What Rodrigo Was Hiding Behind the Washing Machine

Carmen Villarreal was forty-five years old, had been widowed for three, and led an orderly life in which her morning workout occupied a sacred place. Dark hair, brown skin, generous hips that time had shaped with a kind of poetic justice: wider, firmer, more present. She was not the kind of woman who went unnoticed.

Her son Rodrigo had just turned twenty-one and had come back home for the summer to save money while he finished his degree. He was athletic, quiet, with his father’s square jaw and her dark eyes. When he laughed, which was rarely, two wrinkles appeared beside his mouth that Carmen had known all her life.

The first time they worked out together was on a Wednesday morning. Carmen suggested that he hold her ankles while she did crunches, because on her own her body drifted to the right and she ended up with a sore back. Rodrigo did it without thinking too much about it, kneeling at the end of the mat, his hands wrapping around his mother’s slim ankles.

The problem was the position. Carmen went up and down, and with each lift the fabric of her leggings tightened in a way that left Rodrigo nowhere to look. He chose the ceiling for twenty minutes. Every time he glanced down for an instant, he saw the bulge of his mother’s cunt marked beneath the Lycra, the seam sinking between her lips, and felt his cock begin to swell inside his shorts.

—Are you okay? —she asked at some point.

—Yeah —he said, his voice a tone lower than usual.

They finished without incident. Rodrigo went straight to the shower and jerked off under the hot spray thinking about the line of that seam, about the smell of sweat that had reached him when Carmen had sat up too close. He came against the tiles with a low grunt, and even so, that night, lying in bed with the fan turning overhead, he tried not to think. It didn’t work. He jerked off two more times before falling asleep, and both times the face he saw when he came was his mother’s.

***

The following Friday was worse.

Carmen suggested a new exercise: she would get on all fours and he had to hold her by the hips so she wouldn’t slide on the freshly waxed floor. She explained it with complete naturalness, as if it were the kind of thing mothers and sons do without it meaning anything.

—I just need you to anchor me —she said—. Otherwise I slip on every rep and it’s useless.

Rodrigo put his hands on his mother’s hips. He felt the heat of her skin beneath the hem of the short top she wore, the soft curve over her waist, the firmness of those hips that left no room for ambiguity.

—Hold tighter —Carmen asked—. I’m still moving.

He squeezed. Carmen started the reps. It was a rocking motion, forward and back, with a steady rhythm that Rodrigo managed for thirty seconds before his body made its own decisions. On the fourth return, Carmen’s ass brushed the front of his pants. On the fifth, the cleft of her ass pressed against his already hard cock, and Rodrigo felt the fabric of his shorts sink between those two wide, firm cheeks as if that gap were claiming him.

Rodrigo pulled away sharply.

—What’s wrong? —she asked without turning around.

—Nothing. Go on.

But he didn’t keep the same position. He placed his hands from a slightly more lateral angle, endured the rest of the set, and when Carmen said enough he stood up before she could see his face —or the erection straining his pants and not going down.

They separated without looking at each other.

She’s your mother, Rodrigo told himself as he took the stairs two at a time. You’re twenty-one and you’re thinking about your mother as if she weren’t.

But thoughts don’t obey when you tell them to stop. As soon as he closed his bedroom door he pulled his shorts down, grabbed his dripping cock, and stroked himself imagining Carmen’s ass flattened against his shaft, no fabric now, her pushing back to drive it into herself. He came over his own stomach in less than a minute, his teeth clenched so he wouldn’t groan the name burning on his tongue.

***

That afternoon, Rodrigo went down to the laundry room to drop off his workout clothes. He tossed the T-shirt into the basket and saw something he wasn’t looking for.

A triangle of green fabric sticking out from the pile of clothes. Unmistakable.

He stood still for ten seconds. Then he reached into the basket and slowly pulled out the garment, as if moving slowly would make it less real. It was a small green lace panty, one of the ones Carmen wore under her training leggings. Still warm. He turned it in his fingers and found the bottom seam damp, with a pale stain where his mother’s cunt had rested all morning. He brought the fabric to his face without thinking and inhaled deeply. The smell went from his nose to the pit of his stomach like a cable.

He put it back in the basket.

He went up to his room.

He came back down.

He took it out again.

Just this once, he thought. Just to get this out of my head. No one has to know.

He tucked it under his T-shirt and went upstairs. In his room, he stripped from the waist down, sat on the edge of the bed with the green panty pressed against his nose, and grabbed his already rock-hard cock. He sucked the fabric from the inside, searched for the dampest spot with his tongue, the taste a little salty, a little sour, unmistakably his mother’s cunt. He jerked himself slowly at first, up and down, squeezing the head with his thumb, then faster, with the panty wrapping around the tip. When he came, he did it into the green lace, blasting two, three, four thick spurts of semen that soaked the fabric and stained his fingers. What he did took less than five minutes, but the relief he expected didn’t come. In its place was something darker, quieter, harder to name.

He rolled up the sodden panty and hid it behind the washing machine that very night, when the house was asleep.

***

The next training day was Monday. Carmen suggested crossover crunches: she on the floor, him standing, holding her feet while she lifted them in sets of twenty.

Rodrigo looked at the ceiling. He looked at the wall. He looked at anything but the figure of his mother lying on her back in front of him, her arms reaching toward his ankles, raising and lowering her legs with a regularity that was almost unbearable to him. Every time she lifted her legs the leggings sank between the lips of her cunt, marking a perfect slit, and on the way down her breasts moved beneath the top like two weights begging for hands.

But the body makes its own decisions. After three minutes, Rodrigo had to readjust his pants without her noticing. His cock was pressing painfully against the fabric, a thick bulge he had no way to hide.

After five minutes, Carmen looked up from the floor. She lowered her gaze to her son’s shorts. She lifted it again to his face.

She said nothing. She kept doing the exercise. But the rhythm changed ever so slightly, as if something in her had registered something she didn’t want to process. And with the changed rhythm came, too, a slow flush climbing from her neck to her cheeks, and her breathing a touch deeper than the crunches required.

—That’s enough —she said when the set ended.

They stood up. Rodrigo went to the bathroom before she could look directly at him. He locked the door, pulled down his pants, and came into the sink in four dry tugs, unable to close his eyes because the moment he did he saw Carmen down there again, looking at his marked cock.

***

That same afternoon, Carmen looked in the closet for a pair of mauve panties she hadn’t been able to find for days. She searched twice. Checked the laundry. They didn’t turn up.

They must be in the basket, she thought. I’ll check tomorrow.

The next day she checked the basket. They still weren’t there.

She frowned and moved on to the next thought, because some suspicions are too big to fit in the mind all at once.

That night, in bed, Carmen found her hand under her nightgown without quite knowing when she’d put it there. Her fingers found a wet cunt, already swollen, the lips hot. She rubbed them slowly, ashamed at first and then less so, and when she came biting the pillow the face that came to mind was not her dead husband’s. It was Rodrigo’s, looking down at her during the crunches, with his cock imprinting his pants.

She fell asleep crying softly, not knowing whether from shame or something else.

***

Another week passed with more exercises, more inevitable contact, and more carefully staged distance between them. An excessive politeness that said everything without saying anything.

—Thanks for helping me, Rodrigo.

—No problem, Mom.

But their hands kept finding the same points of contact, and Carmen kept going down to the laundry room to leave the clothes before showering, and Rodrigo kept going down afterward.

The basket slowly emptied its collection of garments. Rodrigo filled it with another kind of weight.

***

The discovery happened by accident on a Thursday afternoon.

Carmen threw the dirty clothes from across the room, as she sometimes did when she was in a hurry, and the pile landed behind the washing machine. When she went to retrieve it, she saw she wasn’t the only laundry back there.

She pulled everything out. Counted three items she hadn’t thrown there herself. She recognized them at once: the green lace panty, a pair of blue cotton panties, and the mauve ones she’d been looking for for two weeks.

All three were balled up tight. All three were stiff, with dry crusts of semen that could be nothing else. The green one had a huge yellowish stain in the crotch, the blue ones were rigid in front, the mauves still carried the sour smell of old semen no matter how many times the washer had gone over them.

Carmen took a long time to move. Then she went upstairs with the three items in her hand, knocked on Rodrigo’s bedroom door, and waited.

—Come in.

He was in a towel, fresh out of the shower. When he saw what she was holding, the color drained from his face at once.

—Rodrigo. I need you to explain this to me.

***

—Mom, I....

—Don’t start with “I” if you don’t know how you’re going to finish the sentence.

—I’m sorry —he said—. I don’t know how to explain it. I shouldn’t have done it.

—What exactly is it that you shouldn’t have done? I want to hear it.

Rodrigo swallowed.

—I stole your panties. I jerked off with them. I came on them.

Carmen closed her eyes for a moment. It wasn’t anger she felt, though that would have been simpler. It was something else: a tug low in her belly that shouldn’t have been there, an absurd heat between her thighs telling her that for weeks her body had been waiting to hear exactly those words.

—Why mine?

—Because... —Rodrigo took time to find the words—. Because you’re the most beautiful woman I know. I know I shouldn’t think that. I know I’m wrong. But I can’t control what I feel since we started working out together.

The silence that followed was long. Carmen didn’t break it.

—There are girls your age, Rodrigo.

—I know. But they’re not you.

Carmen exhaled slowly. She set the three items down on the dresser beside the door.

—This isn’t going to happen again —she said, though she wasn’t sure whether she was saying it to him or to herself.

—No. It won’t happen again. I swear.

—Besides —Carmen went on, and her voice dropped a notch—, if you have those kinds of needs, I can give you money. So you can go with someone your age.

Rodrigo looked at her for a moment.

—Can I ask you something?

—Depends.

—Have you never felt anything during the exercises? Nothing at all?

The silence that followed lasted too long to mean no.

Carmen looked at her son. Twenty-one years old, towel at his waist, her own dark eyes looking back at her from a face that wasn’t hers. And beneath the towel, a bulge growing visibly, one Carmen hadn’t stopped glancing at since she entered the room.

—Rodrigo —she said at last—, don’t do this to me.

—I just want to know.

—I’ve been alone for three years —Carmen said, almost in a whisper—. Since your father died, there’s been no one else. So yes: my body reacts. My cunt gets wet when you put your hands on my hips. That’s it. Happy? But that doesn’t mean anything.

—Are you sure about that?

She wasn’t. And they both knew it.

***

Rodrigo took a step toward her.

Carmen didn’t move back.

—This can’t happen —she said.

—I know.

—And yet you’re taking a step toward me.

—And you’re not moving.

Carmen looked at her son for several seconds. Three years of silence in an empty bed. The exact heat of his hands on her hips every morning. The weight of what she hadn’t wanted to name.

—Just once —she said, and her own voice sounded like someone else’s—. This does not happen again. Understood?

—Understood.

—And we don’t talk about it afterward.

—Okay.

Carmen closed the bedroom door and turned the lock.

***

Rodrigo kissed her without hurry, his hands on her face, as if he’d been practicing this moment in his head for weeks. It was possible that he had. He opened her mouth with his tongue and she sucked it slowly, biting his lower lip, tasting him as if she needed to make sure it was him.

Carmen responded. She couldn’t not. She ran one hand down his chest, followed the flat stomach, and grabbed the bulge under the towel without hesitation. Her son’s cock was thick, more than she had imagined, and filled her entire hand. She squeezed it through the fabric and felt it throb against her fingers.

—Fuck, Mom —he gasped.

—Shut up.

His towel fell to the floor. Hers followed a moment later. Rodrigo looked her over without hiding it, as if he wanted to keep every detail. He looked at her big breasts, a little sagged by the years, their dark nipples already hard; he looked at her soft belly, the dark patch of trimmed hair between her thighs, and Carmen felt that gaze take three years off her.

—Stop —she said.

—I’m not doing anything.

—Exactly. Stop looking at me like that, you’re making me nervous.

—Nervous good or nervous bad?

Carmen didn’t answer. She knelt in front of him without thinking too much about it, grabbed his cock with both hands, and took it into her mouth in one motion, as deep as it would go, with a need that had been tightening in her chest for three years. Rodrigo let out a hoarse moan and buried his fingers in her hair.

—Mom... fuck...

Carmen sucked him without haste, both hands at the base and her tongue curling around the head. She licked his balls, worked up the shaft with a flat tongue, took him back to the throat and held there for a few seconds, eyes watering, until she had to pull away coughing a little. Then she went back down. Her son’s cock gleamed with saliva, thick, throbbing against her cheek when she took it out.

—I’m going to come if you keep going —Rodrigo whispered.

She pulled him from her mouth with a wet pop and stood up.

—Not yet.

She gently pushed him back onto the bed and climbed on top, straddling him. She took her son’s cock in one hand, rubbed it against her soaked cunt lips, up and down, searching for the angle. When she felt him inside her for the first time, she closed her eyes and stayed completely still for a second. Three years, she thought. Three years without this. Her cunt opened slowly around that thick cock, felt it reach all the way in, to a place no one had touched in far too long, and a long moan escaped her that she couldn’t control.

She started moving slowly. She rose until only the tip remained inside and then dropped down hard, seating herself all the way onto her son’s shaft, her ass hitting his thighs. Rodrigo gripped her hips with both hands, the same pressure as during their exercises every morning, but now with no possible ambiguity. Carmen braced her hands on his chest and sped up. He lifted his hips to meet her, thrusting from below every time she came down, and the wet sound of flesh colliding filled the room.

—Mom —he said, voice broken—, you’re so tight...

—Shut up —she replied without stopping—. Suck my tits. Now.

Rodrigo half-sat up and caught one nipple in his mouth, tugging it with his teeth, sucking it until Carmen threw her head back and a little “oh God” escaped her. He moved to the other, bit, sucked, and with one hand squeezed the other breast until she moaned louder.

What followed was not gentle. Rodrigo turned her over, put her face down on the mattress, and kept going from behind, his hands gripping the hips he’d held every morning while pretending they meant nothing. He spread her ass with his thumbs, spit into his hand to slick his cock, and drove into her with one hard thrust that tore a muffled cry from Carmen against the pillow.

—Like that —she gasped—, like that, you son of a bitch, harder...

Rodrigo started fucking her without mercy, his hips slamming against that wide, firm ass that had obsessed him for the past weeks. Every thrust made the flesh jolt, every pullback showed the cock shining with slick, every plunge back in tore another moan from his mother. Carmen buried her face in the pillow and let out everything she’d been holding in for weeks, biting the back of her hand so she wouldn’t wake the whole house with her screams.

—Tell me I’m yours —he said, voice broken above her, sweating.

—No.

—Say it.

—I’m yours, fuck, I’m yours, don’t stop...

He reached around her, found her clit with two fingers, and rubbed it in quick circles while he kept thrusting from behind. Carmen felt the current climb her spine like a lash. She clutched the sheets, clenched her teeth, and came first, with a muffled sound she bit down into the back of her hand so it wouldn’t fully break free. Her cunt closed in spasms around her son’s cock, squeezing it, milking it.

Rodrigo held out for three more thrusts and lost control.

—Mom, I’m coming —he gasped—, where...?

—Inside —she said without thinking—, come inside, son, inside...

He came seconds later, his fingers dug into her waist and his forehead resting between her shoulder blades, blasting hot spurts after hot spurts into the depths of his mother’s cunt. Carmen felt every pulse of that cock emptying inside her and a second moan slipped out of her, smaller, almost like surrender.

They stayed still. Rodrigo’s cock still inside, still hard, still throbbing. Semen began to slide down Carmen’s thighs when he finally withdrew slowly, and she felt the warm stream trickling to her knee, too weak to wipe it away.

The room’s silence was different now. Heavier. More real. It smelled of sex, of sweat, of mother and son mixed in the sheets.

***

Carmen dressed without saying a word. She picked up the towel from the floor, wrapped it around her body, and opened the door.

—Tomorrow we continue with the exercises as usual —she said from the threshold, without turning around.

—Okay —said Rodrigo.

Carmen stepped out into the hall and closed the door carefully. She went downstairs with one hand on the banister, thinking about the order of things and the exact point in that order that had just broken forever. She could still feel her son’s come sliding inside her thigh, warm, obscene, impossible to undo.

She reached no conclusion.

But when she got to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror, what she saw on her face was not guilt. It was something harder to handle than that.