The Quarantine at My Grandmother’s House Changed Everything

It was March 16, 2020 when Rubén left Valencia with the engine of his old Honda growling between his legs. He had no choice but to go back to his grandmother Remedios’s village, his father’s mother. They had put him on temporary layoff, one of those euphemisms that let the people at the top sleep soundly while they abandoned guys like him in the ditch.

He forced that heap through a journey of nearly seven hours on secondary roads, dodging Guardia Civil checkpoints with a mobility certificate as fake as the money he had paid for it. Past Teruel, the sky split open, and the rain worked its way into the seams of his leather suit until the cold turned into metallic pain. Beyond Huesca, the shivering stopped being just a reaction to the water. Bet you caught that fucking bug, he told himself with a stab of dread. On that final stretch, fear of the fever beat fear of the Guardia Civil.

When he stopped the bike in front of the exposed stone house, panic was devouring his guts. He had crossed half of Spain to take care of his grandmother, and what he was about to do was bring her death in his lungs. If the bug didn’t kill him, his father would.

From the upstairs window, Remedios watched the hunched figure on the motorcycle. She didn’t recognize the soaked rider at first; he looked like a defeated outsider seeking shelter. When she understood it was her grandson, she came downstairs, tightening her mask with knotty hands. She was already at the door when he cut the engine, dressed in those ashen-colored clothes she hated so much, leaning on her cane. She made to run out and hug him, but he stopped her cold.

—Stay right there, Grandma! —he shouted. The burst of authority frightened him, but the fear of contagion was stronger than any family protocol—. I think I’ve got a fever… don’t come near me.

—All right, Rubenico —she answered, with a resignation that soured her face. Her eyes searched for the little boy she had always known in that man ordering her from the middle of the street.

—Don’t call me that, you know I hate it —he shot back, with a sad smile that barely hid the tremor in his jaw.

His grandmother stepped back with an agility that surprised him. Though she barely stood above five foot three, she moved with a physical firmness that seemed to fill the entryway. She was a woman of generous curves, and the sway of her clothes, however rough, could not hide the curve of her hips or the weight of a bust that defied her own old age. He followed her down the hall and up the stairs behind her, unable to take his eyes off the sway of that ass. They reached the bedroom that had belonged to his parents, the only room with its own bathroom besides his grandmother’s: the perfect refuge to lock away his fever and, above all, those thoughts that were beginning to turn dangerous.

Stripping off the leather suit was a massacre for his bones. He was taking off his soaked underwear when he looked toward the door. Remedios was there, planted in the threshold, watching him with a fixed stare that froze him solid. Her mask hid her mouth, but her eyes blazed, two embers that seemed to feed on his nakedness. He tried to convince himself it was the fever projecting his own desires onto that strange gaze.

—Grandma, hand me a laundry bag —he said, trying to sound firm—. I’ll wash them myself tomorrow.

His grandmother reappeared in the doorway with a roll of black trash bags, approaching in a way he considered dangerous. Her eyes, fixed and bright above the mask filter, performed a visual autopsy on him, tracing every inch of his body with indecent boldness.

—Hold it right there! —he ordered—. Throw them to me and back up. If we both go down, who’s going to take care of us?

—Okay, Rubenico —she replied, her voice muffled by the mask and laden with a dark irony, almost a challenge.

Dazed, he went into the bathroom desperate for hot water. He showered trying not to think, but through the steam he thought he could make out a grayish silhouette moving on the other side of the frosted glass. When he slid open the screen, she was there, a towel in her hands and a gaze that crossed the distance with the force of possession.

—I brought you a towel —she said. Her eyes, however, were not searching his face, but were fixed directly on his manhood.

—Hand it over —he replied, rubbing his face to clear the haze.

—Sorry… I… —her fingers clenched the towel’s looped fabric—. C-could I ask you something?

—Of course —he answered. He had started drying himself and, whether by accident or feverish exhibitionism, made no effort at all to cover what she was staring at.

—Do y-you still not have any h-h-hair? —the stammer surprised him more than the boldness of her stare.

—Grandma! —he laughed—. I’m twenty years old! I’ve got plenty of body hair; that’s why I shave.

—You shave? —her gaze stayed fixed on that limp but solid instrument—. Are you… you know… gay?

—No, Grandma. I like women —the fever let him use the plural, launching a dart that left her breathless. She lowered her eyes, not from modesty, but from the vertigo of feeling herself included, however accidentally, in that man’s inventory of hungers. What she had in front of her eyes was not the childish appendage from summers by the river, but a raw, solid piece of flesh. She didn’t blink, until a sudden dizziness made him sway.

—Give me the towel, Grandma —he said, breaking the spell with a thin voice.

She reacted as if waking from a dream. She thrust the towel at him and stepped back into the hallway, breathing hard behind the mask.

—Dry off and get into bed, boy. I’ll bring you some broth —she said, trying to be a grandmother again.

***

The next three days were a blur of sweat-soaked sheets and the tapping of Remedios’s cane, striking the floor with an urgency that had nothing to do with nursing. The ritual was always the same: the door opened, the smell of disinfectant flooded the room, and there she was, with her surgical mask and a pair of blue latex gloves that squeaked with every movement.

She sat on the edge of the bed and made him drink the broth. When the sweat became unbearable, the sponge came out, sliding over his chest with a slowness that made both of them prickly all over. The wet latex stuck to the boy’s skin, a synthetic caress replacing human heat. Sometimes the sponge went lower than necessary, lingering on his stomach and brushing the base of a cock that, betraying his will, began to swell under the old woman’s fixed stare. One afternoon, while she was drying him, Rubén felt his grandmother’s fingers close hard over his shoulder: a spasm of possession that had nothing to do with nursing.

One night, the fever gave him a break and he woke clearheaded in the dark, uncovered and naked. The door was ajar and a sliver of light cut across the room like a knife. He heard a whisper —it could have been a prayer or a curse— and saw his grandmother’s shadow outlined against the wall. She wasn’t carrying the cane: she stood upright, watching that slender body and that cock of his, now awake. Remedios hated herself for her own needs, for that flesh that dried her mouth.

The next morning, when she came in with breakfast, something had changed for good. She set down the tray and, before leaving, plunged her latex fingers into the boy’s hair with a hungry roughness that burned more than the fever itself.

***

On the sixth day he felt much better. It was deep night when an urge got him to his feet. In front of the bathroom porcelain, he heard the hiss of pipes behind the wall: someone had opened a tap, and he didn’t need to think to know that water was running for Remedios.

Muttering, “you’re a fucking sick bastard,” in a tone that sounded more like self-affirmation than insult, he walked naked into the hallway. The light seeping through the keyhole of his grandmother’s door sent him into a short circuit: he bent at the waist and pressed his eye to the metal opening, turned into a peeping tom inside his own family.

Remedios emerged from the bathroom steam, wrapped in a terrycloth towel that seemed heavy on her body. She stood before the large mirror of the old wardrobe, lost in herself, and untied the knot of the towel.

—You’re a filthy old slut —she hissed at herself—. Who’s going to look at this fat old woman?

On the other side of the door, Rubén felt the incorrigible kid inside him take over. He didn’t care that she was his grandmother: she was naked flesh. His erection grew harder while she ran her hands over her mature skin, wet hair falling down her back and revealing her heavy buttocks with each turn. He clenched his fist and began to punish himself in a frantic rhythm. When the old woman bent down to pick up the towel from the floor, the full display of those buttocks offered him a total, obscene view.

—Aaah…! —the cry shattered the house’s silence as he came against the wooden door—. What an ass, Grandma!

The racket alerted Remedios, who flung the door open wide, exposing her nudity. The last lashes of that release slammed into her shins and bare feet. The sticky heat burned her skin while her eyes remained hypnotized by the boy’s hand, which still rose and fell with suicidal inertia.

—I’m s-sorry, Grandma… —he gasped—. I’ve been dry for a year. I’d forgotten what a woman is like.

—Sorry? —she muttered, trying to piece together the fragments of her authority before it exploded—. Tell me how sorry you are, you pig! Shameless bastard!

But when she turned toward the bed, she once again, unwillingly, offered him the pallor of her buttocks. Rubén’s smile widened; his erection, far from calming, returned to a violent hardness.

—What a huge ass you’ve got, Grandma! —he blurted out, unable to hold back.

—Rubén! —she shouted, using his name like a weapon—. I’m your grandmother! You owe me respect, you little shit!

—Yes, I’m your grandson —he answered, hardening his expression—, but I nearly lost my life on the road. Either of us could kick the bucket tomorrow. That bug doesn’t know anything about respect.

The old woman stood hypnotized by the pulsing of that flesh while he, sensing her weakness, began to rock his hips with obscene rhythm.

—This isn’t right… —she whispered—. You’re my grandson… You’re being bad to your grandmother.

—Yeah, I’m a bad boy —he replied in a whisper of pure venom. He caught her hands and forced them to close around his naked waist—. I’m very bad, but I want to be good to you… I want to be the best.

What crossed that grandmother’s mind was not a return to the fold, but a dry bolt that scorched her insides. She exploded: she slammed her hands furiously on the boy’s buttocks, a series of slaps with which she tried, in vain, to exorcise the demon devouring her judgment. But the blows, far from punishing him, lit up his skin, turning pain into an electric current that traveled down to his groin.

—That’s enough, Grandma —he declared, gripping her by the shoulders—. Now we’re going to behave badly for real.

That sentence finished demolishing the woman: in that instant the respectable widow died, and only hunger remained.

***

Between caresses and kisses, Rubén led her to the huge bed she had once shared with his grandfather. After the spanking, she clung to the boy’s buttocks with a double-edged terror: panic at what was about to happen and savage hunger for it, at last, to happen.

Lying on her back, he kissed and fondled that body that seemed like a dream to him: the old marble skin, the silver hair on the bedspread, the full breasts with dark nipples hardening under each squeeze. He kissed that prominent belly and buried his tongue in her sex streaked with silver, warm and wet.

—N-no… what…? Aaah… —Remedios gasped, clutching the sheets—. That’s not for licking! Dirty boy! What are you doing to your grandmother?

Spurred on by that babble from another era, he drove his tongue in harder. Remedios was no longer the owner of her body; only that wet muscle invading her and that electric friction on a clit that no one had ever dared kiss existed. It was a blessed filth dragging her toward an abyss of pleasure that decades of marriage had not even allowed her to imagine.

Less than two minutes passed before she exploded. It was a mute convulsion that tightened every tendon before her body arched over the mattress as if an electric current were running from her heels to the nape of her neck.

—I’m c-c-coming, Rubenico! My God, that feels so good! —she cried, tangling her fingers in her grandson’s hair to pull him away—. Get off, I’m falling apart!

When he returned to the source, hungry, she turned over until she was face down. But Rubén did not stop at the old woman’s modesty: he forced those pale buttocks apart and drove his tongue fiercely into that other dark hole, a cave that for decades had known only the passage out. It tasted to him like the purest and most erotic sin he had ever tasted in his life.

—You pig! —the old woman roared, struggling against the mattress with a rage that had become pure helplessness—. Not there, Rubenico!

But he kept control with his hands dug into her flesh and all his weight crushing the woman’s legs.

—You like me eating your ass, Grandma? —he whispered, with a bluntness that made her tremble.

—Don’t say it like that! —she babbled, with a voice that seemed to come from a distant dream—. It’s filthy… but… God… yes, I like it.

Remedios’s resistance crumbled from sheer moral exhaustion. He hauled her up by the waist until she was on all fours and slid his tongue, slow and hot, toward her sex.

—Dirty boy! You like smelling me? —she blurted out, her voice thick with desire—. Yes…! Like that, like a little dog!

Rubén rose up on his knees. His erection was a blood column so taut the skin looked ready to split, something that had never happened to him right after coming. Either his hunger demanded old flesh, or it was taboo dictating that violence to him. He brought that column toward the buttocks she was offering and began slapping flesh against flesh.

—Did you like beating me when I was a kid? —he let out, sweeping away any trace of respect.

Remedios’s treacherous mind dragged her into an image: the hairless ass of a little boy over her knees, taking her slaps, now fused with the present, where she was the one being spanked. She felt the blind pressure of that flesh demanding the back door, but what little lucidity remained warned him that he would split her in two. She pulled back a few inches and, with one thrust, sank into her grandmother’s soaked vagina.

—Take that! —he roared, saliva spilling from his mouth—. Right into your cunt!

—Aaah, you’re tearing me apart! —she howled, beside herself—. I love it! Give it to me with that cock!

After several minutes of deep thrusting, grandmother Remedios, the respectable lady of the whole village, could not and would not hold back that wave. That orgasm, a violent hybrid of spasm and agony, tore a howl from her as her body twisted like a wounded animal, and hot wetness overflowed between them, soaking the sheets.

—Grandma, yes…! —he shrieked, spilling his orgasm—. Take this milk, horny granny!

Even on the edge of fainting, she felt the hot spurts seeking the center of her innards, blasts so violent she would have sworn they were tattooing her womb from the inside.

***

When everything finally went still, Rubén realized his grandmother was motionless. His panic lasted only long enough for him to confirm that she was breathing, slow and deep. The beast he had just fucked withdrew, giving way to a grandson who suddenly felt the weight of her fragility. With the strength of his twenty years, he carried her in his arms to his own room. She, more asleep than fainted, clung to his neck, hiding a face where the shame of the respectable lady battled the satisfaction of the woman who had been sated.

—Don’t be ashamed, Grandma —he whispered softly—. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

He laid her on the bed, covered her carefully, and lay down beside her, and she held him with the complicity of someone who can no longer go back.

—Well, Granny —he said, kissing her forehead and turning off the light—. As my grandfather used to say: nobody reaches the end of life and regrets having loved too much.

He looked at the glow of the alarm clock. They had said it would be fifteen days, but the news was talking about extensions, about a country shut down for an indefinite time. As he felt Remedios’s heat against his chest, a cynical smile spread across his face: if the world went to hell out there, they still had weeks, maybe months, of dirty sheets and shared sins ahead of them. The lockdown, for the grandson and the grandmother, was not a punishment. It was the safe-conduct to keep going down to hell every night, whenever they wanted.