Mature

I was half asleep, touching myself, when I felt a hand that wasn’t mine. What came next shattered every boundary I thought I had.

I went up to change into something more daring while they showered. By then I already knew that if I went downstairs to the kitchen, I wouldn’t be able to hold myself back.

We asked for two singles and split the beds without thinking. By eleven everyone was asleep; in ours, Mom started asking questions no mother should ask.

I cornered her against the oak door without imagining that, through the crack in the drawing room, a pair of green eyes could no longer look away from us.

We’d been talking every day for a year. On that fifth night in Seville, playing on her phone while sitting on her couch, I touched her hand by accident. Neither of us had ever been with a woman.

I had never seen my mother naked. The day her arm was broken, someone had to put her in the shower, and that someone was me.

I grew up hearing her through the wall, hating every man who passed through her bed. That dawn, with the house silent and the national team on TV, she was the one who closed the distance.

She stood still against the mirror, breathing through her nose, letting me do as I pleased in silence while the rest of the building rode up without suspecting a thing.

I crossed half of Spain with a fever to take shelter at my grandmother’s house. I never imagined that country woman would look at me naked the way she did that first night.

The silence at the table said it all before the words did: my father had a debt, and this time it wouldn’t be paid with money.

The elevator was old and narrow, and she was right in front of me. I only had to slide my hand around behind her and pray her husband kept his eyes on his phone.

She lowered her forehead onto the oak desk, between the son and his mother, and understood that her title as a respectable mother-in-law had just died in that office.

We had been fleeing for four days when they caught us. My grandmother stripped naked in the mud and the night, and I knew that madness was our only way out alive.

The night she offered me a test to see if she was worth it, my mother took off her robe and I understood there was no going back between us.

I’d been crossing paths with her in the lobby for months, avoiding her gaze. That afternoon, trapped in the elevator with her drunk husband beside us, I stopped avoiding her.

She was on her sofa, her skirt hiked up and her cunt wet, and all she had to do was say one sentence for me not to leave her there, waiting for her husband.

What began as an awkward talk about toys in the back seat ended up becoming the darkest secret that family would ever tell.

She knocked on my door in desperation: her husband had been arrested. I agreed to go, but on one condition, and she was in no position to refuse anything.

It was my daughter’s wedding, but it was him I looked for in the crowd. A ballad, the sand under our feet, and suddenly he was no longer just my son.

I still felt the echo of the night before between my legs when I entered their room. My daughter slept like an angel and all I could think about was doing it again.