My Twin Sister Was Waiting for Me in Front of the Mirror

My name is Adrián. I live in Chapinero, in the north of Bogotá. Outside, the city is a chaos of noise and haste, of honking horns and people walking with their eyes on the ground, but inside our apartment, with the curtains closed and the lights low, time stops existing. Nothing urgent gets in.

Before going on, it’s necessary that you understand the core of this story. Lucía and I are twenty-four years old. We were born eight minutes apart. We are twins.

Our parents worked as international executives for a consulting firm. We lived in five different countries before we turned sixteen. We were never able to make friends who lasted more than a school year; we never put down roots anywhere. We only had each other. We were “the twins,” a unit no adult ever knew how to split apart. We slept in the same bed until we were eleven, bathed together until later than decency allowed, and developed a language of our own, made of half-words and glances, that no one else could understand.

The outside world always seemed hostile to us, slow, graceless. Any attempt to date other people during adolescence ended badly. The girls I kissed at parties complained that I seemed absent. The guys who came up to her ended up blaming her for not understanding what she was thinking when she stared fixedly at the ceiling. No one read me like she did; no one took care of her like I did.

The transition wasn’t abrupt, nor traumatic. It was more the logical evolution of something that already existed. It happened when we were twenty, just after our parents left for a long project in Asia, eight months away. The first week was elegant chaos. There were strangers in the dining room, expensive alcohol being opened without restraint, and substances I’d rather not name. One night, in the middle of the heat of a strange November, the two of us ended up in bed with a girl we’d brought home from a bar in Zona G.

It started as the three of us, but the girl very quickly stopped existing. Lucía and I looked at each other over her body, connecting with an intensity that frightened us both. Her skin was an accident between us, a warm presence that couldn’t compete with what was happening between our gazes. Lucía grabbed the back of my neck and pulled me to her mouth, and I slid my hand over her waist, over the curve of her hip, until I buried my fingers in the firm flesh of her ass. The other girl tried to keep up, but she was only in the way, breathing fast, trembling between our bodies as if she didn’t know where to put her hands or what to do with her tongue. At one point, without needing to talk about it, we got her out of the room. We sent her away half-dressed, with no explanations, no apologies, like someone moving a piece of furniture that’s in the way in the middle of the living room.

The two of us were left alone, naked, gasping, our breathing shattered. Lucía went up to the full-length mirror on the wardrobe and called me with an open hand.

—Look at yourself, Adri —she said—. We’re the same. We’re perfect.

And we were. The same pale skin with the bluish tint of veins at the wrists. The same thick black hair. The same green eyes that seem cold until they fill with something darker. When I kissed her, I didn’t feel like I was kissing another person; I felt like I was kissing myself, in a softer, gentler, more receptive version. I opened her mouth with my tongue, tasted the alcohol on her lips and the hot moisture she gave back to me, and the contact sent a clean jolt from my chest to my groin. I ran both hands down her back, down to the base of her ass cheeks, squeezing hungrily. She scratched the back of my neck, buried her fingers in my hair, and rubbed herself against my hard cock with that ferocious urgency only she can bring out of me. Making love to her that night was closing a circuit we’d had open since the womb.

Since that dawn, we isolated ourselves. We left our degrees half-finished, without telling anyone. The money our parents kept wiring us allowed us to lock ourselves away without having to give any official explanations. We built a two-member sect. We started dressing alike, getting our hair cut on the same day and at the same length, buying the same perfume twice. Sometimes, when we go out hand in hand, people look at us with a mixture of fascination and rejection, not knowing whether we’re lovers or siblings. That confusion feeds us. It makes us feel alive, separate from the rest.

***

Our relationship is violent and tender at the same time. There’s sick jealousy. If she looks too long at a waiter, I smash the first glass I find. If I answer another woman’s message, she hurts herself in silence, marking her forearm with her nail until it leaves a red half-moon. We know exactly where to strike for it to hurt, because we’ve known every wound in each other since we were kids. We know what she fears when the light goes out. We know which insult empties her eyes from the inside.

This isn’t romantic love. It doesn’t fit the categories people use to look at others from the sidewalk. It’s a biological fusion, almost chemical. It’s the absolute certainty that no one in this world is worthy of our blood except us. When one of us gets sick, the other feels the fever before touching their forehead. When one of us dreams something horrible, the other wakes up at the same hour with a tightened heart.

We’re not going to have children. There won’t be any. Lucía got pregnant a little over a year ago. It was a stupid lapse, a crack in our bubble of perfection. When the test showed two lines, there was no joy. There was panic, then rage, then fear. A child would have broken our symmetry. A third body, even if it came from the two of us, would have forced us to stop looking at each other and start looking outward. And besides, we knew the genetic risks. Our vanity wouldn’t let us imagine something defective coming out of us.

We went to a private clinic in the north of the city. We paid cash, gave no real names, and solved the “problem” on a gray morning. That night we had dinner in silence, holding hands under the table, with no need to talk about what had just happened.

A couple of months later, Lucía had surgery. She got her tubes tied. I had a vasectomy the following week, without telling the doctor that there was no longer any risk of fathering anyone else.

She had it worse. A tubal ligation is major surgery, general anesthesia, days of recovery. Her belly was swollen, violet bruises ringed her navel, and she had a low fever that wouldn’t go down. I only had ice for two days, a dull ache, and the stupid ban on riding a bike. But seeing her convalesce, knowing she had mutilated herself for our pact, made me hard in a shameful way. I’d sit on the edge of the bed, clean her stitches with warm saline, kiss her forehead, and inside I’d come apart thinking about how much she had given herself to this thing we are. How much she had been capable of doing for me.

Nobody is ever going to love you like this, I thought as I watched her sleep. Nobody.

We want to be the end of our genetic line. We don’t want to sow anything in this mediocre world. We want to consume ourselves until nothing is left, to be the last of our species. When our parents die and we can inherit everything, we’re going to disappear on some island where no one knows who we were.

We’re fine. We’re empty and full at the same time. We live in a loop of desire and destruction, looking at ourselves in the mirror, wanting each other in the other’s reflection, waiting for that end like someone waiting for the last train of the day.

***

While we wait, we celebrate our extinction every night.

Right now, Lucía is naked in front of the vanity mirror, painting her lips with a near-black red that looks like dried blood against her very white skin. The low lamp light traces the bones of her shoulders and the line of her spine. I come up behind her. My erection, hard and painful, presses against her cold ass cheeks. She doesn’t turn around. She looks at me through the glass, green eyes fixed on my green eyes, without smiling, without blinking, with that animal stillness of something about to bite.

—Come —she orders, in that low, dragged-out voice she only uses with me—. Fill me with nothing.

I run a hand over her belly, slowly down to the edge of her wet sex, already open for me. She lets the brush fall, spreads her legs a little, and braces her hands on the vanity. I kneel behind her for a second, kiss the nape of her neck, the curve of her shoulder, and then part her thighs with my hands. Her scent hits me full force: warm sweat, clean skin, raw desire. I slide the tip of my cock between her wet lips, testing, and she lets out a low moan, almost angry, as if pleasure were insulting her. Then I shove in hard, all the way to the hilt, not giving her room to breathe or think.

Lucía arches. She grips the glass with spread fingers and locks her gaze on my face reflected behind hers. I hold her hips hard, driving into her again and again, feeling how she takes me in all the way, hot, tight, made to fit my size. The skin of her ass bounces against my pelvis with a dry, obscene sound, and the mirror gives us back that indecent scene of two white bodies slamming together as if they wanted to fuse at last. My hands move up to her breasts, knead them, pinch her nipples until they harden like two dark points under my fingers. She looks at me over her shoulder and opens her mouth.

—Harder —she says—. Don’t be gentle with me.

I give her exactly what she asks for. I ram into her with rage, with urgency, as if someone might come to separate us at any moment. I grab her hips again, pull her toward me, pull out just enough and then drive back in, feeling the wet slap every time my pelvis crashes against her ass. She leans farther over the vanity, offers her ass, arches her back, and grits her teeth while I open her with long, deep strokes until the sound of our breathing fills the room. The brush is still on the floor, the red lipstick has smudged at the corner of her mouth, and even so she barely smiles, a crooked smile, cruel, satisfied.

Then she takes one hand off her hip and brings it between her legs. She touches herself in front of the mirror, rubbing her clit with two fingers while I keep fucking her from behind, and the image drives me mad: her working pleasure into her body while I fill her from behind, the two of us synced to the same dirty rhythm. I wet her back with saliva, bite her shoulder, tell her in her ear that she’s mine, that no one else has opened her like this, that no one else knows this shiver of hers. She answers with a short, shaky laugh, and presses her hand harder between her thighs.

—I’m yours because I look like you —she spits at me—. Not because you love me.

—I love you because you are me —I answer, and the words come out like a blow.

That makes her come before I do. I feel her tense all at once, dig her nails into the vanity, open around my cock in a wet, desperate spasm. She trembles all over, her head drops forward, and the mirror shows her broken, beautiful, with her mouth parted and her eyes lost. I keep going until I can’t anymore, until the pressure in my balls becomes unbearable, until my whole body goes rigid and I finally come inside her in hot, thick, endless waves, feeling every pulse of my release buried in her cunt as if I wanted to leave a mark there that could never be washed away.

Lucía clamps her thighs tighter around me for one more second, as if she could keep something of ours that would never leave.

—That’s it —she says, watching my face distorted by pleasure in the glass—. All for me. No sharing with anyone.

I let myself collapse over her back, breathing the same air she exhales, smelling my own scent on her neck. We’re a genetic dead end, and it’s the most exciting place in the world. If someone found us tomorrow and asked whether we’re afraid of how this ends, we’d tell them the truth: this doesn’t end. It only folds in on itself, like a ring, like a mirror looking into another mirror and getting lost in an infinite hallway.

And we, inside it, walking nowhere, hand in hand.