Taboo

When I stepped into the living room, I realized my father-in-law’s surprise had a name, a red dress, and a smile too practiced to be innocent.

When her mother took the night shift and he waited for her with the workshop light on, Daniela knew she could no longer lie to herself.

When my stepmother locked the bedroom door and started unbuttoning her blouse, I knew that punishment wouldn’t be like any sermon before it.

We’d been kissing in secret for four years like two hidden lovers. When our aunt and uncle closed the door on the way to the airport, I knew there would be no turning back that night.

It was Thursday, Mom’s day, but my stepsister dragged me into the shower before breakfast. The harem rules they invented were starting to break again.

That morning I thought I was alone in the house. I walked naked down the hallway and, as I turned the corner, there she was, with a look that wasn’t a mother’s.

I was masturbating thinking about her when she pushed the door open without warning, fresh from the shower and not a stitch of clothes on. What happened next shouldn’t be told.

I left the keys on the table without making a sound. Faint light came from my brother’s room and, before I even looked in, I knew that night was going to change everything between the three of us.

When the camera came on that afternoon, Camila was sitting in her office in a very short skirt, hiding a secret that had no business fitting in that room.

When we arrived at my father-in-law’s house, I thought the send-off would be like any other—until I saw my mother-in-law coming down the stairs with that look I already knew.

She arrived at my apartment with her cheek still bruised. That same night she stepped into the bathroom wrapped in a towel and dropped it when she saw me.

The living-room sofa had already seen too much, but nothing like the slow smile with which my sister-in-law waited for me that afternoon while my father-in-law pretended not to notice.

I’d been Camila’s boyfriend for two years. That night, her sister Antonella turned eighteen, and I understood that nothing in that house was forbidden.

I heard my twin sister moving in the shower. When I went into the bathroom, I saw her panties on the floor, and everything got complicated that very morning.

I was alone on the sofa when the door opened. It was Marina, my sister’s friend, and what she saw made her smile. What happened next took me by surprise.

When the warning arrived, I turned on the screen thinking it would be just another meeting. I never imagined I’d see my sister-in-law kneeling in front of my father-in-law’s business partner.

Just turned nineteen, a thirty-eight-degree afternoon, and my aunt by marriage mopping my room in tight jeans. That day I couldn’t take it anymore.

They thought she wanted jewelry or a trip. When they asked what she really desired, there was nothing left to do but say the one thing she had never dared speak aloud.

My mother leaned in front of me to pull an old tape from the box, and when she slowly adjusted her robe, I knew she had seen what I didn’t want her to see.

He turned eighteen and the first thing he did was go looking for the woman his father had torn from him. He never imagined that afternoon in a café, she’d come with a different plan.