I Spied on My Brother with Our Cousin from the Window

My grandmother’s birthday was always a good excuse to go back to Querétaro. Three years had passed since my parents, my brother Diego, and I had moved to the capital, but Grandma’s house was still that refuge with its huge garden and the smell of wet earth that none of my friends ever understood when I tried to describe it.

I had just turned 19. I wasn’t a social girl; during family gatherings I preferred to take a corner of the couch and let the conversation pass me by. My mother called it shyness; I called it common sense. That night everything followed the usual script: too much food, too much wine, and the cousins laughing at jokes only they understood.

Diego, who is a year younger than I am, had spent the whole afternoon glued to our cousin Camila. Before we moved, they had been inseparable; when we left, they stayed in touch through messages and calls that lasted until late at night. I hadn’t given it any importance until that night.

“Aren’t you going to have dessert?” my grandmother asked when she saw me sitting on the couch with my phone in my hand.

“No, Grandma, I’m already full.”

“You’re too skinny, girl. You look like a candle.”

I smiled and let her kiss my forehead. From the dining room, Camila let out a little giggle at something Diego had whispered in her ear. His hand was resting on the back of her chair, not on her shoulder, but close, too close for my taste. I didn’t think anything of it. They were cousins. They had always been like that.

After midnight, the guests started to leave. Grandma told my parents and the uncles not to drive at night, that there were plenty of beds, couches, and blankets for everyone. There was a clumsy reshuffling of who would sleep where. I got the back bedroom, the one facing the backyard. Diego stayed in the room next door and Camila slept with her parents in the living room.

“Good night, little sister,” Diego said in the hallway, with that half-mocking smile he’d worn since he was fourteen.

“Night,” I replied, and closed the door.

I got into bed in the thinnest pajamas I had brought, a pair of old jeans I used for sleeping and a tank top. The room smelled like a stored-away quilt. I turned off the lamp and settled on my side, looking at the window. The curtains were drawn but not all the way; an orange strip of garden light slipped through between them.

I was starting to doze off when I heard the laughter.

It was low, muffled laughter, the kind people make when they know they shouldn’t be making noise. Then, a murmur of voices. I sat up in bed, my heart racing. The first thing I thought was burglars. The second, ridiculously, was ghosts. Grandma’s house had always had a reputation for being haunted among the grandchildren.

I got out of bed as quietly as I could and walked barefoot to the window. I parted the curtain just a couple of inches and pressed one eye to the opening. The patio was lit by the stake lights planted in the grass and by the yellow glow of the porch bulb. It took me a few seconds to find them.

They were sitting in one of the garden chairs, next to the round table where my grandmother put the potted plants. Diego and Camila. I felt immediate relief when I realized they weren’t burglars or ghosts. I was about to drop the curtain and go back to bed when I saw my brother lean in and kiss her on the mouth.

I froze, my hand still on the fabric.

It wasn’t a cousin’s kiss. It wasn’t a drunk kiss, a joke. It was a slow kiss, open-mouthed, with tongue. Camila slid her arms around his neck and moved closer, almost on top of him. Diego held her waist with one hand and ran the other up her back, beneath her blouse.

I felt heat rush to my face. A mix of shame, surprise, and something else I still didn’t know how to name.

They stood up from the chair. Camila looped her arms around his neck again while Diego slid his hand down her back to the curve of her ass, tightly fitted in very snug jeans. He lifted one of her legs with his left hand and hooked it around his hip. Camila let out a silent little laugh and bit his lower lip.

They were cousins. That was the only thing I could think during those first few seconds. They were cousins and they were kissing as if they weren’t, as if instead of blood they shared a long, well-kept secret.

***

Camila pulled away from him, bit her lip, held his gaze, and knelt down on the grass. She gathered her hair into an improvised ponytail with one hand while Diego unbuckled his belt. I gripped the curtain without even realizing it. I watched him let his pants and boxer briefs fall to his ankles. I saw my brother in a way I should never have seen him.

Camila took his cock in one hand and started moving it slowly, unhurriedly. Then she leaned in, stuck out her tongue, and ran it from the bottom up, slowly, like someone trying something new. Then she took him into her mouth.

I closed my eyes for a second. I wanted to stop looking. I wanted to go back to bed, bury myself under the blanket up to my head, and forget that image existed. But when I opened them again, all I did was pull the curtain farther apart to see them with both eyes instead of one.

My heart was pounding fast, just like before, but it wasn’t fear anymore. I knew it and didn’t want to know it. My breathing was ragged, and there was a strange tingling between my legs that tightened inside me every time Camila adjusted the rhythm of her mouth around my brother.

Diego stroked her hair. He whispered something I couldn’t hear. She looked up at him with a smile that left my mouth dry.

Then she stood up. She turned her back to Diego and pressed herself against him. My brother’s hands circled her torso, squeezed her breasts over her blouse, slid down over her belly. Camila moved away a little, unbuttoned her tight pants, and walked over to the garden table. She leaned forward, supported on her forearms, offering her ass to Diego as if she’d spent the whole night thinking about it.

Diego understood perfectly. He came up behind her, pulled her pants down to her knees, and revealed a pink lace panty that seemed to mock the idea that this had all been improvised. Then he pulled down her underwear too and knelt in the grass.

He bit her ass. He kissed it. He ran his tongue over it unhurriedly, parting her cheeks with his hands, burying his face between them. Camila brought a hand to her mouth, closed her eyes, bit the back of her thumb so she wouldn’t make a sound. I could see her face from my window: the face of someone about to lose control.

***

I couldn’t take it anymore.

I took my hand to my crotch and pressed over my jeans. I felt the fabric give back a dampness I couldn’t explain. I rubbed in circles, slowly at first, without taking my eyes off them. My body had decided for me. My mind protested somewhere in the corner, but the rest of me was already on the other side, watching through the curtain what my brother and my cousin were doing in Grandma’s backyard.

Diego stood up. He reached into the pocket of the pants around his ankles and pulled out a condom. He opened it with his teeth, rolled it down over his cock with one hand. Then he licked two fingers and stroked Camila’s sex patiently, as if he were preparing her.

He held her at the waist with one hand. With the other he lined himself up. And with one hard thrust he pushed inside her.

Camila covered her mouth with both hands. Diego started moving, slowly at first, then harder. The garden table shook a little. I stopped breathing for several seconds in a row.

I unbuttoned my pants with clumsy fingers. I slipped my hand under my underwear and found myself in a way I never had before: soaked, swollen, ready. I rubbed my clit with two fingers without really knowing what I was doing. Then, with some discomfort from the tight clothes, I managed to slide two fingers inside myself.

I moved to the rhythm of my brother. It was an idea I didn’t dare fully form, but it was there, dictating the beat. Every time Diego thrust into Camila, I thrust against my own hand. I bit the curtain so I wouldn’t make a sound.

***

Diego stopped suddenly. He stepped back. Camila sat up, turned halfway around, and knelt on the grass again, face lifted, as if she knew by heart what was coming next. Diego took the condom off in a hurry, gripped his cock with his hand, and started jerking off quickly in front of her.

I was still inside myself, fingers circling, pulse racing. I couldn’t stop watching.

Diego threw his head back and came all over Camila’s face. Long, abundant, almost white under the garden’s yellow light. She kept her mouth half open and her eyes closed, taking it with a small smile that told me everything I needed to know about how long they’d been doing this in secret.

I let go of the curtain as if it had burned me. I took two steps back, found the bed behind me, and let myself fall onto it. I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop.

With my free hand I grabbed one breast over my T-shirt. The other was still between my legs. I was hearing the sounds my own body made and they felt shameful and wonderful at the same time. I could feel the bed getting wet beneath me and I didn’t care.

Suddenly everything focused into a single point. An electric current shot up from the soles of my feet to the nape of my neck, my back arched on its own, and I exploded in something I had never felt before. Something warm came out of me in waves, beyond my control. I clenched my teeth so I wouldn’t scream. My hips moved on their own. My underwear, my pants, the sheet, everything got wet.

It took me a long while to open my eyes.

***

When I did, I hugged myself. I pressed my arms over my breasts as if I needed to hold myself together inside my own skin. My face was hot, my eyes watery, my fingers sticky. I stayed like that for several minutes, breathing slowly, listening to the silence of the house.

In the end I sat up. I looked out the window again. The patio was empty. Only the two garden chairs remained slightly out of place, the only proof that I hadn’t imagined it.

I pulled my hand out of my clothes and wiped it on my T-shirt. My pants were soaked in front and, above all, in back, where I had been sitting on the bed. The sheet too. I spent a while thinking up the excuse I was going to invent at dawn.

As soon as the light started slipping through the window, I took off my pants, wrapped myself in a towel, gathered the sheet and blanket from the bed, and went down to the kitchen with everything in my arms. Grandma was already awake, making coffee.

“Girl, what happened?” she asked when she saw the sheets.

“I got up in the middle of the night for a glass of water and spilled it on myself. I’m so sorry, Grandma. I’ll hang them out myself.”

“Oh, my girl, you’re so clumsy. Go on, off you go.”

I went out to the patio with my clothes under my arm. The grass was still damp with dew. I passed by the table where my brother and my cousin had been hours earlier and noticed, on one of the supports, a fresh mud mark in the shape of a knee.

I spread out the sheet. Then the blanket. Then the pants. The sun was starting to warm my neck and I still didn’t really understand what had happened to me that night. I only knew one thing: I would no longer be able to look at Diego or Camila the way I had before. And that, however strange it was to admit, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.