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 an apartment downtown, and until a couple of weeks ago I thought I had finally gotten my life in order. I’m slim, with small breasts, defined hips, and legs I work out four times a week at the gym on the corner. The only thing I was missing, and that walked out the door with a bang, was love.

Marina left me. Just like that, without much preamble. We’d been together a year and seven months, long enough for me to get used to her smell on the 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 shared 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, only six years older than me. More than an aunt, she was always 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, we all thought they were the perfect couple.

When she heard about Joaquín’s supposed betrayal, she didn’t ask questions. She packed a small bag, 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 staying with me for the weekend,” she said, hugging me before I could protest.

I cried on her shoulder. I cried over Marina, I cried over the lie I was holding up, and I cried, above all, over the feeling of being alone in a house that suddenly felt far 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 house, something informal, supposedly to take my mind off things. 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 appeared in the living room in a black miniskirt and a cream silk blouse. I kept looking at her longer than I should have. Her skin was very fair, her legs toned, and she wore a perfume I remembered from when I was fifteen and used to steal the bottle in secret.

“Do I look that bad?” she asked when she noticed me pausing.

“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 a little deeper into my chair. Something similar was happening to Caro: she laughed when it was expected, toasted when it was expected, 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 to the apartment we stopped at a kiosk 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 on the coffee table in the living room. I handed her a cushion. She took off her shoes, folded her legs under her body, and looked at me in a way that made me nervous without my quite understanding why.

“I’m separating from Ernesto,” she blurted out.

I nearly dropped my glass. Caro and Ernesto were, in my mind, a fixed postcard. They had never argued in front of anyone. They went everywhere together. My mother used to hold them up as an example every time I complained about some invented boyfriend.

“What happened?”

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

“I told him something. Something I’d been keeping to myself for years. And ever 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 nails.

“I can’t tell you. Not you.”

“Why me?”

She looked up and went quiet for a moment, as if measuring how much she could say. Then she laughed, a nervous laugh, almost childish.

“Because you’ll think I’m crazy.”

“I promise I won’t.”

She tightened her grip around the glass with both hands. When she spoke, it was almost a whisper.

“I confessed that I’ve always been curious about being with another woman.”

I felt my heart in my throat. It wasn’t possible. Not that night. 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 flushed as if she had a fever.

“And you never did?” I asked, trying not to let my voice shake.

“Never. I thought about it. I dreamed about it. But I never dared.”

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 me to do for ten minutes.

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

“With whom, Lu? I’m thirty-five, I’m about to get divorced. I’m not going to go to a bar tomorrow looking for some stranger.”

“You don’t have to go to any bar.”

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

“What are you saying to 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 last 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 were afraid to open them and discover she’d made a mistake.

“Caro, look at me.”

She opened her eyes.

“I’m not telling anyone anything,” I said. “And if you want this to end here, we’ll end it. It’s okay.”

She shook her head. This time it was her who grabbed my face and kissed me hard, without asking permission. Her mouth tasted like gin and something else, something I knew by heart from previous lovers and had never expected to find in my aunt.

***

We undressed in silence in the middle of the living room. I lowered her skirt’s zipper with both hands. She pulled my dress over my head slowly, as if afraid of breaking it. When we were left in our underwear, she stared at me and said a line that melted me:

“You’re gorgeous, Lu. I hadn’t realized.”

I led her to the bedroom by the hand. The light stayed off; only the hallway light fell diagonally across the bed. I laid her on her back, took off her bra, and kissed her neck, the hollow of her collarbone, the center of her chest. Her pink nipples hardened before I even brushed them with my tongue.

“Tell me if anything makes you uncomfortable. Anything at all.”

“Nothing makes me uncomfortable,” she said in a thin voice. “Keep going.”

I went down slowly. I kissed her belly button, nipped the hip bone lightly, made her wait. Caro was breathing hard. When I removed the last piece of clothing and gently parted her legs, I saw she’d been wet for a while.

I tasted her first with a long kiss, no tongue. Then I dared more. I worked every fold patiently, playing with her clit sometimes with the tip, sometimes with my lips. Caro covered her mouth with one hand so she wouldn’t cry out; it was ridiculous, we were alone, but I respected the gesture. I picked up the pace when I felt she could no longer hold back. I dug my nails into the inner side of her thighs. I took my tongue as far as I could.

Her first orgasm hit sooner than I’d imagined. It shook her whole body, arched her back, and left her trembling for several seconds. I went up to kiss her on the mouth so she could feel it. Her eyes were full of tears.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m better than okay. Let me do something to you.”

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

“I want to.”

She gently pushed me so I’d lie on my back. She started with my breasts, tentatively, until she got brave enough to use her teeth. She went down my stomach the same way I had gone down hers. When she reached between my legs, she hesitated for a moment. Then she stopped hesitating.

She wasn’t inexperienced. Or at least it didn’t show. She learned very quickly what I liked, what made me breathe harder, what made me spread my legs wider. She made me come with her tongue and a couple of fingers that were clumsy at first and then sure. When I lay still, she climbed up my body and settled on top of me.

“I didn’t know it could feel like this,” she said.

“Now you do.”

We stayed silent for a while, her face on my chest, my hand tracing her back. Then she suggested, with a smile that was no longer timid at all, trying something she’d once read about in a magazine. We positioned ourselves the other way around, one over the other. It was the first sixty-nine of her life, and her enthusiasm showed. It wasn’t the last of the night either.

I lost count of the orgasms. At some point I brushed her ass with a finger, watching her to see if I’d scare her off. I didn’t: she returned the gesture with her mouth, slowly, attentive to how my body responded. I fell apart, and she, far from stopping, spread my legs again and buried herself between them once more as if she wanted to memorize the taste forever.

***

Dawn came with the sun entering through the bedroom window and the two of us tangled beneath the sheet. Caro’s hair was tousled and there was a red mark on her neck she’d have to cover with makeup.

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

“Not a thing. You?”

“Neither do I.”

She thought about it 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 kept hidden for years.

“Lu, I don’t want to go back to 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 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. Kissed me on the forehead.

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

One day we’ll have to tell the truth, or at least part of it. Or maybe not. Maybe it will 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 together, in silence, without asking permission.

For now, this is my confession.