Taboo

Esteban was asleep when I got up to shower. By the time he woke again, I had already decided who else I wanted in that bed before noon.

When I saw him get off the train, he was no longer the boy I remembered. In that moment I thought my husband would have to learn to share, even if he never knew how.

When I found him behind me in the kitchen, his body pressed to mine and his breathing ragged against my neck, I knew I was going to give in before I fought.

The Saturday the house was empty, my mother-in-law came into the kitchen barefoot, wearing lingerie that wasn’t for her husband, and smiled like she already knew the ending.

When she opened the door and found us, I thought the family was over that afternoon. What I didn’t expect was to hear her confess, right in my ear, desires she’d kept hidden for years.

I gave her permission to go out with both of them on the same afternoon. When she came back to the parking lot, she still had one man’s marks on her and a date with the other at seven-thirty.

When she clung to me in the water and I felt her breathing change, I knew the summer we turned eighteen would be unlike any other.

Three weeks after discovering the hidden monitors in my father-in-law’s office, the screen flickered on by itself, just as he was already behind his daughter.

Friday yoga started as a silent game of looks and ended with her body pressed against mine in my father’s game room.

I booked the same Airbnb where I first made love to my cousin. This time we weren’t alone: each of us brought our partner, and all four of us knew it.

The dress was French-blue voile, almost transparent. My father was in front of me. My husband to the left. And the French guest still didn’t understand what was going to happen that night.

My cousin had gone to the beach with her friends. When I rang the bell, my aunt opened the door wearing her apron and a smile I’d never seen before.

When the screen came on, my sister-in-law was welcoming her two relatives in the living room with a smile I’d never seen at Sunday lunches.

He showed up at the door unannounced, looking for a fight and carrying a bottle under his arm. By three in the morning, nothing I knew about him was true anymore.

When I suggested to Valeria that she share my boyfriend and my brother, she was left speechless. What happened next in the dungeon was impossible to forget.

I pushed the door open, holding my breath. He was asleep on his side, the sheet fallen to his waist. If I left then, nothing had happened. I didn’t leave.

I walked into the living room and found him waiting for me with something hidden behind his back. That smile told me before he did that the night wasn’t going to be normal.

When I walked into his room that night, he was already waiting for me. There was something different in his gaze, something I had never seen in my son’s eyes before.

When she turned in those heels, the dress lifted just enough to reveal the exact line where the stocking ended and the skin began. And then she asked me for a massage.

Three glasses of wine, a backpack full of toys, and a complicit look. What happened with my sister that night crossed every line I ever thought I’d cross.