Taboo

When the flight attendant dimmed the cabin lights and left the thickest blanket over them, Lorena turned to her son and knew no one would sleep that night.

For years I’d imagined her without knowing she was thinking about me too. That Saturday she came down to the living room with a magazine and a question that changed everything.

I walked with my legs apart, loaded with a pain I didn’t know how to ease. When she came into my room and asked what was wrong, I knew there was no turning back.

The last time I saw her we were twelve. Now she was dancing pressed against me in a red skirt and with a look that wasn’t a cousin’s.

That afternoon I found one of his movies. That night he came back drunk, opened my bedroom door, and I knew something was going to break forever.

When the power went out, her foot was still in my lap. I felt her move it slowly, pretending it was an accident, knowing damn well it wasn’t.

We got to the ninth floor almost out of patience, she drunk on desire and me ready for anything. What I didn’t expect was to find her mother awake, with the screen lit up.

When he saw Camila leaning against the fridge with that half smile, he understood that this summer at his father’s house was going to get a lot more complicated than he’d expected.

He was my son; he’d come back the night before. At seven in the morning I walked into the bathroom without thinking and found him in front of the mirror, wearing nothing.

I went up to see the new apartment and toast with cava. I didn’t come down until the next morning, with her perfume still on my skin and a secret no one should know.

When I opened the door to my uncle that afternoon, no one else was home. What I confessed to him after that, on his sofa, I had never told anyone.

I arrived with my T-shirt stuck to my body from the heat, and she opened the door with that smile she had spent years pretending not to have.

They came down to the kitchen with serious looks on their faces. I thought it was over. What they said next turned that night into something none of us could undo.

She opened the door in a badly tied robe, heels on, and a smile that wasn’t a welcome. Her husband wasn’t there, and she knew it when she let me in.

I went barefoot to the bathroom and, when I pushed the door open, I saw him coming out of the shower. What I saw in that second never left my head.

I found her underwear on top of the laundry basket when I went into the bathroom. She hadn’t put it away properly. And from that instant, I could never see her the same way again.

We were having dinner like any other Sunday when my father dropped the line. Three hours later, my brother and I were closing the door to their bedroom, not knowing what we’d be by morning.

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.