can remember. I’m twenty-nine, I live alone in a downtown apartment, and until a couple of weeks ago, I thought I had finally gotten my life in order. I’m thin, with small breasts, defined hips, and legs I train four times a week at the gym around the corner. The only thing I was missing, and that walked out with a bang, was love.

Marina left me. Just like that, with no real explanation. We’d been together for a year and seven months, long enough for me to get used to her smell on my pillow and her badly made coffee on Sundays. One ordinary morning she told me she needed to think, and two days later she called to confirm there was nothing left to think about.

Nobody in my family knows I’m a lesbian. Not my mother, not my sisters, not my Aunt Caro. To them, Marina was my roommate, a very close friend I split expenses with. When I called my mother crying that night, I made up that my boyfriend Joaquín had dumped me. It was easier. It was the script they expected to hear.

My Aunt Carolina — Caro to everyone at home — is thirty-five, just six years older than me. More than an aunt, she was always more like an older cousin: the one who took me to the movies when I was a teenager, the one who lent me clothes, the one who laughed with me about my mother’s scoldings. She’s been married to my Uncle Ernesto since she was twenty-one, and for years everyone thought they were the perfect couple.

When she heard about Joaquín’s supposed blow-off, she didn’t ask questions. She packed a small suitcase, drove three hours, and showed up at my door on a Friday at nine at night with two bottles of white wine and a bag of Thai food.

—You’re spending the weekend with me —she said, and hugged me before I could protest.

I cried on her shoulder. I cried for Marina, I cried for the lie I was carrying, and I cried, above all, for the feeling of being alone in a house that suddenly felt too big. Caro didn’t ask anything. She let me cry until my body asked for silence.

***

On Saturday night we had an invitation I didn’t dare cancel. Some mutual friends were hosting a dinner at their place, something informal, supposedly to cheer me up. Caro convinced me.

—Let’s go for a while. If you feel bad, we’ll come back. I promise.

I put on a short black dress I hadn’t worn in months. Caro showed up in the living room in a black miniskirt too and a cream-colored silk blouse. I stared at her longer than I should have. Her skin was very white, her legs shapely, and she wore a perfume I remembered from when I was fifteen and used to steal the bottle from her in secret.

—Do I look that bad? —she asked when she noticed my pause.

—You look gorgeous —I said, and looked away toward the mirror.

The dinner was exactly what I feared. Five couples, a round table, and the two of us as the only women without someone beside us. My friends were kind, but every inside joke between husbands and wives sank me deeper into my chair. Something similar was happening to Caro: she laughed when she had to, toasted when she had to, but the smile never reached her eyes.

At midnight I caught her eye from across the table. We left with some excuse. On the way back to the apartment we stopped at a corner store that was open all night and bought a bottle of gin and two limes.

—We need to talk —Caro said when we closed the door.

—Me or you?

—Both, I guess.

We poured our drinks at the coffee table in the living room. I handed her a cushion. She slipped off her shoes, folded her legs under her body, and looked at me in a way that made me nervous without me quite understanding why.

—I’m separating from Ernesto —she blurted out.

I almost dropped my glass. In my mind Caro and Ernesto were a fixed postcard. They had never argued in front of anyone. They went everywhere together. My mother held them up as the example every time I complained about some invented boyfriend.

—What happened?

She lowered her eyes. Took a long sip of gin. Ten endless seconds passed before she spoke again.

—I told him something. Something I’d kept to myself for years. And since then he hasn’t looked at me the same way.

—What did you tell him, Caro?

She shook her head. I took her hand. It was cold, with dark red nail polish.

—I can’t tell you. Not you of all people.

—Why not me of all people?

She lifted her eyes and stayed quiet for a moment, as if measuring how much she could say. Then she laughed, a nervous, almost childish laugh.

—Because you’ll think I’m crazy.

—I promise I won’t.

She gripped the glass in both hands. When she spoke, it was almost a whisper.

—I confessed that I’d always been curious about being with another woman. About eating pussy. About knowing what it tastes like. That’s what I told him, with those exact words, after some shitty fight. And Ernesto’s world fell apart.

I felt my heart in my throat. It wasn’t possible. Not tonight. Not with her. I looked at her searching for some trace of a joke, but Caro had her eyes fixed on the table and her cheeks were flushed as if she had a fever.

—And you never did it? —I asked, trying to keep my voice from shaking.

—Never. I thought about it. I dreamed about it. I touched myself thinking about it more times than I care to admit. But I never dared to fuck a woman.

There was a long silence. I had two options: change the subject, make a joke, save the moment. Or do the other thing. The thing my body had been asking for for ten minutes.

—And why don’t you try? —I said, staring at her.

—With who, Lu? I’m thirty-five, I’m about to get divorced. I’m not going to go out to a bar tomorrow looking for a stranger.

—You don’t have to go to any bar.

I said it without thinking, and the air in the room changed. Caro slowly lifted her head. The yellow light of the lamp traced her cheekbones. I saw her swallow.

—What are you telling me?

I didn’t answer with words. I knelt on the couch beside her, held her face with both hands, and kissed her cheek. Very close to her lips, but not on them. I wanted her to take the final step.

She did. She turned her head just two centimeters and kissed me. A soft, frightened, brief kiss. When she pulled away, her eyes were closed, as if she feared opening them and discovering she’d made a mistake.

—Caro, look at me.

She opened her eyes.

—I’m not going to tell anyone anything —I said—. And if you want this to end here, we’ll end it. It’s fine.

She shook her head. This time it was her who grabbed my face and kissed me hard, without asking permission. Her mouth tasted of gin and something else, something I knew by heart from previous lovers and never expected to find in my aunt. I slid my tongue into her mouth without thinking, bit her lower lip, stretched it until a moan escaped her. Her hands found my breasts over the dress and squeezed my nipples with a clumsy touch that turned me on more than any technique ever could.

—Set the pace —she whispered against my mouth—. I have no fucking idea what I’m doing.

—You’ll learn fast. You’ll see.

***

We stripped in silence in the middle of the living room. I pulled down the zipper of her skirt with both hands and let it fall to her ankles. She took my dress off over my head slowly, as if she were afraid of tearing it. When we were down to our underwear, she stared at me and said a line that melted me:

—You’re gorgeous, Lu. I hadn’t realized.

I ripped open her bra and her tits fell free, bigger than they’d looked clothed, with dark nipples already hard. I bent down and suckled one while pinching the other between two fingers. Caro clung to my shoulders and arched her back. I ran my tongue beneath her breast, bit her on the side, came back up. When I slid my hand inside her panties, her knees buckled: she was soaking wet, so much that my fingers were sticky at the first touch.

—You’re dripping, Caro.

—I know. I’ve been like this for two hours, ever since I watched you get into the taxi.

I led her to the bedroom by the hand. The light was off; only the hallway light cut diagonally across the bed. I laid her on her back, finished pulling her panties down her legs, and tossed them to the floor. Her pussy was exposed, shaved, swollen, shining. I kissed her neck, the hollow of her collarbone, the center of her chest. Her pink nipples hardened even more when I brushed them with my tongue.

—Tell me if anything makes you uncomfortable. Anything.

—Nothing makes me uncomfortable —she said in a thread of a voice—. Keep going. Please keep going.

I went down slowly. I kissed her navel, lightly bit the hip bone, made her wait. Caro was breathing heavily, in little broken gasps, her hands gripping the sheet as if she were afraid of falling out of bed. I settled between her legs, opened them with both hands, and stayed there looking at her cunt up close until she couldn’t take it anymore.

—Don’t do this to me, Lu. Eat me already.

I tasted her first with a long kiss, no tongue, pressing my whole mouth against her wet lips. Then I got bolder and flattened my tongue, sweeping from bottom to top in one long, greedy pass. The taste hit me all at once: salty, a little sharp, thick. Caro jerked her hips and drove a heel into my back. I worked every fold patiently, playing with her clit sometimes with the tip, sometimes trapping it between my lips and sucking slowly, as if giving her a hickey. I slid two fingers inside and curled them, searching for that rough spot that drives me crazy when Marina touched it.

—Holy fucking shit —Caro gasped—. Holy fucking shit, Lu. What are you doing to me?

—Shut up and enjoy it.

She covered her mouth with one hand so she wouldn’t scream; it was ridiculous, we were alone, but I respected the gesture. I picked up the pace when I felt she couldn’t hold back anymore. I dug my nails into the inner sides of her thighs, deep, and pushed my tongue in as far as I could, in and out of her cunt like I was fucking her with it. Her clit turned hard as a pebble under my upper lip. I went back to sucking it, this time mercilessly, while my fingers kept buried inside her and hit that spot again and again.

Her first orgasm came sooner than I’d imagined. It shook her whole body, arched her back, and clenched her thighs around my head so hard I couldn’t breathe for a second. I felt her cunt pulse against my mouth, strong, repeated contractions, and a stream of hot fluid bathed my chin. I left her trembling for several seconds, not pulling my fingers out, letting her come down on her own. I climbed up to kiss her mouth so she could taste herself. Her eyes were full of tears.

—Are you okay?

—I’m better than okay. I’ve never come like that in my fucking life. Let me do something to you.

—You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.

—I want to. I want to taste you. I want to know what you taste like.

She gently pushed me so I’d lie on my back. She started with my breasts, shyly, sucking my nipples one by one, alternating, until she dared to use her teeth and pulled a moan out of me that surprised even myself. She moved down my stomach the way I had moved down hers, leaving a trail of saliva from my navel to my pubic bone. When she reached between my legs, she hesitated for a second, looking up at me from down there with an expression that was half scared, half hungry. Then she stopped hesitating.

The first lick was timid, barely a brush, but she quickly found her courage. She opened my pussy lips with her thumbs and drove her tongue inside as if she’d known what she was doing forever. She wasn’t inexperienced. Or at least it didn’t show. She learned ridiculously fast what I liked, what made me breathe harder, what made me spread my legs wider and push her face against my cunt. She figured out on her own that if she sucked my clit while sliding two fingers inside me I’d start saying filthy things.

—Like that, Caro, like that, don’t stop, suck it all, come on.

She made me finish with her tongue and a couple of fingers that started out clumsy and then grew sure. When I exploded, I grabbed her head with both hands and pressed it against my pussy while I came, spilling all over her mouth. She didn’t slow down: she kept licking, slower now, until I tugged her hair because I couldn’t take one more touch. She stayed still for a second and then climbed back up my body and settled on top of me, her mouth shining and her chin sticky.

—I didn’t know it could feel like this —she said.

—Now you know.

—I want more.

—You’ll get more.

We stayed silent for a while, her face on my chest, my hand running down her back to the base of her ass. I squeezed it by accident and she gave a tiny jolt. Then she suggested, with a smile that was no longer shy at all, doing something she’d once read in a magazine. We arranged ourselves the other way around, one over the other, her on top, with her cunt over my face and mine within her reach. It was her first sixty-nine, and you could tell by her enthusiasm. She sat on my mouth without fear, moving her hips to the rhythm of my tongue, while she shoved hers into me and rocked it from side to side. I pushed my tongue deep into her cunt, then up to her clit, then back down, alternating, until I felt her second orgasm hit her with a long shudder through her thighs. She came too, almost at the same time, flooding my mouth for the second time that night. It wasn’t the last orgasm of the night either.

I lost count. I fucked her with my fingers face-down while she clutched the bedframe and begged me harder. I rode her with one leg between hers, cunt to cunt, and we rubbed ourselves against each other until we both came again, shouting without worrying about the neighbors anymore. At some point I brushed her ass with a finger, looking at her to see if I’d scare her off. I didn’t: she bit her lip, arched her hips back, and told me to touch it slowly. I wet my finger in her own cunt and slid it in little by little, all the way to the knuckle. Caro moaned in a way I hadn’t heard all night.

—No one’s ever done this to me —she whispered—. Ernesto never wanted to.

—Your husband’s a fucking idiot.

—Ex-husband.

She laughed and came again, with my finger inside her ass and her mouth biting my shoulder. Then she returned the favor with her mouth, slowly, paying attention to how my body answered, sucking my clit while she ran the tip of her tongue over my other hole. I fell apart and she, far from stopping, spread my legs again and buried herself between them as if she wanted to memorize the taste forever.

***

Dawn came with sunlight pouring through the bedroom window and the two of us tangled under the sheet, the bed a wreck and the smell of sex clinging to the whole room. Caro had messy hair, a red mark on her neck she’d have to hide with makeup, and another on the inside of her thigh that only she and I would see.

—Do you regret it? —I asked before she could get up.

—Not a thing. You?

—Neither do I.

She kept thinking for a while. Then she looked at me with that same expression she’d worn in the living room the night before when she confessed what she’d been keeping to herself for years.

—Lu, I don’t want to go back with Ernesto.

—I know.

—And I don’t want to leave here either.

She bit her lip. I didn’t say anything at first. I was weighing every word. My family, my mother, the impossible explanations. And at the same time, her body still pressed against mine, her hand resting on my pussy as if it were already hers, and the feeling that, after Marina, I couldn’t imagine anyone else in that bed.

—Stay —I said at last—. We’ll make something up. I’ve been lying to them about who I am for years. One more lie isn’t going to kill me.

She smiled. She kissed my forehead. Then she lowered herself again and kissed me lower, and we lost another hour before getting up to have breakfast.

That was eight months ago. Caro signed the divorce papers in March, left the city where she lived with Ernesto, and moved in with me. For the family, she shares the guest room because renting alone is insanely expensive. For me, she’s shared my bed since the first night.

Someday we’re going to have to tell the truth, or at least part of it. Or maybe not. Maybe it’ll be enough that two women of the same blood found each other at the worst moment of both their lives and decided to save each other, in silence, without asking permission.

For now, this is my confession.