Taboo

He stayed on my sofa for a couple of weeks, polite and distant, until one Sunday afternoon he dropped the line that woke everything we’d buried in those summers.

I went into his room just to talk and ended up discovering something that woke every hormone in my body. Once he caught me, there was no pretending I didn’t want him.

I was days from giving birth and could think of only one thing. When the contraction bent me double with pain, I asked Rocío to put her hand beneath the sheet.

His heart was racing and the sheet was soaked in the seven-degree dawn. The problem wasn’t the cold —it was who he’d dreamed about.

I had her against the wall when her phone rang. I ordered her to answer on video call: her friend was going to see just how far her obedience went.

At eighty-seven, he thought he’d heard everything. Then she knelt on the other side of the grille and started telling him what she did when her husband traveled.

I always knew my mother was different from the others, but not until that dawn did I understand how different — or how far I was willing to go.

I thought she was asleep the night I brought those two men home. I was wrong: she saw everything. And weeks later she walked into the bathroom, sat in front of me, and demanded to know it all.

My brother told me everything: his lovers, his fetishes, what he did with Romina. What he never imagined was that one night I’d end up in bed with her, without him.

I thought I controlled everything at home, until the woman I married made it clear who really ruled the three of us.

She was coming of age, and the entire sanctuary held its breath as she walked naked to the altar where her two mothers waited, ready to initiate her.

He kept saying it was wrong, that he shouldn’t touch me. But his hand was already seeking my waist, and we both knew nothing would stop us for those five days.

What we had was the secret we carried everywhere, but that night, far from the city, we decided to share it with someone else.

She was her father’s wife, but that dawn, sitting in the sand and pressed to his chest, I stopped knowing where affection ended and something else began.

On the last night before becoming mortal, she curled up between her two divine mothers, knowing that at dawn she would have to bury everything she was under layers of plain cloth.

From below, while she pushed the guide line at the top of the ladder, her T-shirt parted from her body and Adrián realized that summer was not going to be like the others.

I thought the family weekend would be like any other. Until she walked through the gate and I realized the past had never really been buried.

The coach looked at me from across the table and smiled. My father gripped the back of my neck and whispered, “Son, we’re going to do whatever it takes to get you on the team.”

When she came out of the bathroom with her robe tied carelessly and her nipples pressing against the fabric, I knew I could never look at her as just the cousin from summer beach trips again.

They arrived at midnight in short dresses, fishnet stockings, and a perfume that hit me like a punch. In three weeks, my house turned into something else.