What My Brother Taught Me That Forbidden Summer

From a very young age, I knew what I liked. I always played with the girls, and boys scared me: they were loud, rough, the opposite of me in every way. As the years went by, those same brutish boys became the only thing that kept me awake at night. But before any of them, there was Néstor.

Néstor is my brother. My father was widowed young and, when he married the woman who later became my mother, he already had a two-year-old son. I was born the following year. We grew up glued together, almost like staggered twins, and he looked after me from as far back as I can remember. His maternal grandparents were Scottish, so when he started his engineering degree he went to study in Edinburgh with them. But summers were sacred: he came home, and the house made sense again.

As a child, they sent me to the same school where he studied, and there he protected me from the kids who picked on me. I didn’t know how to live without him close by. When he wasn’t there, I counted the days on the kitchen calendar like a prisoner crossing off a sentence.

In class I had a friend, Marcos. Big, handsome, smart, inseparable from me. By eighteen we already knew exactly what we were, because we talked about it in secret, during recess, comparing ourselves to the others and feeling weird and proud of it at the same time.

One afternoon, at my house, Marcos asked me if I wanted to be his boyfriend. I got excited like an idiot. I said yes, and we kissed in my room, the door ajar and our hearts racing. It was my first real kiss, the kind you feel in your stomach.

Over time, we became careless. Sometimes our hands brushed without us caring who was around, and we would seek each other out with our eyes in the middle of someone else’s conversation. We were too happy to be careful.

***

It was Néstor who caught us. That summer he had come back earlier than expected, and one afternoon he climbed up to the attic and found us kissing against the wall, Marcos’s hands under my T-shirt and mine gripping his cock over his pants, hard and outlined beneath the fabric.

I had never seen him like that. He went red, then white, and shouted things at us that still hurt when I remember them. He called us every name he could think of, the worst he could come up with. Marcos left almost running, zipping himself up halfway down the stairs. Néstor stayed trembling in the doorway, looked at me one last time, and stormed out, slamming the door. I’d swear he was crying.

At dinner he didn’t speak to me. My mother tried to figure out what was going on, asked two or three times whether we’d had a fight, but he answered in monosyllables, eyes fixed on his plate. I barely ate. I had a knot in my throat that nothing could loosen.

That night I went to his room, like so many other times. I’d done it since I was little, when I was scared or had nightmares or simply needed someone to hold me until I fell asleep. I pushed the door open without asking and climbed into his bed.

I found his hand in the dark. And then he started crying again, softly, so no one in the house would hear him. I was about to turn nineteen and he was twenty-one, fully grown, and seeing him fall apart like that, because of me, completely undid me.

—I didn’t like seeing you with him —he murmured at last, his voice breaking—. I can’t stand seeing you with anyone.

I sat up in the dimness, not quite understanding.

—Why? —I asked.

—Because I love you. Because I’ve always loved you, and not in the way I should. You’re mine, do you understand? Mine.

He said it with shame and anger at the same time, like someone confessing to a crime. And the craziest thing of all is that, instead of scaring me, I felt something click into place inside me. I loved him that way too. I’d loved him that way forever, without daring to put a name to it.

***

That summer was the most intense of my life. Néstor and I learned how to hide from the rest of the world inside our own house, how to invent excuses, how to steal minutes. A caress in the hallway, a look at the table, a foot seeking mine beneath the tablecloth while our parents talked about the heat.

One night in August, as the stars fell and the sky filled with streaks of light, I gave him my virginity. We had gone up to the terrace under the pretext of watching the show, and ended up in his room with the window open and the hum of crickets slipping in between the sheets.

Néstor had prepared himself. I could tell in the way he touched me, slowly, patiently, as if he had read a thousand times about how to hurt me less. He kissed the back of my neck, my back, worked his way down with his mouth while talking softly in my ear so I wouldn’t be afraid. He yanked my shorts and boxer briefs off in one pull and left me naked face-down on his bed, ass raised and legs spread for him.

—Look at that ass you’ve got, fuck —he whispered, and squeezed it with both hands, parting my cheeks to see my hole for the first time—. I’ve been imagining this for years.

He bent down and I felt his hot tongue between my cheeks, licking my ass all over, patiently salivating over my little hole with a martyr’s endurance. I was trembling, moaning into the pillow, not knowing you could feel something like that. He licked me down there for a long time, until my hole was wet and throbbing, and then he started sliding the tip of his tongue inside, pushing it in, opening me little by little.

—Tell me if it hurts —he whispered when he came back up to my ear, spitting on his fingers—. We’ll stop whenever you want.

—I don’t want to stop —I told him, and it was true.

He prepared me with his fingers and saliva, unhurried, first one finger going in and out, then two, searching inside me until he brushed against something that made me arch my back and bite my hand to keep from screaming. He slid three fingers into me, scissoring them, and by the time he pulled them out my hole was open and pounding, begging for his cock.

He spat on his cock —I felt it thick against my thigh when he settled over me— and rested it against my little hole, pushing the tip in very slowly. When it finally sank into me, I clenched my teeth at the burn, feeling his head split me open inside, the shaft filling me centimeter by centimeter until I felt his balls pressed against my ass. Soon the pain turned into something else. I felt him inside, felt him trembling, heard him hold his breath so he wouldn’t moan too loud. He filled me slowly, holding my hips as if afraid I might change my mind and disappear.

—Fuck, brother, you’re so tight —he gasped against my neck—. You’re choking my cock.

He started fucking me with long thrusts, pulling almost all the way out and then driving back in to the hilt, hitting my prostate with every push. I shoved my ass back toward him, seeking him, biting down on the pillow so the old folks wouldn’t hear us. I was drooling, my eyes filling with tears, and my cock was outlined against the sheets, leaking pre-cum with every thrust.

He turned me over, spread my legs, and hooked them over his shoulders so he could sink into me while looking me in the face. I could see his tight jaw, the vein on his forehead, sweat running down his chest. He grabbed my cock with one hand and started jerking me off to the rhythm of his thrusts, never taking his eyes off me.

—Come with me —he begged, his voice breaking—, come for me, I want to see it.

A few more pulls were enough. I came in spurts over my own stomach, cum splashing up to my chest, and my ass clamped down like a fist around his cock. Néstor groaned through clenched teeth, dug his nails into my thighs, and emptied himself into me in three, four long shudders that I felt like hot heartbeats deep inside. He stayed there, buried to the root, breathing against my mouth while his seed leaked from my hole and dribbled down my perineum.

I didn’t regret it. I clutched the pillow and let him make me his again that same night, while the stars kept falling outside.

After that, there wasn’t a day I didn’t seek him out. I became his silent lover, his secret, the shadow that slipped into his bed when the house slept. I learned to suck his cock on my knees beside the bed, to swallow his load without spilling a drop, to let him fuck me against the bathroom wall with his hand over my mouth while my parents ate breakfast downstairs. Until September came and he left for Edinburgh again, and distance came between us.

***

I didn’t see him again until Christmas, and by then something had changed. We still sought each other out whenever we were alone, with the same hunger as before, but we also talked late into the night about how impossible what we had was. Him in another country, me here. A story with no future whichever way I looked at it.

In spring, Marcos started coming close again. He texted me, waited for me outside, made me laugh like before. Little by little I started feeling attracted again to my old friend, that calm, bright attraction so different from the storm my brother stirred in me.

When Néstor started dating a classmate, I cried. He swore it was just for show, that he needed to keep up appearances in front of his grandparents, that with me everything was still the same. I wanted to believe him. A part of me always wanted to believe him.

***

By the following summer I was truly with Marcos. We had started sleeping together, and although it wasn’t the fire I felt with my brother, it left me satisfied, loved, at peace. Things were simple between us: him active, me passive, and neither of us asking for more than the other could give. Marcos fucked me tenderly, lying on top of me, kissing me as he moved; he filled my ass with cum and then held me until we fell asleep tangled together.

But Néstor came back. He arrived with the girlfriend he’d introduced to the grandparents, and I promised myself I wasn’t going to give in this time. Marcos had gone on vacation with his family and I was left alone at home, at the mercy of my brother and myself.

We held out a few days. Both of us tried to cross paths as little as possible, measuring the distance between us, avoiding empty hallways. It was useless. We were drawn to each other like a magnet to a needle, and in less than a week I was once again getting up at dawn to slip into his bed.

He had improved. Where there had once been awkward tenderness, now there was a man who knew exactly what he was doing. The first night I walked barefoot into his room and he was already waiting naked, his cock hard against his stomach, thicker than I remembered.

—Get over here, asshole —he said softly—. On your knees.

I knelt between his legs and took him into my mouth without thinking. I sucked him off completely, until I was choking, until my eyes filled with tears and he grabbed the back of my neck to fuck my throat at his own pace. I sucked his balls one by one, licked his shaft from bottom to top, took him back into my mouth until his veins stood out. He tasted of sweat, of man’s skin, of my brother.

—Up —he ordered, yanking his cock out of my mouth with an obscene pull against my cheek—. Ride me.

I climbed on top astride him, spat on his cock, and sank onto it slowly, sitting down centimeter by centimeter until my ass was pressed all the way against his thighs. I started riding him, bracing myself on his chest, feeling him all the way to my guts every time I lowered myself. He pinched my nipples, slapped my ass so the sound cracked through the silence of the house, shoved two fingers into my mouth so I’d suck them along with his cock.

He turned me over, held my wrists against the mattress, put me on all fours, and fucked me from behind like an animal, his hands on my hips and his balls hitting my perineum with every thrust. He made me bite the pillow so we wouldn’t wake anyone, pulled my hair, fucked me with the rage of all the months he had gone without being able to touch me.

—Tell me it’s mine —he panted in my ear, never pulling out of me—. Tell me this ass is mine, not his.

—Yours —I moaned, my face smashed into the mattress—, all yours, brother, fuck me harder.

And he fucked me harder, and spread my legs, and came inside without asking, filling me to the brim night after night. Then he’d run his hand over my soaked ass, take the fingers slick with his own semen to his mouth, and make me lick them too. The wild passions came back, and I gave myself to them with a guilt that evaporated the moment I felt him inside.

By day I regretted it. Even more when the phone rang and it was Marcos telling me about his trip, his clean voice, unaware of anything. I swore to myself I wouldn’t fail him again. And every night, without exception, I forgot him the second Néstor’s door opened and his cock opened me up inside again.

***

Some years have passed since that summer. Néstor ended up getting married; he has two children and a life that looks perfect from the outside. Marcos is still my boyfriend, and sometimes we talk about getting married, though we never quite make up our minds. I love him, I truly love him; he’s a big-hearted, good man who makes me happy every day.

And yet, every now and then, I invent a trip. A course, a conference, any excuse that sounds believable. I take a flight to Edinburgh and let my brother meet me at the door of his house with that look of his that never changed. I close my eyes, and for a few hours we are nineteen and twenty-one again, and the August sky fills once more with falling stars just for us.