Taboo

“If you open that box, I won’t be the boy you take care of anymore,” I warned her. My older sister held my gaze for a moment and then tore the red paper.

I asked for a foot massage almost as a joke. I never imagined that night, by the fire and with wine in me, my father and my cousin would stop holding back.

The steam came out with her wrapped in a tiny towel, and for the first time in months I felt like picking up a brush. What came next should never have happened.

With the house all to ourselves and him turned away among the rose bushes, I knew that afternoon I wouldn’t be satisfied with just watching him from the window.

For days I’d had my eyes covered and only recognized people by their perfume and their voice. That night, her hands were nothing like a nurse’s.

When the study door creaked behind me, I knew we weren’t alone, and that the woman hiding in the shadows wasn’t leaving.

I put my finger where no father should ever touch and felt him tremble. He said no, that he was my father. But that night I learned what a man becomes when he denies what he wants most.

I saw his silhouette outlined against the refrigerator light, barefoot on the cold tile, and I knew I hadn’t come down that night for a glass of milk.

Her father watched her from the pool’s edge, and for the first time she wondered what hid behind that gaze that followed her with every stroke.

I went into his room like any mother. I came out knowing my own son desired me, and that a part of me had spent months waiting for exactly that.

Marisa strolled through the house in a tight dress, never imagining that that night her daughter-in-law would turn family dinner into something none of them would forget.

When I saw her come down through the lobby at six in the morning, with a suitcase bigger than she was, I knew that summer would be unlike any other.

The creak of the mattress in her parents’ room was not sex: it was theft. Barefoot, Sabina followed it down the hall and pressed her eye to the crack in the door.

They were paid double if they adapted the act to something more adult. Marisol thought of the debts; Camila, of the way the host looked at them.

When she asked me for coffee on my knees, I knew something between us had changed forever and there was no going back.

One lie was enough to make my father stop looking at us with rage. My sister saw it before I did, and signaled me to keep going.

My uncle was driving in a rage, lost for the umpteenth time, and she used every bump and sharp turn to drive me crazy without him noticing a thing.

I had spent years hiding the woman who screamed beneath my hands. That night, a widow and her servant discovered who truly ruled that house.

A little too much to drink and an empty apartment were enough for my sister-in-law’s daughter to stop being the little girl I remembered. What happened that night should not be told.

For six months, we had the house to ourselves, and the contract that bound us became a routine neither of us wanted to escape.