My Nephew’s Confession I Shouldn’t Have Heard

Marcos and I had always been too similar to really be aunt and nephew. We shared the same musical tastes, laughed at the same jokes, and at family gatherings we inevitably ended up in the same corner, both of us dodging talk of mortgages and chronic illnesses. And that despite the sixteen years between us.

The birthday celebration for my mother was her idea: she rented a country house for the long weekend and crammed twenty people under the same roof. By Saturday night several of us were already coughing. On the way back Sunday, Marcos and I were in the car competing to see who looked greener and who was quieter.

“Stay at my place,” I told him when we got to the city. “You won’t want to infect your flatmates with this.”

He agreed without thinking about it too much.

***

The first few days were what you’d expect from two sick people: instant soup, paracetamol every eight hours, and turns in the bathroom. We slept in separate rooms. He left the kitchen a mess and I pretended not to care. It was easy living with Marcos. It always had been.

The problem came when the fever dropped for both of us on the third day and there was still a lot of time ahead. When you run out of series to watch and shallow conversation topics, boredom takes you places you normally don’t go.

We started talking about things we’d never talked about. About his relationships, mine. About what we liked and what disappointed us. Marcos really listened, without that habit of preparing your answer while the other person is still talking. That made it easy to open up with him.

One night, without either of us planning it, we fell asleep in my bed watching a movie. When I woke up it was three in the morning, he was lying next to me with his mouth slightly open, and both pillows had ended up on the same side. I didn’t wake him. I turned off the TV and stayed still, listening to his breathing.

The next night there was no movie excuse. He simply said the sofa hurt his back and I told him not to be dramatic, there was plenty of room.

***

The heat made me not want to sleep in any more clothes than necessary. I started going to bed without a bra, in a loose T-shirt and pajama pants. Marcos noticed, I think, the second night we shared a bed, but he didn’t say anything. Neither did I.

Darkness changes things. When you can’t see the other person, words come out differently, less filtered. He told me he found it very hard to talk to girls, that his experiences had been few and pretty awkward. I told him about my divorce, about how long it took me to understand what I really wanted from another person.

“And do you know now?” he asked from his side of the bed.

“More or less,” I answered.

He went quiet. Then he slid his arm under the pillow and his wrist brushed my side by accident, or so it seemed. I didn’t move it away.

The following nights he gradually became bolder: a hand on my shoulder, an arm lingering near mine longer than necessary. I stopped him with an elbow jab or by shifting to the other side, but without saying it out loud. Because deep down, and it took me several days to admit it to myself, it didn’t bother me entirely. I was getting wet at night because of my nephew, and in the morning I’d wake up with my panties stuck to my cunt and my hand between my thighs.

***

His ritual started around the fifth day.

He’d come into the room after showering, lie down, and announce that it smelled strange in there. Like dirty socks, he said. He’d lift the blanket on my side with two fingers and make an exaggerated disgusted face.

At first I laughed and hit him with a pillow. Then, without exactly noticing when it happened, I started playing along: I’d bring a foot up to his face and he’d pretend to pull away but never quite did. He’d hold it by the ankle, sniff it with his eyes closed.

It was a game. That’s what I kept telling myself.

“Don’t you find it disgusting?” I asked one night while he had my foot in his hands.

“Not especially,” he said.

“What do you mean, not especially?”

He shrugged. Said nothing else.

That night I fell asleep thinking about it. I fell asleep with my hand between my legs, two fingers buried in my cunt and the other foot brushing the empty sheet where his face had been before. I came biting my lip so I wouldn’t make a noise, pressing my fingers against my swollen clit until my legs trembled. And I fell asleep with my fingers still inside me, wet and hot.

The following nights the game spread. From sniffing to lightly biting my toes through the sock. I’d kick him when he squeezed too hard, but it was like a reflex with no real intention of stopping. He knew it. And I knew that he knew it. And I also knew, because I wasn’t blind and because the sheet doesn’t lie, that Marcos was going to bed beside me with a hard cock pushing against his pajama pants.

***

On the seventh day he crossed a line.

He came into the room with that habit already established, lifted the blanket, took hold of my foot. Up to there it was all the same as the nights before. But then he bent down and kissed it. Not a playful nibble. It was a slow, deliberate kiss on the sole of my bare foot. And then he stuck out his tongue and licked me from the heel to the tip of my big toe.

I sat up sharply.

“Stop,” I said. “Not that. Don’t you ever do that again.”

He froze.

“Sofía...”

“No.” I got out of bed. “You’re sick.”

I locked myself in the bathroom. I closed the door and sat on the edge of the bathtub for a long while, hands on my knees and my head somewhere else. My panties were soaked through. I pulled them down to my knees and looked at myself in the wardrobe mirror, my cunt shining and my nipples outlined under the T-shirt. I touched myself. I touched myself thinking of his tongue on my foot, the sound of his breathing, the cock I had seen straining against his pants that same night. I came in two minutes, biting my fist, and I hated myself for it. When I went back to the room, he was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. I spent the rest of the night awake twenty centimeters from him, saying nothing, my cunt still throbbing.

***

The next day we didn’t speak to each other.

I made coffee in the morning and left his mug on the counter without looking at him. He spent hours in the living room with headphones on and the volume so loud you could hear it from the bedroom. At noon he heated up leftovers without asking if I wanted any. I ate alone.

In the afternoon I sat down and thought seriously.

I had reacted badly. Not in the essential part — what he’d done was still too much, without permission or any conversation beforehand — but in the way I’d done it. The words I used. The tone. Marcos had behaved well all week and I had answered him in a way nobody deserved.

I punched the wall with my knuckles.

“Marcos. Come.”

***

He came in slowly, as if he didn’t know what he’d find on the other side of the door.

“Sit down,” I said.

He sat on the edge of the bed. I was leaning back against the headboard with my knees drawn up.

“I went too far,” he said before I could begin. “I know. I shouldn’t have done that, without asking you.”

“No,” I said. “And I shouldn’t have yelled at you the way I did. What I said to you was worse than what you did.”

Silence.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“Sure.”

“The feet thing. Since when?”

It took him a while to answer. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand.

“Since always, I think. I’d never told anyone. Not even my friends.”

“And why tell me?”

“Because it’s easy with you.” He paused. “And because it just happened on its own. It wasn’t something I decided to do.”

I believed him. Marcos wasn’t the type to plan things like this.

“Are you embarrassed?” I asked.

“Right now? Pretty much.”

“You shouldn’t be,” I said. “Everybody has their things. The ones they admit and the ones they still don’t dare admit.”

He looked at me for the first time since he’d come into the room.

“Do you have things too?” he asked.

“Everybody has something,” I answered. “Don’t think you’re the only one carrying things you don’t know how to explain.”

We turned off the light.

***

Like every night since the first week, I took off my T-shirt in the dark. It was already an automatic habit, something I’d stopped thinking about. He wasn’t wearing anything on his torso either when the first hot days came, but that night he had gone to bed dressed.

I noticed when I rolled onto my side and my hand brushed fabric instead of skin. Without saying anything, I tugged his T-shirt upward. He lifted his arms and let me pull it off.

We lay there in silence. Me with my back to him. Him close, not moving. I could feel my own nipples hard against the sheet and I knew, without needing to look, that he had an awake cock thirty centimeters from my ass.

What am I doing? I asked myself. I had no answer.

I started taking off my socks with my feet, one against the other, slowly. When I had them in my hand, I whispered:

“Can I confess something to you?”

“Tell me,” he replied.

“I’m sensitive to certain stimuli too. Not the same as yours, but I understand what it is for something to move you inside even when you don’t want it to. I’ve been getting wet for days thinking about you, Marcos. That tells you everything.”

I heard him swallow.

“Why are you telling me now?” he asked, and his voice came out ragged.

“Because one of us has to make the first move.”

I brought the sock to his face, slowly. He didn’t move. I held it against his nose and he took a deep breath, once, with his eyes closed, I guessed. Then he breathed again, longer, and I felt his whole body shiver against my back. I heard him murmur something into the fabric that sounded like “fuck,” and my cunt clenched like a fist.

“Stay still,” I said.

I pressed myself against his back. He put a hand on my thigh, still, not moving any further than that. I could feel his cock, hard as a rock, pushing against the pajama fabric and against the curve of my ass. Every time he breathed, it moved a centimeter and brushed me.

“This happens once,” I said. “And you don’t tell anyone. No one, Marcos.”

“I know.”

“Do you really know?”

“Sofía.” His voice was low, almost breathless. “I know.”

I asked if I could touch him. He said yes, almost voicelessly. I slid my hand under the waistband of his pajama pants and lowered my palm over the hair until I wrapped around him. He was hard, swollen, the tip soaked with pre-cum that ran over my fingers as soon as I gripped him. I squeezed him gently, measuring him, and he let out a muffled groan against my nape.

“Shhh,” I told him. “Still.”

With my other hand I pulled his pants down to his thighs. His cock was left out in the open, hot against my ass above the pajama fabric. I ran my thumb over the head, spread the fluid all over the tip, and drew another groan out of him. Then I put the sock over it carefully, wrapped him in the sweat-damp cloth from the day, and started moving slowly, without hurry. Up, down. A slow rhythm, squeezing his glans with every upward stroke. The fabric absorbed the pre-cum and he breathed harder and harder.

“Do you like it like this?” I whispered. “With your aunt’s sock on your cock?”

“Yes. Fuck. Yes.”

“Say it properly.”

“I like it. I love it. Sofía, don’t stop.”

He was breathing with his mouth against my nape. Every exhale raised goosebumps on my skin. With my free hand I reached for his balls under the fabric and cupped them in my palm, squeezing them softly while I kept stroking him with the sock. They were taut, pressed tight to his body, ready.

He tried to turn around to kiss me. I shook my head no. He tried to move the hand he had on my thigh upward, looking for my cunt. I held his wrist.

“Only this,” I said. “Me on you. Not the other way around.”

He obeyed, but I heard a frustrated whimper against my hair and I liked it. I liked having him like that, dependent on my hand, with his pants around his thighs and his cock wrapped in the sock from my foot, unable to do anything but breathe and take it.

I kept moving. No rush, nothing but the darkness and both our breathing growing more irregular. I squeezed the sock tighter around his cock and sped up a little. He rocked his hips against my hand, a reflexive thrust, searching for more. I worked him fast for ten seconds and then stopped dead. I heard him groan with rage against my nape.

“Sofía, please.”

“Hold on.”

I went back to the slow rhythm. My cunt was leaking under my pajama pants, so much that I could feel the dampness spreading through the fabric. I clamped my thighs together looking for some friction and drove a nail into my clit through the clothes. I almost came from that alone. At some point I stopped thinking about whether it was a good idea or a bad one. I was just there, with him, listening to him pant faster and faster.

“Sofía,” he whispered. “Now. I’m going to come.”

“Come,” I told him in his ear. “Come in the sock. All of it.”

I sped up, squeezing his glans with the fabric every time I went up. Three, four, five quick strokes. I felt him tighten all over, his cock pounding in my fingers, his balls drawing up, and then heat soaking through the cloth, stream after stream, while he bit his shoulder to keep from shouting. I kept moving my hand softly until he stopped trembling, squeezing the last drops out against the fabric. The sock was heavy, wet and hot.

Then I turned it on myself. I slid my hand under my pants, with the sock still in my palm, soaked with his cum, and rubbed it over my cunt. I pressed it against my clit, mixing his semen with mine. In four strokes I came, pressing my back against his chest, biting my tongue so I wouldn’t make a sound, feeling the orgasm rise from my thighs and shake me whole against him. He felt it. He put a hand on my hip and squeezed hard while I trembled.

***

We stayed like that for a while without speaking.

Then he got up to go to the bathroom. When he came back he lay down without saying anything, and a few minutes later his breathing fell into sleep’s rhythm. It took me much longer to fall asleep, with the sock still hidden under my pillow.

There were four days left before we could both go back to our lives. Four days in the same apartment, in the same room, with what had just happened hanging in the air between us.

I didn’t know what was going to happen.

What I do know is that the next morning, when I opened my eyes, Marcos was awake and looking at me. And neither of us looked away.