Uncle Niece

I went back to my room trembling, stood naked in front of the mirror, and let his memory guide every one of my fingers. I couldn’t stop until the end.

The creak of the mattress in her parents’ room was not sex: it was theft. Barefoot, Sabina followed it down the hall and pressed her eye to the crack in the door.

A little too much to drink and an empty apartment were enough for my sister-in-law’s daughter to stop being the little girl I remembered. What happened that night should not be told.

When I went into the bathroom I had no idea her mother was waiting for me, or that my niece would appear in the doorway with a smile that would change everything.

It had been eight years since I last saw her. She came back as a woman with one idea in mind: to provoke me until I gave in.

I told him yes, but he’d have to pay for me to leave the cantina and give me something too. And there I was, walking ahead of my uncle toward the hotel.

I went down to a remote Andean village to close a deal. That night I discovered why nobody there asked about kinship.

The first night I only wanted to look. By the third, I could no longer stop my hand. When she turned in the darkness and smiled at me, I knew I was lost.

For weeks I’d been pretending I wasn’t looking at him. That night, with two drinks too many and the house empty, I stopped pretending and went downstairs looking for him.

Since I was widowed, my nieces spoiled me and looked after me. That afternoon we were left alone by the pool, and I knew nothing between us would ever be the same again.

No one at the firm imagined what Lorena did during lunch break, two floors down, behind a door she always locked.

I went barefoot down to the bathroom and the half-open door let me see him in the shower. What happened that night on the living-room mattress was my first time with another man.

The key turned in the lock at the worst possible moment. Or the best. Dad didn’t even stop when my uncle appeared in the doorway and saw us.

We were lying there naked, still smelling like what we’d just done, when Sofía told me she had something to confess. Something about Elena. Something that would change how I saw her forever.

It was raining outside, and she was looking at me in a way no one in my family ever had before. I knew what she was about to ask, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to say no.

I found him on my bed with one of my panties in his hand and a wad of bills on the spread. What came next wasn’t about the money.

I went up to see the new apartment and toast with cava. I didn’t come down until the next morning, with her perfume still on my skin and a secret no one should know.

When I opened the door to my uncle that afternoon, no one else was home. What I confessed to him after that, on his sofa, I had never told anyone.