The Secret of My Mother and Her Lifelong Friend

I have an aunt named Renata, though she isn’t really my aunt. There’s no blood relation between us: we call her that because of the deep friendship that ties her to my family. She’s been my mother’s soulmate since they were teenagers, I think since school, maybe even before that. To me, she was always part of the scenery of my home.

She comes to dinner once a week, without anyone formally inviting her. Both my younger sister and I call her aunt, and we love her with a devotion that’s hard to explain. She looked after us countless times when my parents couldn’t, was allowed to pick us up from school, and my mother would trust her with her life without blinking.

Renata lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment a few blocks from our house. She has no known family, at least not to us, and we never knew of any partner. According to what my mother told me, she was married briefly to a man and they separated, but that was before I was born. Every time I asked about that subject, the answer would be cut off right away, as if there were a door nobody wanted to open.

She’s the same age as my mother, though she looks a bit older, maybe because her skin is so fair. Round face, soft cheeks sprinkled with freckles, large light-green eyes that catch your attention the moment you look at her. She has brown hair, straight and almost always worn loose, and an easy smile that disarms you.

She’s not a thin woman. She has wide hips, generous thighs, fleshy arms, and a barely defined waist. But what defines her most is her huge, prominent chest, which she insists on hiding under loose T-shirts. It was as if all her life she had wanted to go unnoticed while carrying a body that wouldn’t let her.

As a teenager I invited classmates over several times, and she was usually there. Except for one, who one afternoon stripped her with his eyes the moment he noticed the bust she was hiding under her clothes, the rest ignored her completely. Most were dazzled by my mother, who had another kind of beauty, more obvious, more sought after.

The few times I noticed Renata attracting male attention was on vacation, at the beach. She wore modest one-piece swimsuits, I suppose embarrassed by her curves, but not even that fabric could hide such a chest. With that white skin and those green eyes, anyone would have said she’d have a line of suitors. Instead, she dodged them all.

Once in Florianópolis, a man approached her and struck up a conversation with the utmost friendliness, and she dismissed him with a cold elegance that admitted no reply. At dinner that night we laughed about the episode for an hour. Renata laughed with us, but there was something in her laughter that I would only understand many years later.

***

A few years ago, my father asked me to load some songs onto his phone, because he’s a total disaster with technology. In the middle of copying files, I took it upon myself to make him a backup of the phone. It was full of family photos and I thought it would be a shame for them to be lost because he was clumsy with any device that had a screen.

That habit repeated several times; in fact, I still do it now and then. On one of those backups I accidentally came across a home video of my parents fucking. And I can’t say it was a hint, or an affectionate embrace, or a modest silhouette under the sheets: it was my mother on all fours at the edge of the bed, her ass thrust up high, and my father behind her, gripping her hips, driving into her all the way while she moaned without the slightest shame. You could see her cunt open every time he pulled his cock out, glossy, soaked, and my mother asking for more, asking harder, saying “like that, daddy, wreck me completely” in a voice I had never heard from her before. In the end, my father grabbed her hair, yanked her head back, and emptied his load across her back, a thick white stream that ran down to the base of her ass. She turned around, ran two fingers through it, brought them to her mouth, and smiled at him, looking him in the eyes. I overheard a later conversation I wish I had never heard.

On another review of the backup, photos appeared. My mother naked, on her knees, tongue out and mouth open waiting for the load, breasts out and nipples rigid, hard as if ice had been passed over them. In another photo my father’s cock was all the way inside her mouth, her cheek marked by the bulge, a thread of saliva hanging from her chin. My mother with her cunt open using two fingers, showing herself completely to the camera, her skin reddened by the slaps. My mother with her ass bare and someone else’s hand marked red across one cheek. I was young; I’m not proud of invading their privacy, I know perfectly well that I was wrong. But I never showed it to anyone. I carried the secret in silence and tried to forget it.

The problem was the day I found a folder. It had a very short name, a single letter: R. What I found inside changed the way I looked at the two most important women in my life.

There were about twenty photos and one video.

I opened the first images and instantly recognized my parents’ room. The bedspread, the bedside lamp, the crooked picture on the wall. I started flipping through the photos and something sank in my chest. It was Renata. Renata sitting on my parents’ bed, wearing a smile I had never seen on her before.

I almost started crying. The first thing I thought was the worst: my father is a son of a bitch, cheating on my mother with her soulmate, they’re both disgusting. With trembling hands I kept going. Renata took off her T-shirt, stayed in her bra, showed her stomach and that enormous chest she had hidden all her life.

In the following images she was holding her breasts, squeezing them over her bra, laughing alone at the camera. Then she appeared on all fours on the bed, with thick legs and a plain white cotton panty, unsexy, sunk between the cheeks of her ass, which in that context looked even more provocative. In another photo she had pulled her panty down to mid-thigh and you could see a hairy cunt, fleshy, with the thick lips pressed together. By then tears were already falling on their own and I was thinking about how I was going to gather the courage to tell my mother what her husband was up to.

Then I moved to one more photo and couldn’t believe it.

In the next image Liliana appeared. My mother.

She was also in a bra, one of black lace that showed the base of her breasts, not as big as Renata’s, but just as beautiful. In the following photos they were together: my mother touching Renata’s breast over the fabric, Renata slipping her hand into my mother’s bra and pinching a nipple, both of them laughing like two girls sharing a private joke that was no joke anymore.

Then they appeared without bras. If my mother’s breasts were glorious, Renata’s belonged to another world. Despite her age they had the perfect shape, skin so white with barely bluish veins running through it, nipples such a pale pink they almost blended into the areola, but pointed, ridiculously hard, aiming upward. I understood at once why she hid them: it wasn’t shame, it was guarding something she reserved for very few.

In the next photo my mother was sucking one of Renata’s nipples. You could see her tongue out, flattening it, and one of Renata’s hands on my mother’s nape, pushing her against the tit. In the next one, Renata had her mouth open with my mother’s other nipple inside, and my mother looked at the camera with narrowed eyes and a slack mouth, as if asking for more.

I was completely confused. My mother, in an intimate scene with another woman I considered a second mother.

***

Although, if I thought about it calmly, it wasn’t exactly a sexual scene. I myself, with my college friends, had stayed in our underwear many times, we had touched each other’s breasts as a joke, we gave each other kisses on the cheek and even on the lips without it meaning anything. It was a way of showing affection, of having fun, of trusting one another.

If I touched my friends’ tits and they touched mine without anything strange happening, why should my mother doing the same with her lifelong friend be a crime? I clung to that idea to shake off the shock, although deep down I knew none of my friends had ever sucked my nipple with that devotion, or opened their legs with that much ease. And yet, something in my body told me this was different.

It was different because of the looks. Because of the way they sought each other out. Because of how one woman’s fingers lingered on the other’s skin a second longer than any innocent game would allow. There was an intimacy there that I knew, because I had felt it once, and it didn’t resemble two friends joking around.

Since I’m an irredeemable curiosity, I kept looking and found more. In the last photos the two of them were already completely naked on the bed. Renata lying on her back, legs spread, showing her hairy cunt, the lips half-open, shiny. My mother between those legs, propped on her elbows, her face pressed to her friend’s pubis, tongue out, a centimeter from the clit. In another she was already eating her out: her mouth sealed over Renata’s vulva, cheeks hollowed by the suction, and Renata with one hand gripping the sheet and the other squeezing one of her own tits, mouth open in a moan frozen by the photo.

The next photo was Renata returning the favor. My mother lying down, legs bent and spread wide, pubic hair shaved bare, pink, wet, and Renata kneeling beside her, leaning in, with two fingers parting those lips and her tongue deep inside. You could see the tip of her tongue coming out and going back in, shiny with fluid. My mother had her eyes closed and her mouth twisted in a grimace of pleasure I had only ever seen on porn actresses until then.

In the last photograph the two of them were in scissors, with their cunts pressed together, rubbing against each other, their breasts bouncing with the movement. They were holding hands as if to brace themselves, looking into each other’s eyes and smiling, with years of complicity that suddenly took on another meaning. Finally, I decided to open the video. It could have ended very badly for my head, but I double-clicked it anyway.

It was almost three minutes long. Renata and my mother appeared in bras, obviously filming and taking photos at the same time. The two of them removed the garment and were left with their breasts exposed. They laughed, touched each other’s tits with the tips of their fingers, looked into each other’s eyes, and gave each other a short kiss, just the brush of lips.

Then they laughed again and kissed for real. A long kiss, with my mother’s tongue entering Renata’s mouth, Renata’s hand sliding down my mother’s back until it grabbed one ass cheek and squeezed it. They parted with a thread of saliva between their mouths and laughed, the laughter broken up. Renata lowered her head and sucked one of my mother’s tits, nursing with hollowed cheeks, and my mother threw her head back and let out a soft moan, very real, very much her own, that turned my blood to ice.

My mother pushed Renata’s face down and Renata obeyed. She pulled my mother’s panty down with her teeth, biting the elastic, and ended up with her nose pressed against my mother’s shaved pubis. She started licking her slowly, going from bottom to top, with a broad, flattened tongue, as if savoring an ice cream she loved. My mother grabbed her hair, wound it around her fist, and moved her head at the rhythm she wanted, grinding herself against that mouth. You could hear her say, in a trembling voice, “like that, Rena, suck me like that, deeper, you little cunt, you’re gonna make me come.”

And when I thought the video couldn’t surprise me any more, my father’s voice was heard, hoarse, satisfied, saying from behind the camera:

—You two look so beautiful.

The camera moved. My father entered the frame, naked, his cock hard, thick, pointing upward. My mother stretched out a hand and grabbed it, starting to stroke him while Renata kept eating her pussy. Then Renata’s voice, a little rough, with a smile, said “come on, give it to me too,” and my father went over to her and put his cock in her mouth. Renata sucked him with her eyes closed, all the way to the back of her throat, while my mother stroked her hair and told her, “that’s it, swallow it all, show my husband how you suck it.” The video cut off right there. I never knew what happened after that, and even today I don’t know if I want to know.

***

It took me a couple of weeks to be able to look the three of them in the face again. Every family dinner became an acting exercise. My mother serving the food as always, Renata bringing dessert that she herself had made, my father making bad jokes. And me there, keeping a secret heavier than any of the others.

With time I let it go. I reminded myself that I also did similar things with my friends — not the same things, but similar —, decided it wasn’t my place to judge, and pushed the memory into a corner of my mind where it wouldn’t bother me. I didn’t think about it again until now, when I sat down to write it.

To close this story, I have to tell something that happened afterward. A couple of years later, already in her mid-forties, Renata got pregnant. We never knew who the father was. She always said it was through assisted fertilization, but I had my suspicions from day one and, after what I had seen in that folder — my father’s cock going into Renata’s mouth while my mother stroked her hair — those suspicions took on a shape I prefer not to name.

With the pregnancy, her body transformed in an incredible way. Her chest, which was already huge, became even more imposing, her tits swollen with milk pulling the nipples downward. When her daughter was born, she seemed to grow ten years younger all at once. She bought a bigger apartment shortly after giving birth, left that studio behind, and we went from having an aunt to also having a cousin.

Renata still comes to dinner every week. My mother still looks at her the way she looked at her in those photos, though now I know how to read that look. Sometimes, when they laugh together in the kitchen and I see their bodies press together “by accident,” when one woman’s arm brushes the other’s breast and neither moves away, when my mother’s fingers rest on Renata’s waist a second longer than necessary, I watch them from the corner of my eye and wonder how many things they must have shared over so many years, how many times they must have licked each other’s cunts in the big bed, how many times my father filmed them, how many times he emptied his load over both of them. What kind of love is that which doesn’t need a name to exist.

I never found photos like that again, but I never looked for them again either. I decided that the best thing for me, and for everyone, was to stop poking around in other people’s intimacy. They’re good parents, she’s a good aunt, my cousin is beautiful. I don’t need to know anything else. And yet, every time I see them exchange that complicit look across the table, a part of me smiles at the secret I share without their knowing.