The Night My Mother Stopped Being Just My Mother

Lucía’s wedding was held in Rosario, almost a thousand kilometers from our house. My sister had spent months arranging everything with that meticulousness of hers, and even so, until the day before, she still wasn’t sure whether to put the flowers at the entrance or at the altar. Andrés, her brand-new husband, had been born in that city, and they were planning to stay and live there. Lucía had always been shy, reserved, with few friends, and the list of guests from her side of the family could fit around a small table.

My mother arrived at the hotel on my arm, quiet, looking out of the taxi window as if she wanted to memorize every sign. She wore a long emerald dress, fitted at the waist, with a discreet neckline that still couldn’t hide the shape of her breasts. She was fifty-one and had the habit of biting her lower lip when something unsettled her.

“You’re going to be fine, Mom,” I told her.

“I’m going to be alone,” she replied, without turning her face.

It was true. With Lucía settling on the other end of the country, the house would be just for her. My father had died six years earlier and she still wore his ring on her ring finger, that thin gold band she would absently spin when she thought of him.

The ceremony was short. Lucía cried, Andrés cried, my mother cried while holding it in. At dinner, I seated her beside me and forced her to eat something. The wine slowly loosened her up. By dessert she was laughing at my bad jokes, and when the music started I pulled her out to dance without asking her permission.

“I haven’t danced in years,” she protested.

“All the more reason.”

We danced first to a waltz, then to something faster, then to a ballad nobody knew but everyone ended up singing along to. My mother laughed with her head thrown back, and people came over to toast with her, to tell her she looked radiant, to remind her she was still a young woman. Every toast was another glass, and by the third or fourth she started resting her head on my shoulder between songs.

At some point, her hand slid down from my waist and squeezed my ass. I looked at her, surprised, and she laughed, pretending it had been an accident. Ten minutes later, in the middle of a bolero, she kissed me near the corner of my mouth and told me, looking me straight in the eyes, that she loved me more than anyone in the world. Then, with her mouth against my ear, she murmured that it had been years since she’d felt anything between her legs, and that tonight she was feeling it. I got hard right there on the dance floor, and she noticed because she pressed herself against my belly and smiled without pulling away.

I thought it was the wine. I wanted to believe it was the wine.

***

I walked her to her room a little after one. The hotel hallway was dim and smelled of wilted flowers. She clung to my arm and every few steps she stroked my hand with her thumb. At the door, she took the card from her purse and stood still for a moment, not putting it in the slot.

“What if you stay a while?” she said, without turning around.

“Mom.”

“Just a little while. Until I fall asleep.”

I went in behind her. The room had only one lamp on, beside the bed, and a large window overlooking the river. She sat on the edge of the mattress and took off her shoes one by one, with that slowness of someone delaying the inevitable. Her black hair, which she always wore tied up, now fell halfway down her back.

I sat beside her. I didn’t know what to say. I brushed a strand of hair away from her face and, when I leaned in to kiss her forehead as I always did, she lifted her chin and our lips brushed.

“No,” she said at once, covering her mouth with her hand. “I’m drunk. I’m old. Don’t mind me.”

“You’re not old.”

I kissed her bare shoulder, right where the dress strap ended. She closed her eyes and let out a sigh so long it seemed like the first one she’d taken in years. I kissed her neck, slowly, letting my hand slide down her back until I found the zipper of the dress.

“If I take this off, Mom, there’s no going back.”

She didn’t open her eyes. She nodded once, almost imperceptibly.

***

The dress fell like a splash of water at her feet. Underneath she wore only a flesh-colored bra and plain panties that looked apologetic for being there. Her body wasn’t a young woman’s body, and that was exactly what made it beautiful: the wide hips, the belly just slightly rounded by the years, the pale skin crossed by a few fine lines that told the story of a whole life. The pubic hair, thick and dark, showed through the thin fabric of the panties, and a wet patch had already darkened the cotton between her thighs.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she whispered.

“Like what?”

“Like I’m the first woman you’ve ever seen.”

“You are the first woman I ever saw,” I replied, and she laughed softly, lowering her head like a teenage girl.

I made her turn toward the wardrobe mirror. I stood behind her, unclasped her bra, and let it fall to the floor. Her breasts were heavy, with pink nipples already hard as stones and wide areolas wrinkled by the cold. I kissed the nape of her neck while I looked into her eyes through the glass and, with my hands, traced the outline of her breasts without quite touching them, until she took my wrists herself and put them on them. I squeezed them hard, weighing them, and she let out a hoarse moan from deep inside her.

“Look at me,” I told her.

“I am looking at you.”

“No, look at what you’re seeing.”

She studied herself for a long time. I saw the exact moment on her face when shame finally left her. I slid one hand down her belly, slipped my fingers inside her panties, and found her cunt soaking wet, so wet that the moisture ran down my wrist at the first touch. I pinched her clit between my index finger and thumb and she bent forward, bracing herself against the mirror, leaving two fogged patches at the height of her hands.

“You’re leaking, Mom.”

“Shut up. Don’t say that.”

“You’re leaking because of your son.”

“Shut up, for God’s sake, shut up.”

But she spread her legs wider and pushed her ass back against my bulge, and kept looking at herself in the mirror while I pushed two fingers inside her and pulled them back out shining.

***

I took her to the bed and laid her down with a tenderness I didn’t even know I possessed. I pulled her panties down to her ankles and took them off completely. She opened her legs for me with a new calm, as if she had silently decided she was going to give herself over entirely. I knelt on the floor beside the edge of the mattress and ran my tongue between her thighs, first on the outside, nibbling at the inner flesh, until I felt her trembling. Then I parted the lips of her cunt with my thumbs and drove my tongue inside, all the way to the back, searching for her taste.

“Oh, son,” she murmured, and immediately covered her mouth with the back of her hand. “Sorry. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.”

I pulled her hand away from her mouth. I wanted to hear her. I wanted to hear everything she’d kept buried for years. I sucked her clit with my lips, wrapped it up, sucked slowly, and she began to move her hips against my face, unable to control herself. I slid two fingers inside her again, this time curled upward, searching for the spot that would make her leap, and when I found it she arched her back off the mattress as if she’d been electrocuted.

“Not there, not there, I’ll die there,” she moaned, but she pressed my head against her cunt with both hands and forced me to keep going.

She came like that, with her son’s mouth eating her cunt and my fingers buried to the knuckles, squeezing my face between her thighs until I could barely breathe. It ran down her chin, her neck, her breasts, all the liquid she had kept locked away for years. She was left trembling, legs spread, with a broken, nervous laugh that I couldn’t tell was tears or not.

When I sat up and started unbuttoning my shirt, she stopped me. She sat on the edge of the bed, pulled down my belt, my pants, my briefs, and stared at my cock for a moment before taking it in her hand. I felt her tremble at first, not from nerves but from something older, as if she had been remembering a gesture she thought she’d forgotten a long time ago. She began to jerk me off slowly, staring at her hand closed around my cock as if she recognized neither one nor the other.

“It’s bigger than your father’s,” she said quietly, almost to herself, and blushed when she heard it out loud.

Then she opened her mouth and took me all the way in. I hadn’t expected that from her, not like that, not the first time, but she swallowed me to the back of her throat, until I felt myself hitting it and she didn’t pull away. She drew back slowly, sucking me, leaving a string of saliva hanging from her chin, and took me in again until she gagged. She sucked me with her eyes closed, focused, like someone praying. I took her head in both hands and fucked her mouth slowly, carefully, and she moaned every time I thrust into her throat, filled to the brim.

“Come here,” she said when she pulled me out of her mouth, and lay back down again, opening her arms for me. “Put it in me already. Put it inside.”

I got on top of her. Her legs wrapped around my waist. I rested the tip of my cock at the opening of her cunt and she lifted her hips herself so I’d slide in. When I entered her, both of us held our breath at the same time, and then we let out almost the same sound, a groan that was neither pleasure nor pain but recognition. I felt her tight, closed, scorching hot, as if that cunt had been waiting twelve years for someone to open it again.

“Slowly,” she asked. “Please, slowly. It’s a lot.”

I did as she asked. I moved slowly, looking at her, giving her time to get used to something she probably would never get used to. I went in centimeter by centimeter, feeling her open, feeling her yield. She took my face in both hands and kept me close, forehead to forehead, until our breathing blurred together. I started fucking her deeper, with long, slow thrusts, and she closed her eyes every time I drove into her to the hilt.

“Don’t hold back,” I told her after a while. “We’re alone.”

And then she moaned for real, without filters, a whole woman letting herself go after far too long. “Fuck me, son, fuck me,” she started repeating in my ear, and every time she said it I shoved into her harder, until the bed began slamming against the wall and she stopped caring. “Harder, like that, like that, do whatever you want to me.” I grabbed her beneath the knees and folded her legs up against her chest, opening her wide, and speared her from above at a pace that drove the air from her lungs with every stroke.

We changed positions. I put her on top of me and let her set the rhythm. She sat down on my cock in one hard drop and let out a howl I had to cover with my hand. Then she began to ride me, palms pressed to my chest, rising and falling, searching for the angle. Her hair fell across our faces like a curtain. Her breasts moved with each thrust, heavy, hanging over my mouth, and I lifted my head to suck them, to bite her nipples, to tug on them with my teeth. She dug her nails into my chest and moved faster and faster, talking to herself, saying filthy things I never imagined would come out of my mother’s mouth.

“I’m taking all of it in, see? I’m taking all of it in. My son’s whole cock inside me. All of it.”

I grabbed her hips and started driving up from below, fucking into her at a brutal pace, hearing the wet slap of her cunt every time I pulled out and shoved back in. She came apart over me, back arched and mouth open with no sound, and I felt everything inside her tightening, her cunt squeezing my cock in nonstop spasms. A second later I came too, inside her, without even thinking of pulling out, unloading every drop deep inside. I felt it overflow, leak out along the edges and run down her ass to the sheet.

“Not inside,” she whispered afterward, once she could breathe again, but she said it smiling, knowing it was too late. “Not inside, son, I’m past the age for scares but you make me so fucking horny.”

***

We stayed wrapped in each other’s arms without speaking for a long time. She played with the hair on my chest. I stroked her back and absentmindedly touched her crotch, feeling it swollen, soaked with both of us. I slipped in a finger and pulled out a thick strand of my semen. I put it on her lips and she licked it off without looking away.

“Dirty boy,” she murmured, and kissed me with the taste still in her mouth.

At some point I heard her crying softly, and when I asked what was wrong she told me they were good tears, that it had been years since she’d felt so alive.

“If I’d accepted you sooner, I would have been the happiest woman in the world,” she confessed. “I’m lucky.”

We slept embraced, her head on my shoulder, my hand on her hip. The next morning we didn’t go down for breakfast. She woke me with her mouth, gently, without warning, sucking me slowly under the sheets until I was hard again, and then she climbed on top without saying a word and took me in herself, riding me with her gaze lost out the window, while the sun painted her body orange. She came twice like that, on top of me, squeezing my throat with one hand, covering her mouth with the other. Then she sucked me until the end and swallowed everything I gave her in her mouth, not spilling a drop, watching me as she did it.

I bent her over on all fours before leaving the bed. I spread her ass with my thumbs and ran my tongue all around, from her asshole to her clit, until she begged me to put it in her again. I took her from behind, grabbing her by the hair, and fucked her while we looked at each other in the wardrobe mirror. Her, my mother, naked and on all fours, hair pulled tight and mouth open, being ridden by her son. We came like that, looking at each other.

My mother, that same reserved woman who years earlier used to cross herself if a long kiss appeared on television, discovered in a single night that she had an entire body waiting to be used for the first time.

She ordered breakfast to the room. We ate sitting on the bed, her wearing my shirt over her shoulders and nothing underneath, me with a towel around my waist. She talked more in that hour than in the last five years. She told me things about my father I didn’t know, as well as things she had kept quiet out of habit —that she hadn’t had an orgasm with anyone in ten years, that she’d been touching herself thinking of me longer than she was willing to admit— and in the end, while stirring her coffee with a tiny spoon, she asked me what we were going to do when we went back.

“Whatever you want,” I told her.

“I want this. I don’t know how to do it, but I want it.”

***

When we got back, I moved in with her. We told Lucía it was an arrangement of mutual care, while the expenses were sorted out. My mother took off her widow’s ring the following month and put it away in the memory drawer, beside the letters my father had written her when they were boyfriend and girlfriend. She never wore it again.

We learned each other’s bodies like two strangers with all the time in the world. She discovered she liked things she never would have dared ask for —being fucked in the ass slowly on Sunday mornings, having me finish on her face when she brushed her teeth, being tied to the bed and left like that for an hour before I touched her— and I learned to read her silences. She cut her hair to shoulder length because the gray hairs had started to come in and, as she said, she preferred nobody confuse us for mother and son when we went out to dinner. I joked about it once, and after that we never used the word “mother” outside the house again.

Twelve years have gone by. I’m thirty-seven now, she’s sixty-three. We’re in Rosario again, in the same hotel, this time for Andrés’s funeral, after he was killed in a road accident a week ago. My mother is wearing a black dress that ends at the knees and stockings that outline her legs with an elegance that still undoes me. Lucía will come live with us for a while, until she decides what to do with the rest of her life. She’s spent twelve years believing we’re mother and son, and we have no intention of correcting her mistake.