Taboo

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 to the oak desk, between him 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 running for four days when they caught us. My grandmother stripped naked in the mud and the dark, and I knew that madness was our only way out alive.

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

Hidden among the trees, they heard them gasping, and back at the table the woman whispered to her son an idea she never thought he’d dare carry out.

My friend couldn’t take his eyes off her. I pretended to be annoyed, but the truth is I understood perfectly what he felt when he looked at her.

I live naked in this apartment where no one knows us, waiting for my son to come back each night. After him there will be no other man, and I knew it from day one.

I cornered her on the sofa amid drunken laughter, and when my fingers slipped beneath her kitten pajamas, the ice woman finally gave in.

I had begged her a thousand times and she always stopped me with the same excuse. Until that night, in the dim bedroom, she said yes.

I’d been crossing paths with her in the lobby for months, avoiding her gaze. That afternoon, trapped in the elevator with her drunk husband beside us, I stopped avoiding her.

She was on her sofa, her skirt hiked up and her cunt wet, and all she had to do was say one sentence for me not to leave her there, waiting for her husband.

What began as an awkward talk about toys in the back seat ended up becoming the darkest secret that family would ever tell.

She knocked on my door in desperation: her husband had been arrested. I agreed to go, but on one condition, and she was in no position to refuse anything.

I’d been faithful to my girlfriend for eight years. It only took a pool, two bikinis, and my sister’s mischievous smile for everything to fall apart.

When my daughter walked through the door laughing, I was still wearing the trace of the man she was going to marry on my skin.

It was my daughter’s wedding, but it was him I searched for in the crowd. A ballad, sand underfoot, and suddenly he was no longer just my son.