Taboo

Bruno had spent the whole night staring at his friend’s mother’s neckline. What he didn’t know was that the two women had worked out every detail of the game long before they did.

I turned thirty-nine and had the day off. I was waiting for a lover; the one who knocked on the door midmorning was the last man I should have let in.

I told him yes, but he’d have to pay for me to leave the cantina and give me something too. And there I was, walking ahead of my uncle toward the hotel.

I knew my boyfriend was on the afternoon shift. I knocked on the apartment door with my heart pounding, determined not to leave without what I’d been imagining for weeks.

She stood still against the mirror, breathing through her nose, letting me do as I pleased in silence while the rest of the building rode up without suspecting a thing.

I crossed half of Spain with a fever to take shelter at my grandmother’s house. I never imagined that country woman would look at me naked the way she did that first night.

The silence at the table said it all before the words did: my father had a debt, and this time it wouldn’t be paid with money.

I turned off the TV when she went upstairs to sleep, but the scene kept replaying in my head with my sister’s face instead of the actress’s.

I slept in his bed when I was scared. The night I found him crying over me, I understood what I felt for my brother was beyond return.

Sharing a room with her in that house by the sea seemed harmless, until the heat, the mezcal, and her body pressed against mine changed everything.

That first week under her roof changed everything: a hug that lasted too long, one drink too many, and the certainty that she felt the same thing I was hiding.

She used to tan topless by the pool, sure no one could see her. Until she felt his gaze fixed on her naked skin.

The elevator was old and narrow, and she was right in front of me. I only had to slide my hand around behind her and pray her husband kept his eyes on his phone.

She lowered her forehead onto the oak desk, between the son and his mother, and understood that her title as a respectable mother-in-law had just died in that office.

Ever since I returned to his life, every shower was our ritual. But that afternoon I offered him something no mother should offer, and he didn’t hesitate.

At three in the morning I found him in the dark on my bed, waiting for me. The fury with which he dragged me out of the bathroom wasn’t just brotherly concern.

For years she’d looked down on me, but that afternoon, bent over in front of the freezer, Marisol made the mistake of putting her ass at eye level.

Three days in the same suit, broken in the armchair. I was the only woman in the house now, and I decided life had to go on, even if I had to start by undressing him.

We had been fleeing for four days when they caught us. My grandmother stripped naked in the mud and the night, and I knew that madness was our only way out alive.

The night she offered me a test to see if she was worth it, my mother took off her robe and I understood there was no going back between us.