What My Twin Saw That Morning

My name is Camila and I have a twin. His name is Mateo, and since we were born we shared a cradle, a room, and, for years, a wooden bunk bed my father built himself in the back bedroom. I slept below, he above. I in a nightgown that reached my thighs, he in briefs. We never thought twice about it: we were siblings, and between siblings those things stop being strange very quickly.

We turned eighteen the winter before the story I’m going to tell. By then we were already almost adults in body, though we still behaved like kids when we were alone. Mateo was thin, tall, with that endearing awkwardness of boys who grew all at once. I still hadn’t quite accepted that the mirror was giving me back a woman’s hips.

The baptism was on a Saturday in May, in a banquet hall three blocks from home. My parents had spent days organizing everything with their usual godparents, and we shared a table with two married couples who were friends of the family, and with Marta and Eduardo, Andrés’s parents. We had known Andrés since kindergarten. We called him cousin because our parents called each other compadres, but by blood we weren’t related at all.

I grew up with Andrés. And I kissed Andrés for the first time when I was eleven, behind the stage at the school fair. At that fair we also played at getting married, with a plastic ring and promises of things neither of us understood. After that came afternoons of clumsy groping on the sofa at his house, tongue kisses without knowing what to do with the tongue, hands slipping under a polo shirt and then going still, frightened of themselves.

Mateo knew. Mateo always knew. He was our accomplice, our cover. If Andrés came over for any excuse at all, Mateo would invent a game on the console to leave us alone in the kitchen for ten minutes. He didn’t ask for explanations. He was that kind of brother.

The baptism ran long. It started at noon and by seven in the evening Marta, Andrés’s mother, was already loose-tongued and suggesting the party should continue somewhere else. My father, also with several drinks in him, raised a hand and offered our house. It was three blocks away, he said; there wasn’t much to lose.

“Let’s go,” Marta said, grabbing her purse with the clumsy air of someone still refusing to admit she’d had too much.

At home the party picked up right away. My mother put on old boleros, someone opened a bottle of fernet, another a whiskey that had been saved for a special occasion. Marta started laughing very loudly and leaning on her husband’s shoulder. An hour later she was bent over the guest bathroom toilet and my mother was holding her hair back.

“Nobody’s leaving tonight,” my mother declared when she came out of the bathroom.

Between her and the wife of one of the friends, they took Marta to the downstairs guest room. They laid her down fully dressed and opened a window. Then they set up the sofa bed for Andrés, who would have to sleep there, beside his sleeping mother.

It was two in the morning when the friends started saying goodbye. Left in the living room were my father, Eduardo, and a bachelor friend of the family we called Uncle Ramón. My mother, exhausted, said she was going to sleep and gave Mateo and me that look that said, you too.

The three of us went upstairs. On the landing we said goodnight: to the left, my parents’ bedroom; to the right, ours, with the bathroom and the stairwell opening dividing us like a border. Andrés stayed downstairs, on the sofa bed, waiting for someone to lend him something to sleep in.

I took off the dress I’d worn to the baptism, the bra too, and threw them in the laundry basket. I put on an old nightgown that barely covered my thighs and slipped under the sheets. Mateo did what he always did: he took off his jacket, shirt, and trousers without looking, tossed them in the basket, and climbed into the top bunk in his white briefs.

“You turn it off,” he said, already yawning.

I switched off the bedside lamp and closed my eyes. I thought of Andrés. I thought of the moment at dinner when he’d looked at me over the rim of his glass and smiled slowly, as if he were keeping a secret.

Fifteen minutes later someone knocked on the door. Three soft taps, two quick ones. The code Andrés and Mateo had invented when they were twelve to get into the bedroom without our parents getting mad.

“Come in,” I said, and my voice came out more awake than I’d expected.

Andrés came in barefoot, still wearing the gray suit, tie loosened, with an apologetic smile.

“I came to see if Mateo would lend me pajamas,” he whispered. “I’m cold on the sofa.”

I switched the lamp back on. The yellow light lit half the room. From the top bunk, Mateo stuck his head out, eyes narrowed with sleep.

“Bro, sleep in your briefs, I don’t wear pajamas,” he muttered, and dropped back onto his pillow.

Andrés chuckled under his breath and went over to the bunk to insist. Mateo, annoyed, threw off the covers and hopped down. He stood in the middle of the room in white briefs, arms folded across his skinny chest.

“Look at me,” he said. “I don’t have any. It’s been like this since I was twelve, don’t come at me like you don’t know.”

But he still rummaged through the wardrobe and found him an old pair of soccer shorts. Andrés took them, laughing, and when he saw Mateo climbing back up to the bunk, he gave him a pat on the ass.

“Thanks, brother,” he said.

Mateo grumbled something and got under the blankets. Andrés, instead of leaving, sat on the edge of my bed. The mattress sank under his weight. His knee brushed mine through the sheet.

“Are you going to sleep already or can we talk a bit?” he asked quietly.

I felt the blood rush to my face. I told him yes, just for a little while. We started talking about anything and everything, the baptism, the priest, the cake that was dry. We held hands under the sheet, like when we were fifteen and still didn’t dare do more. And then suddenly, without my knowing how, we were kissing.

“Andrés,” I murmured, pulling back a little, “Mateo is here.”

“He’s asleep,” he said, and kissed my neck. “Turn off the light.”

I reached over and switched off the lamp. The room fell into a blue half-dark, lit only by the streetlight filtering through the shutters. I felt, before I saw, Andrés’s hand sliding up my thigh. He kissed me again, slower, and his mouth moved down to my collarbone. I stopped breathing.

He pulled my nightgown up slowly, as if every inch of fabric were a decision. When his fingers brushed my breasts, a sound slipped out of me that I had to smother against the pillow. I thought of Mateo, a yard and a half above us. I wanted to believe he was asleep. I didn’t dare look.

Andrés kept going. He took the nightgown off me completely and let it fall to the floor. Then my panties. I was left naked in the lower bunk, with his gray suit brushing my skin every time he moved. That turned me on even more: me naked, him dressed as he’d been at the party, with his white shirt clinging to his chest.

He moved down my body. He kissed my breasts, first one, then the other, and my nipples got so hard they hurt. Then he went lower. When his tongue touched me between my legs for the first time, I had to bite the back of my hand not to cry out.

No one had ever done that to me. I hadn’t even dared to imagine it fully. Andrés’s tongue moved slowly, in circles, and every so often it paused over my clit with just the right pressure, making my hips lift. I grabbed his hair with one hand and covered my mouth with the other.

And then I heard it. A slight creak from the top bunk. Mateo had moved. He turned onto his side. I didn’t know if he was asleep or not. I didn’t want to know.

Andrés kept going. He spread my legs a little wider, lifted them, and his tongue moved toward a place no one had ever touched before. He made slow circles, with a patience I didn’t know he possessed. I dug my teeth into my lip so I wouldn’t moan out loud. One of his hands slid up and rested on my belly, pressing, as if to hold me against the world.

He started using his fingers. First one, then two. And all the while, his tongue never stopped. I felt something gathering at the base of my spine, a heat that wasn’t heat, a need. My hips moved of their own accord. The bed creaked. The top bunk no longer creaked: Mateo was still, too still.

***

When I started to come I couldn’t control it. It was like falling from something very high. I clamped my legs around Andrés’s head, grabbed his hair with both hands, and let out a long moan that the pillow didn’t quite manage to muffle. My whole body shook. I felt something slip out between my legs and soak the sheet. It was my first orgasm. I hadn’t known the body could do that.

When I opened my eyes again, light was already beginning to come in through the window. The gray dawn outlined Andrés’s head between my thighs. I sat up as best I could. My hair was stuck to my forehead, my back wet, my legs trembling. I looked toward the top bunk.

Mateo was lying on his back, eyes closed, too still to be sleeping. I knew it then: he had seen everything. Every minute.

I said nothing. Andrés didn’t either. He handed me a towel he’d taken from the chair and helped me sit on the edge of the bed. I was still shaking. My skin was covered in goosebumps and my heart was pounding in my throat. He handed me the bundled-up nightgown and my panties, but both garments were ruined, wet, transparent.

Downstairs, on the first floor, the music cut off abruptly. Marta’s voice could be heard, still thick but now awake, asking where her son was. Eduardo’s voice, calmer, answering that he was coming down. Footsteps in the landing.

“In the closet, get in the closet,” Andrés murmured, panicking now.

Mateo jumped down from the bunk. He moved fast, as if he’d been waiting for this to happen for hours. In less than three minutes we pulled off the wet sheets and shoved them under the bed, opened the window wide, and Mateo threw me a pair of his pajamas, plaid pants and a white T-shirt. I got into the closet clutching the clothes to my chest and closed the door from the inside.

Andrés lay down in my bed, pulled the blanket over his head, and tried to breathe slowly. Mateo climbed back into the top bunk and pretended to be asleep. This time for real, I suppose.

The bedroom door opened just as I finished buttoning my pants in the darkness of the closet. I heard Marta’s footsteps approaching the lower bed.

“Andrés, get up!” she said, whispering loudly. “How can you sleep in a young lady’s room?”

Mateo poked his head out from above, still in his white briefs, hair standing on end.

“Camila slept with Mom,” he said, with a calm I didn’t know he had. “It’s just the two of us guys here. Want to wake her?”

Marta hesitated. She stood in the middle of the room, looking at the lumps in both beds. Andrés sat up slowly, pretending to have just woken, his hair stuck to his forehead for a very different reason than the one she imagined.

“Mom,” he said, his voice hoarse, “respect Mateo’s room. He lent me a place to sleep and now you’re coming in here yelling. We’re both in our underwear; let us get dressed.”

Marta opened her mouth, closed it, and apologized. She gave Andrés seven minutes to come downstairs and left, closing the door carefully behind her.

I stayed in the closet one minute longer, listening. When I came out, Mateo was already standing in the middle of the room, staring at the floor. Andrés was getting dressed in silence. I sat on the edge of the mattress without looking at either of them.

Mateo raised his eyes. He looked at me for a second, then at Andrés, then back at the floor.

“Nothing happened,” he said, and went into the bathroom.

Andrés finished buttoning his jacket. Before leaving, he kissed me on the forehead without saying a word. He went down the stairs and I heard him say goodbye to my father in a voice that sounded completely normal.

I sat on the bed for a long time, listening to the water running in the bathroom. I knew Mateo was never going to talk about that night, and that that silent promise weighed more than any secret we’d shared before. I also knew that the next time Andrés came over, the three of us would pretend this had never happened, and that that fiction would make us accomplices to something none of us had asked to carry.

And yet, when I closed my eyes again on the pillow, I smiled. Not because of Andrés. Because of the feeling of being watched in silence, for hours, by someone who chose not to look away.