The Night My Aunt Took Me to the Sea in the Dark

I had just turned nineteen and had failed half my classes. My mother was sick of me and my father was threatening to kick me out of the house, so, at the end of June, they decided to send me away for a while with her brother, my Uncle Honorio, who lived in luxury on the coast and ran a transport business. He had money to spare.

I hadn’t seen him in five years. I caught a bus with just one suitcase and, during the trip, thought about everything I was leaving behind: my friends, the nights of cheap beers, and a handful of girls who had never been enough for the desire I always carried around.

I got off at Caldemar station and the smell of salt hit me at once. Honorio was waiting beside an enormous blue sports car, with a thick mustache and a smile that seemed too big for his face.

“My favorite nephew!” he shouted, squeezing me in a hug that nearly cracked a rib. “And don’t call me Uncle, goddamn it, you’re not a kid anymore. Call me Honorio.”

We got in the car. On the way he told me, without my asking a thing, that he had separated from his wife a couple of years ago and now lived with a woman much younger than him.

“You’ll like the city,” he said, glancing at me with a crooked grin. “People here know how to enjoy life.”

The gated community had a guard and stone walls. The house was two stories, with a pool, a garden, and a wicker porch. When we came into the living room, two women stood up to greet me and I froze in place.

“Let me introduce you to Yamila, my partner, and her mother, Dolores,” Honorio announced, amused by my stupid expression.

Yamila was a mixed-race beauty with impossible curves, in a tight strappy dress stretched over a body that didn’t seem real. Her mother, Dolores, a little shorter and wider at the hips, had the striking beauty of women who have learned how to use it. The two of them gave me a kiss on each cheek and I noticed they lingered a second too long.

“What a handsome boy,” Dolores said, and Honorio burst out laughing.

We went out to the garden for a beer. The moment we were alone, my uncle leaned toward me.

“Yamila is for looking at, not touching,” he warned me, still smiling. “As for the mother-in-law, do whatever you want. She’s more alone than a stone and she knows how to please.”

I laughed, not really sure what to say. Honorio was blunt as a punch. Before I could answer, his phone rang. He talked for a moment and hung up.

“That was Marina, my daughter. She’s coming over to see you. She’s going to kidnap you for the rest of the day.”

***

I barely remembered my cousin Marina. The last time we saw each other we were just kids, and now she showed up as a tall, slender woman, with short hair streaked with red highlights and a smile that never stayed still. She kissed me on both cheeks, looked me up and down, and announced we were leaving.

As soon as the car doors closed, she let out what she’d been holding in.

“I can’t stand those two. My mother’s been waiting for you, she’s dying to see you.”

Her house, near the beach, was much more modest than Honorio’s, but it had a garden that opened directly onto the sand. And there, with a glass of wine in her hand and a wide-brimmed hat over her hair, was my Aunt Elena.

When she stood up to greet me, I lost the thread of what I was going to say. I remembered her as a discreet woman, almost invisible. The woman in front of me was nothing like that memory. The summer dress clung to a full body, with generous breasts and wide hips, and showed off legs ending in platform sandals. Her hair was brown with golden highlights, and her eyes smiled before her mouth did.

“Look at you!” she exclaimed, filling my face with kisses. “You’ve grown into a gorgeous man.”

“Thanks, Auntie. You’re… stunning.”

She held my gaze a second longer than normal.

The three of us ate in the garden. I told them about my disasters at school with just enough wit to make them laugh, and at some point Elena started talking about her separation. There was no bitterness in her voice, more a kind of relief.

“Deep down, it did me good. It woke me up,” she said, patting my thigh. “Now I go out, I laugh, I treat myself every now and then.”

The word “treat” seemed to linger on her lips. I returned the pat on her bare thigh, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“Good for you, Auntie. You only live once.”

She looked at me with a half smile and brushed a lock of hair off my forehead. There was an odd silence that Marina broke by saying we were going to the beach in the afternoon.

***

The sand was almost empty at that hour. Marina and I went into the water and, between laughs, she ended up with her arms around my neck, telling me gossip from the village. She was pretty and shameless, but while she talked I couldn’t stop thinking about her mother, lying in the sun a few yards away.

A while later two of Elena’s friends showed up. Marina called them “the divorced women’s club.”

“There are four or five of them, all divorced,” she explained quietly. “They play cards, go out drinking, and talk about guys all day. Brace yourself, they’re going to eat you alive with their eyes.”

She wasn’t exaggerating. Charo and Bea, two women my aunt’s age, greeted me by giving me a blatant top-to-bottom once-over that made me blush. Charo, skinny and quick to laugh, said something about how well “Elena’s nephew” had turned out, and the three of them laughed together, with the complicity of people who have been saying the same things to one another for years. My aunt laughed too, but every time our eyes met, hers dimmed a little, as if she were keeping something just for herself.

“We should get going,” Marina said, rescuing me. “These ones would devour you.”

***

The three of us had dinner at Elena’s house. Marina laughed herself silly telling how her mother’s friends had cornered me on the beach, and the evening drifted toward drinks and the comfortable silence of people who like each other. Around eleven, my cousin yawned, announced she was going to bed, and left me alone with her mother in the garden, facing the murmur of the sea.

Elena poured herself another glass. The streetlights barely reached us; everything else was darkness and the sound of waves breaking a few yards away.

“You know something?” she said, her gaze lost in the black water. “At night, this time of year, nobody comes to this beach. And the water stays warm from the sun all day.”

“That sounds nice,” I said, not quite sure where she was going.

She stood up slowly, set the glass on the iron table, and held out her hand to me.

“Come on. I’m going to show you the best tradition in this house.”

We crossed the garden and went down onto the sand. We walked to the shore, where the darkness swallowed us whole. A crescent moon barely traced the edge of the waves.

“Here,” she said, taking off her sandals.

Then, without drama, like someone doing something she had done a thousand times, she slipped the straps of her dress off her shoulders and let it fall onto the sand. The dim light hid the details, but the outline of her full body, the curves of her hips and the weight of her breasts, left my mouth dry.

“Are you embarrassed?” she asked, and I could hear the smile in her voice.

I didn’t answer. I took off my clothes with clumsy fingers and followed her into the water. She had been right: it was warm, like a bath. We moved forward until it reached our waists, and then she turned to me.

“I’ve been thinking about this all afternoon,” she murmured. “Since I saw you get out of Honorio’s car with that good-boy face that fools no one.”

She came closer slowly and wrapped her arms around my neck. The water held us both up. I felt her breasts against my chest, the wet skin, the heat she gave off despite the sea. She turned her head and kissed me. It was a slow kiss at first, almost a test, until she opened her mouth and everything turned into hunger.

“Auntie…” I started to say, not very convincingly.

“Here, now, I’m not your aunt,” she cut me off against my lips. “We’re not blood. I’m just a woman who hasn’t felt like this in a very long time.”

I put my hands on her waist and slid down to her hips, feeling the firmness of her flesh beneath the water. She sighed and bit my lower lip. There was nothing timid about her, nothing like what I’d expected; she kissed me with the certainty of someone who knows exactly what she wants and how long she has wanted it.

“Let’s get out,” she said suddenly. “You can’t really enjoy it in the water.”

We walked back to the shore, where the gentler waves lapped at our ankles. There she gently pushed me down until I was sitting on the wet sand and climbed on top of me, straddling me, her silhouette outlined against the barely lit sky.

She kissed my neck, my chest, while I slid my hands up to her breasts and explored them slowly, feeling how she shuddered every time my fingers brushed a nipple. She threw her head back and let out a long, rough moan that mixed with the sound of the sea.

“It’s been years since anyone touched me like that,” she whispered.

She settled herself over me and, with one hand, guided me inside her. I felt her close around me, warm, and a shiver ran through me from head to toe. She began to move slowly, setting the rhythm, her hands braced on my chest to steady herself. I grabbed her hips and matched her, driving deeper with every sway.

“Like that,” she gasped. “Slowly… so this doesn’t end right away.”

The sand stuck to our wet skin, the waves reached our feet, and she moved on top of me with more and more urgency, biting her lip so she wouldn’t cry out. Darkness covered everything, but I could see the shine of her eyes locked on mine, not leaving them for a second. When she sped up, her breathing turned into a steady, broken panting until she went taut all over me and collapsed against my chest, trembling.

“Now you,” she said in my ear, and moved again, slow and firm, until she pulled out of me everything I had inside.

We lay there on the sand for a while, catching our breath, looking at the crescent moon over the water. Elena stroked my chest with the tips of her fingers.

“Welcome to Caldemar,” she said, and laughed softly. “Here you’re going to learn a lot of things they don’t teach in school.”

I looked out at the black sea, still hardly able to believe it, and thought that this summer was going to be, by far, the best of my life. Failing school suddenly seemed like the best decision I’d ever made.