The Night My Mother and I Were Left Alone

The story I’m going to tell sounds like something out of a dream. But I lived it, and I still don’t know whether it was a farewell or the beginning of something we both decided never to open again.

My mother and I put up with an impossible man for too many years. My father never laid a hand on us, never raised a fist, but that didn’t matter: fear doesn’t need blows to settle into a house. He managed it with silence, with a look that split the kitchen in two, with that way he had of breathing hard whenever something displeased him.

I grew up watching my mother over the rim of my plate. Every time he blew up over something stupid, she and I would catch each other’s eyes for a second and understand the same thing without saying a word. That was our only conversation. The only one he couldn’t hear.

When the word divorce finally came up, I was the first to push her to go through with it. I told her one afternoon while I was peeling potatoes at the sink.

—Mom, you don’t have to put up with this one more day. I’m with you.

She didn’t answer. She only nodded, without lifting her head, and kept peeling as if the peel was all that was left over from life.

The aftereffects of that man were stamped on both of us. On me, an awkward shyness that froze me up around girls: I never learned how to flirt, or hold a long look, or ask anyone out without my voice trembling. On her, the loneliness of a beautiful woman who had forgotten she still was one. My mother was forty-nine, with brown hair streaked by two silver threads at the temple, slim hands, breasts that were still firm and showed beneath any blouse, and green eyes my father had learned not to look at.

The divorce process was long. Lawyers, papers, hearings, moving, that feeling of living inside a permanent waiting room. But on a Thursday in September it was finally over. One signature, one stamp, a distant goodbye at the courthouse door, and my mother and I walked out into the street like two people who had just gotten off a roller coaster.

What happened that night is what I came to tell.

***

We got home just as it was beginning to get dark. The kitchen looked bigger without him, the hallways longer, the sofa too empty. My mother left the keys in the entry dish and let out a sigh that sounded like thirty years all at once.

—Do you want to eat something? —I asked.

—No. Just breathe.

We both smiled at the same time. It was the first time in a long while we had smiled without asking permission.

We had dinner with whatever there was, an improvised omelet and two glasses of red wine she poured right to the brim. We talked about nonsense, about the paint we were going to change in the foyer, about the idea of getting rid of the heavy oak table he had chosen and putting in another one of light-colored wood, lighter, different. We made plans that, for the first time in years, sounded like the future.

At eleven I went to my room. I wasn’t sleepy, I just needed a little time alone to understand what had happened. I went up the stairs with the glass still in my hand. I pushed the door open and stopped.

My mother was in my room.

Sitting on the floor, in the corner between the wardrobe and the wall, her head tilted and looking at me as if she had been waiting for me. She was completely naked. Her breasts hung just a little, with the dark, hard nipples pointing upward. Her legs were open, and between them you could see everything: the wet cunt, gleaming under the lamp’s dim light, the trimmed hair, the lips already swollen. One hand rested on her thigh. The other was moving slowly between her legs, two fingers buried to the knuckle, in and out with a wet sound that filled the whole room.

I stood in the doorway. I don’t know for how long. The glass was about to slip from my fingers.

This isn’t happening.

I left the room. I closed the door behind me with ridiculous gentleness, like someone trying not to wake anyone. I went down two steps. I went back up. I pushed the door open again.

She was still there. The same. Fingers inside herself, moving them, shameless, unashamed, not asking for explanations. As if it were the most natural place in the world to be that night. She pulled her shiny fingers out, brought them to her mouth, and sucked them slowly, staring straight at me, not looking away for a single second.

I went out again. I walked to the kitchen, set the glass down on the counter, and stood staring at the faucet for a full minute. My cock had gone hard against my pants and there was no way to make it go down. Then I went upstairs. I went in for a third time. Closed the door.

Without saying a word, I sat down in the opposite corner, against the other wall, and started taking my clothes off. The shirt first. Then the pants. The boxer briefs came off taut, with my dick jumping out, stiff, red at the tip, already with a drop of fluid hanging there. I leaned my back against the cold wall and grabbed my cock with my right hand. I started stroking slowly, gripping hard, letting her see me completely.

We stayed like that, facing each other, three meters of dark room between us. All you could hear was our breathing and the wet rub of our hands against skin. Her with two fingers inside her cunt, the other hand circling her clit slowly. Me with my hand slick with saliva, jerking off without taking my eyes off that slit open between her legs.

—Are you hot? —she asked, without stopping.

I swallowed.

—Yes.

—Me too. I’m soaking. Look. —She spread the lips of her cunt with two fingers and showed me everything inside, pink, shiny, a thread of slick running down toward her ass—. That wet because of you.

The silence came back. Thick, dense, full. She was the one in control now, the one deciding how long the air lasted between two sentences. When she spoke again, her voice came out lower, almost a murmur.

—Imagine you’re touching my tits. That you take my nipples between your fingertips and squeeze them hard, until it hurts a little.

I closed my eyes for a second. My hand sped up on my cock.

—And I’m kissing your mouth —I said, in a voice I didn’t recognize—. I bite your lower lip. I put my whole tongue in you. I grab the back of your neck so you can’t pull away.

—And I let you put it in. I suck your tongue like it was your cock. Then you take my tit to your tongue. You lick it all over, you suck my nipple, you bite it slowly.

—I squeeze both with my hands, I press them together against your face and lick the middle. I spit on you. I watch the saliva run down your cleavage.

—And you put your cock between my tits. I squeeze them hard against the sides of your dick so you fuck there, in the gap, and the tip reaches my mouth every time you push. I stick out my tongue and lick your head when it peeks out.

—I push it all the way in. I cover your mouth with my cock and watch your face while you suck it.

—I suck you to the hilt. I swallow you until I feel your balls against my chin. My eyes water, my mouth fills with spit, and I keep going. I’ve got your ass gripped with both hands so you can’t pull it out of me.

She shoved in three fingers. I watched them go in all at once, sink in up to the palm, and arch her body against the wall. A low moan slipped out between her teeth.

—Keep going —I told her, gripping my cock tighter—. Don’t stop.

—Then I turn around. I stay on my knees on the bed, ass up and my face against the mattress. You get behind me and open my cheeks with both hands. You lick my cunt slowly, from bottom to top, not leaving a single corner. Then you lick my ass. You put your tongue in there too, move it inside, pull it out, go back to my cunt.

—And you push back with your hips. Rubbing yourself against my face. Asking for more without saying it.

—And then you fuck me. You drive your whole cock into me in one thrust. All the way. Without warning. It makes me scream into the pillow.

—And I start pounding you hard. I grab your hair, yank your head back, and shove it in you again and again, faster every time. You can hear my balls slapping against your cunt.

—I clench my cunt around your cock to feel you better. I come. I come with your dick inside me, screaming, pressing myself against you.

—And I don’t stop. I keep fucking you while you come, I squeeze your waist and drive it into you mercilessly.

—Then you get down. You kneel between my legs. You spread my cunt with your thumbs and suck my clit. You lick it slowly, in circles, then fast, then you suck it whole like it was a little nipple. You slip in two fingers and finger me from the inside while you eat me out.

—And you grab my hair and press my face into your cunt. You suffocate me there. You ride my mouth.

—You come up. You get back into my mouth. I suck you all over, deep, with both hands on your balls, squeezing them. I lick you from the base to the tip. I take your balls into my mouth one by one.

—And I watch you do it. I don’t miss a second. I look at that mother’s mouth of yours, your lips stretching around my cock, and I feel my balls swell.

—And then you put it in my ass. Slowly at first. You spit there to wet it well. You push little by little. Then no. Then you shove it all in at once.

—And I fuck you like that, sitting on top of me, with my back to you, my cock buried in your ass to the root, while I bite your shoulder and grip your tits with both hands. I finger your cunt at the same time so you feel full everywhere.

—And I bounce on your cock, up and down, with my ass squeezing your whole dick. I milk you. I ask you to cum inside. I shout it at you.

—And I come. I come inside your ass. I fill you.

I couldn’t hold on any longer.

I came with a shudder that rattled me from head to toe. I felt the burning rise from my balls, shoot through my cock, and spill out like molten lava. The first jet hit my chest. The second, my stomach. The third, my thigh. I kept pumping, pressing the tip with my thumb, squeezing out the last drop. I was left breathless, my back against the wall and my eyes fixed on the ceiling. The semen burned on my hand, on my thigh, in my breathing.

My mother was still in her corner. She came seconds later, silently, biting her lower lip, fingers buried to the hilt and legs trembling. I saw a thin stream of slick escape from her, wetting her hand and running down the inside of her thigh to the floor. She tipped her head a little farther. She didn’t speak. She pulled her fingers out, took them back to her mouth, and sucked them clean, watching me.

I got up slowly. I picked my clothes up off the floor and put them on piece by piece, without looking her in the eye, not out of shame, but because looking at her in that moment would have been a way of asking for something neither of us wanted asked for. I buttoned my pants, feeling my cock still soft and sticky inside the boxer briefs. I took my shirt in my hands. I left the room.

I closed the door and went downstairs like a sleepwalker. I sat on the living room sofa, my shirt still open, and stayed like that for a long time, staring at the reflection of the street in the window glass.

***

We never brought it up again. Never. Not a single allusion, not a drunk joke, not a loaded look over breakfast the next day. The morning after, my mother came down in her blue robe, made coffee for both of us, asked if I had a lot of work at the office, and told me to buy bread on my way back. I said yes. She asked it as if the night before had been a dream erased by the first ray of light.

And maybe that was exactly what happened.

I have had no sexual contact with her. Nor have I ever gotten undressed in front of her again. Nor heard her voice change register the way it did that night. It happened once, in a corner of my room, on the day we stopped belonging to a man who had made us small for years.

We both needed it. Not sex between us: the freedom of knowing the body still existed, that desire had not died beneath that roof, that we could still come, still moan, still feel something other than exhaustion. We found it that way, face to face, in silence, with fingers and hands, promising each other things we were never going to keep.

Sometimes I think it was the most honest conversation I ever had with her in thirty years.