Taboo

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.

A hidden camera behind the books, two brothers willing to share everything, and a girlfriend with a smile too frank to be innocent.

I thought it was the wine, those shy touches on the dance floor. But when I walked her to the hotel room, she held the card without sliding it in and whispered: “Stay a while.”

I found her crying on the sofa, her blue robe barely tied. When I told her she was beautiful, I already knew that night I wouldn’t be just her son anymore.

When he opened his eyes, she was still asleep beside him, naked. Bruno knew in that instant the night wasn’t over—not really—and that they only had a few hours left.

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 hadn’t seen her in years. When she got off the bus, she was no longer the girl I remembered, and that night we ended up sharing much more than a sheet.

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 she knocked on my door at midnight, I thought she needed something. What I didn’t expect was for her to take off her nightgown and slip under my sheets with that smile.

A proposal made amid laughter in front of the cabin TV opened a door my sisters and I could never close again.

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.

That afternoon at the mansion, my parents made me choose between my privileges and a fantasy I never imagined I’d pay for with my own body.

I was naked on the balcony, smoking in front of the sea, when I saw the stranger on the bench across the street. And instead of covering up, I let him watch.

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 robe barely covered her legs when she approached the sofa. Tobías was no longer pretending to sleep, and everything I’d been keeping quiet for months was showing.

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.

When Carolina came out of the bathroom, her mother still had my hand under her skirt. She didn’t take hers away. She just closed her eyes and looked at me from somewhere much darker.