Taboo

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 looked for in the crowd. A ballad, the sand under our feet, and suddenly he was no longer just my son.

The first thing I remember from that summer is the counselor’s cracked hands and the girl with the fringe’s eyes. The last, what I saw among the trees before dawn.

I got off the train with one idea in my head, and when I crossed the door of his apartment I knew neither of us was going to pretend this was a family visit.

The key had been warming my pocket since the night before. I knew she’d be awake, waiting for me, with her robe open and the coffee pot on the heat.

When the apartment was empty, I’d open my mother’s drawer and become someone else. That afternoon, a shadow in the window changed everything.

When the doors jammed between two floors, I knew it would be hours before rescue. I never imagined my sister already had other plans for that wait.

Two hours before the vows, I tried to steal one last kiss from my fiancé and crossed the forest to his cabin. The back window showed me something I’d never forget.

I still felt the echo of the night before between my legs when I entered their room. My daughter slept like an angel and all I could think about was doing it again.

I’d been watching her for years when no one was looking. That night, with the house empty and a bottle of wine between us, I stopped pretending I was only her daughter’s husband.

I’d spent years looking after her, paying for everything, putting up with her screaming. That dawn, in front of the empty alleyway, I decided that for once she was going to give me something in return.

After twenty-eight years of quiet marriage, one hidden photo was enough for Carmen to obsess over what her little brother was hiding.

I thought I knew my son until that night, when his confession forced me to choose between indignation and something far darker that had slept for years.

When my aunt asked if I already had a girlfriend, everyone laughed. My cousin Camila didn’t. Beneath the tablecloth, her bare foot slid up my leg and I knew the night was only beginning.