What I Heard at My Aunt’s House That Week

Some years ago, the summer I turned nineteen, my parents decided to remodel the house where I grew up. They were going to knock down two walls to enlarge the living room, and since I couldn’t stand the dust—my asthma still gave me trouble now and then—they sent me to spend a week at my aunt Adriana’s place. She lived alone in my grandparents’ old house, the one they had moved out of for Valencia a couple of years earlier.

Adriana was my mother’s younger sister. She was thirty-six and had never married. That didn’t mean she was alone. Different men passed through the house from time to time, some married, some not, and nobody in the family said a thing because she herself was the first to laugh whenever someone tried to lecture her. “I choose who I let in and who I don’t,” she would say. End of story.

She didn’t have a magazine body. She was broad at the waist, heavy-breasted, round-hipped. But there was something in the way she walked, in the way she bit the inside of her cheek when she was thinking, that made men stare at her in the supermarket line. I had seen it. I had envied her too, without really understanding what it was I was envying.

The first day I arrived with two suitcases and a bag full of books. Adriana was waiting for me with the table set—tomato pasta, red wine, an apple tart she had made that very morning—and that night we slept together in her bed, talking late into the night like when I was little and they used to let me stay over on weekends.

“Tomorrow you’ll have your own room,” she said with a laugh, fixing her hair. “Don’t want to scare my niece with my nighttime vices.”

I didn’t understand what she meant. Or I didn’t want to understand.

***

The second day she set up the bedroom that had belonged to my grandmother, at the end of the hallway. We had dinner early, watched television for a while, and at eleven she sent me to bed.

“I’m going to read a little longer,” she said, without looking me in the eye.

I fell asleep almost at once. I was tired from the trip. But at two in the morning a noise woke me that I couldn’t identify right away. It was a rhythmic, dull thumping against a wall. And between each thud, something else: a voice. My aunt’s voice.

“Yes. Yes. Yes. Harder, harder, fuck me, don’t stop.”

Each word more broken than the last, until it became something that wasn’t language anymore but a sound of the body. And between the moans, his voice, hoarse, filthy, answering her: “that’s it, bitch, that’s how you like it, huh?, squeeze my cock with that cunt.” I lay there motionless, staring at the ceiling, not daring to breathe. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what was happening—I’d known for a long time—but it was the first time I was hearing it live, without the filter of a movie or a file downloaded from the internet. It was real. It was her asking to be fucked harder, it was the bed scraping against the baseboard, it was the wet, obscene smack of two bodies slamming into each other without rest.

The thumping sped up, became brutal, until she let out a long cry, broken in three, and he growled something that sounded like “take it, take all my cum.” Then the thumping gave way. Her voice gave way. There was a long silence, a low laugh, a door closing. Then the house went still again.

I didn’t fall asleep. I stayed awake with my eyes open, feeling my heart in my ribs and a warm, thick wetness between my legs that I didn’t know what to do with, thinking about what face I’d make in the morning when I saw her drinking coffee.

***

The next morning I went downstairs to the kitchen expecting everything to feel awkward, but Adriana was there in her robe, her hair gathered up in a makeshift bun, pouring herself coffee as if nothing had happened.

“Sleep well?” she asked.

“Yes,” I lied.

She looked at me over the rim of her cup. She held my gaze a second longer than necessary. And smiled.

“Well,” she said. “If anything ever bothers you, let me know. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, but this is my house and I live my own way.”

I nodded. I couldn’t say anything else. I looked down at my toast and wondered whether what I had heard had really happened, whether she knew I had heard it, whether that look held for one second too long meant what I thought it meant.

That same afternoon I went to my parents’ house to get more clothes, and my mother asked me how my sister’s house was. I told her everything was fine. My mother nodded with that smile of someone who has known her sister for more than three decades and knows perfectly well the kind of life she leads.

“Your aunt is fun, isn’t she?” she said, not pretending to be surprised.

“Yes,” I said again. “She’s fun.”

***

The third night was different. This time they didn’t wait until dawn. As soon as I turned off the light in my room, I started hearing footsteps in the hallway, voices, a man’s laugh I had never heard before. And then, the unmistakable murmur of water running in the big bathroom.

I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t. I tossed and turned for a long while until the need to pee forced me to get up. I timed it in my head. I thought maybe they’d already locked themselves in the bedroom.

I went out barefoot, with the phone flashlight covered by my palm, and tiptoed down the hall. And there, right beside the bathroom door, I ran into her.

Adriana was standing in the doorway in a short, almost transparent nightgown, burgundy-colored. Underneath, her dark, thick nipples stood out, and the shadow of the triangle between her legs. Thigh-high stockings. High heels. She had her hair down, her lips painted, her eyes lined with a precision I had only ever seen on important occasions. She didn’t cover herself. She didn’t step back. She looked at me the way someone looks when they know exactly who they are and what they’re doing.

“Going to the bathroom?” she asked calmly.

“Yes,” I muttered.

She moved aside to let me pass. As I brushed against her, I smelled her perfume, and something else: the warm smell of sex, saliva, and used skin. When I came out, she was gone. Her bedroom door at the end of the hall was barely ajar, and a faint yellow light was coming from inside.

I went back to bed. I pulled the covers up to my nose. Closed my eyes. And then the blows against the wall started.

This time I heard them differently. Maybe because I already knew what she was wearing, or because the image of burgundy and heels had burned itself into my retina, but the thuds and the “yes”es and the moans no longer scared me. Now I heard every detail: the creak of the bed frame, the sharp slap of a hand against a buttock, his “suck my cock all over, don’t leave anything” and her “like that, give it to me all, all the way to the bottom.” I heard Adriana’s voice suddenly choke, as if gagged, and I guessed—because the sound changed, became wet, hungry—that he had put it in her mouth. I heard that obscene slurping for minutes, broken up by his “that’s it, swallow it all, bitch,” until she pulled away with a long gasp and said, almost laughing, “come on, fuck me already, I can’t take it anymore, my cunt is dripping.”

Something in me, something I still didn’t know how to name, started to move. A warm pressure low in my belly. A breath that kept catching on its own. I felt my nipples harden against the fabric of the nightgown, felt the wetness from earlier return, thicker now, soaking through my panties.

I pressed my legs together. I squeezed my eyes shut. I didn’t touch myself. I didn’t dare. But I stayed there listening to everything until the end: the bed hitting the wall again, now in a savage rhythm, his “I’m going to fill you up,” her “inside, leave it all inside me,” and that final cry, sharp and broken, as Adriana came without caring whether I heard her.

***

The fourth day was the worst. Or the best, depending on how you look at it.

That afternoon my aunt told me she was expecting company and that she’d rather we not run into each other so nobody would feel uncomfortable. She prepared dinner on a tray, left it in my room, and asked me not to come out until the next morning.

“Did something happen?” I asked.

“What happened is that you’re a woman now,” she answered. “And I don’t want to play dumb in front of you.”

I didn’t know what to say. I stayed in my room, ate, read two chapters of the novel I had brought, tried to sleep.

Around one in the morning I heard the front door open and close. Then a man’s voice in the hallway—deep, calm, a voice used to giving instructions. Then her laughter, that low laugh I had never heard from her around the family.

I sat up in bed. Stayed perched on the edge, listening. I’m not going out. I’m not going out. I repeated it to myself three times.

I went out.

My room was next to the main hallway. If I opened the door just a crack and stayed there, I could see all the way to the end of the corridor, to Adriana’s room, whose door that night was half open. The bedside lamp was on. A warm light that reached all the way to my bare feet.

I peeked in. Just for a second. That’s what I told myself.

What I saw left me speechless. Adriana was sitting on the edge of the bed, in the same burgundy nightgown as the night before, completely focused on her cell phone. In front of her, a man in his forties, tall, broad-shouldered, was posed against the headboard as if for a magazine photo. He was naked. Completely naked. And she was taking pictures of him.

It was the first time in my life I had ever seen a man like that, with nothing on, without the filter of a screen. Brown skin, a chest with a little hair in the center, an abdomen marked by hours of something—gym, physical work, I don’t know—and a hard cock, thick, dark at the tip, resting against his lower belly, veins running swollen along the shaft and heavy balls hanging between his spread thighs. Adriana shifted the camera angle, asked him to turn, asked him to change his hand, to grip his cock from the base and show it to the lens. “Like that, higher up, show it to me all.” The man obeyed. He ran his fist slowly up and down the shaft, and a thick drop appeared at the tip each time she snapped the picture.

Then I saw her put the phone down. I saw her kneel on the rug between the man’s legs and take his cock in both hands, tiny beside that thick thing. She ran her tongue from his balls to the tip, one long lick, and he dropped his head back. “Go on, suck me off all the way, that’s what you brought me here for.” Adriana laughed with her mouth full, opened wider, and took him in one gulp until she gagged and tears sprang to her eyes through the mascara. I heard the noise—that wet, dirty noise of a forced throat—with a clarity that made my knees tremble. She bobbed her head up and down without stopping, both hands clenched around the base, and every so often she pulled back to spit on it and then take it all the way in again. Saliva ran down her chin, down the tits that had spilled out of the nightgown, heavy and full, with the brown nipples pointing downward.

I backed away without breathing. I closed my bedroom door carefully so as not to make a sound. I slipped under the sheets and lay there trembling, not sure whether it was from shame, arousal, or both at once.

That night, when the thumping and the moaning started, I was no longer an intruder in the noise. I already had the images. I knew exactly what was happening on the other side of the wall: his cock going in and out of my aunt’s cunt, his balls slapping against her ass, the man’s hand gripping her hair. For the first time, before falling asleep, my hand slid down under my nightgown, slipped inside my panties, and stayed there. I found everything soaked, the flesh swollen, the clit pulsing like a beat separate from my own.

I started moving with two fingers, in slow circles at first, faster after that. I slid my middle finger inside and felt my cunt tighten around it on its own, felt it dripping against my palm. On the other side of the wall, Adriana was screaming “deeper, deeper, break me open,” and I, without even realizing it, moved my hand to the same rhythm. I pulled my nightgown up to my neck, grabbed one breast with my other hand, pinched the nipple until it hurt. I could hear the dry slaps against her skin, the man’s “take it, take it,” and I felt everything gathering low in my belly, a hot knot growing and growing.

I didn’t need long. Three minutes, maybe less. When it hit, I bit the back of my other hand to keep from making a sound, arched my back against the mattress, and came with my fingers inside me, feeling my cunt clench in spasms around them. It was long, it was filthy, it was unlike anything I’d ever done before in my room at my parents’ house. When it was over, I realized that all that time I had been following the rhythm of the blows against the wall. Hers. His. Mine. I kept my hand there, soaked, until the noise on the other side also faded, and from the other room there came one last hoarse groan from him, a “I’m coming, I’m coming inside” that sent one more, smaller, delayed shiver through me, like an aftershock.

***

We didn’t talk about it on the last day. Adriana made me breakfast as usual, asked about university, took me to the supermarket, helped me fold my clothes before I put them in the bag. When my parents came to pick me up, she hugged me hard and whispered in my ear:

“Come back whenever you want.”

I nodded without looking her in the eye. I was afraid that, if I looked straight at her, she’d read it on my face.

In the car, while my mother drove and my father dozed in the passenger seat, I looked out the window and understood that that week had changed something in me that I would never be able to change back. It wasn’t just that I had seen a naked man for the first time. It wasn’t just that I had listened to my aunt moan against the wall for four nights in a row, or that I had seen her on her knees sucking a cock with her mouth full of saliva. It was that something inside me—something that had been waiting, crouched and hidden, for a long time—had switched on without asking my permission.

Years passed. Adriana changed partners several times, one of them for almost a year, the others for less. I moved out on my own, finished school, had my own stories, my own nights with thin walls and voices that weren’t mine, my own men kneeling between my legs and my own mornings with semen still running down my thighs. But even now, sometimes, when I’m with someone and the room goes dark, I go back to that week. I go back to the hall of the old house, to the burgundy nightgown, to the man propped against the headboard with his hard cock waiting for her to look at him.

And I go back, above all, to the woman I learned to be by watching, listening, touching myself in silence on the other side of a wall, not yet knowing I was learning.