The key that Carlos forgot

The key that Carlos forgot

The key weighed more than its size. Luis turned it into the lock of the fifth and entered Carlos’ floor as he crossed a border that should have remained closed. The smell of new wood and freshly ground coffee received it before her voice.

"You're right," Marina said from the threshold of the kitchen. "I just put the coffee maker in.

He wore a loose shirt of Carlos and cotton shorts. The hair collected in an imperfect bow exposed the neck and thin line of the collarbone. Luis looked away a second too late. He had been pretending for three years that he didn’t notice those things.

Carlos had asked for the favor with the naturalness of the one who trusts his brother in blood: the works of the bathroom and the kitchen were lengthened, he traveled to Bilbao all week for a contract closure, and Marina did not want to be left alone between the dust and the noise of the operators. «Stay you, uncle. You know the house better than I do». Luis had accepted without thinking twice. Now I thought all that was missing.

They sat on the large sofa, the one looking at the window of Paseo de la Castellana. She served him coffee with two sugars, exactly as he took it. He remembered. That disarmed him more than any friction.

"How long have you been here?" he asked, though he knew.

"Four and a half years. The wedding is in October," she replied, and smiled with that mixture of pride and tiredness that sometimes brings certainty. "Carlos says you are the only one who would leave the house and... well, to me.

Luis noticed the weight of the phrase. “To you. As if she were part of the inventory of trusts.”

They talked about safe nonsense: the traffic, the law firm where she worked, the game on Sunday. But under the words another current circulated. Every time Marina leaned to pick up a cup, the t-shirt tightened on her breasts and he felt the old tug in the groin, that desire he had filed the day Carlos presented it to her in a bar in Malasaña. “This is Marina. Beware, I keep it.” And Luis had laughed, he had given, he had kept his mouth shut and his hands still.

At night the sky fell down. The storm at the end of August unleashed that Madrid violence that did not warn. The water struck the crystals as if it wanted to enter. The light went out at eleven o’clock. Marina looked for candles in a drawer and placed them on the low table. The flame drew the profile and shadows under the cheekbones.

"Stay here tonight," she said suddenly. "The sofa is comfortable and... I don't feel like being alone with this noise.

Luis nodded. “There was no other possible answer that didn’t sound cowardly or hungry.

They went for sheets to the hallway closet. In the narrow space between the door and the shelf their bodies were rubbed from the front. She did not turn away immediately. Neither did he. The smell of her skin — neutral soap and something sweet under it — went up to her head like a long drink.

"Luis..." she began, and the voice barely shook her.

• Tell me.

"There are nights when I think about what would have happened if I had met you before him.

The silence that followed was denser than the darkness. Luis felt his heart hitting his ribs. He raised his hand and touched his cheek with his knuckles, slowly giving him time to reject it.

-Marina, this can't be... Carlos is...

"I know. I know too. That's why I'm telling you now, with the light cut off and he's four hundred kilometers away, because if I don't say it, I'll rot inside.

He closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them, she kept looking at him, her breath slit, her lips abated. There was no alcohol in between, just that raw honesty that sometimes comes with storms.

"If we take one more step," he murmured, "there is no clean reverse. I want you to know that. And I want to hear you say that you love him just like I do.

Marina swallowed saliva. “His hand went up to Luis’ chest, just above his heart, and pressed with open fingers.

"I love him. I want you to touch me. I want you to touch me. Here, now, knowing exactly what we do and who we betray.

"Yes," he replied, and the word snored. "I consent."

The first kiss was clumsy of so long contained. They bumped teeth, laughed for a nervous moment, and then her mouth opened with real hunger. Luis gently pushed her against the wall of the corridor. His hands lowered her back to the edge of the shorts and crept under, whole palm over the firm flesh of her ass. Marina gasped against her mouth and tangled her fingers in her hair.

They taunted her to the guest bedroom — neither hers nor Carlos’s, at least that residual dignity. Luis knocked her over the bed made of cold cotton sheets. She took off her shirt while she was freeing herself from his. The candle they had brought shivered on the bedside table and painted the shadows of gold.

She undressed Marina with deliberate slowness. Every garment that fell revealed a territory that she had stared at for years. The round breasts, the already hard nipples, the soft curve of the belly, the dark triangle between her legs. She knelt between her thighs and smelled it first, that hot dampness that already stained her outer lips. Then she licked her flat tongue, from the bottom up, stopping at the swollen clitoris. Marina arched her back and let loose a long, almost relieved moan.

• So... fuck, Luis, that's exactly it.

He sucked precisely, two fingers slowly going into the tight heat of his pussy. He felt it getting caught around his knuckles. The arousal threw him off his cock almost painfully; his pants still on pressed him. He pulled his fingers out when she started to tremble, unbuttoned and freed himself. Marina stared at him as he climbed over.

"I want to feel you inside," she said, plainly, shamelessly. "Entirely. No condom this time. I'm protected and... I trust. You?

He nodded, voice broken:

"I trust. And I will ask you again when we are in the moment. Tell me yes again.

• Yeah, put it in. I want your dick to the bottom.

Luis lined up and pushed. The entrance was slow, hot, obscenely perfect. Marina opened her mouth in a silent moan and clapped her nails in her shoulders. He sank inch by inch until the hip bones were touched. They stayed there for a second, breathing the same dense air, feeling the other's pulse where they were attached.

He began to move with deep and deliberate onslaughts. Each retreat left a shiny thread of lubrication; each entry started a wet sound and a moaning from it. Marina surrounded his waist with her legs and drew him closer, as if he wanted to merge the chest boxes. Luis bit his neck, the earlobe, his shoulder. He spoke under, in the ear:

"I've been imagining how you'd squeeze. How you'd groan my name. How your breasts would get when I jump when I fuck you harder.

She responded with her hip rising up to meet each attack.

Don't treat me like I'm gonna break up. I want to feel you tomorrow.

She changed her rhythm. She took it from her wrists and fixed it gently on her pillow, without forcing, checking with the look that she still wanted exactly that. Marina nodded and opened her legs more. The skin-to-skin sound filled the room along with the rain. The sweat joined their chest. Luis lowered her head and sucked her nipple as she pushed, feeling her pussy closed in waves closer and closer to orgasm.

"I run," she warned, the voice made a thread. "Luis... I run with you inside."

"Do it. I want you to feel it. I want you to squeeze me.

Marina’s orgasm was a long tremor that swept through her thighs, belly and throat. She screamed her name carelessly, without thinking of walls or neighbors. The rhythmic grip of her inner walls pushed Luis to the edge. She pulled out her dick in the last instant, knelt down on her belly and ran in hot jets over her breasts and abdomen, marking her with that thick whiteness as she groaned at the bottom, the name of Marina between teeth.

They collapsed together. He then wiped it with a t-shirt, slow kisses on the forehead, on the eyelids. None spoke of repentance yet. Only of the heat that was still beating between the bodies.

The next morning the light came back. They woke up tangled, naked, smelling of sex and a past storm. Marina sat on a elbow and looked at him without makeup, without defenses.

"This can't be a custom," she said, serene, adult. Carlos doesn't deserve it. I don't want to become the lie we tell every day either.

Luis caressed his hair. He noticed the weight of what was done and, at the same time, a strange clarity.

“It won’t be. It existed tonight. We look at each other, we ask permission, we cross it. And now we’re back to who we were... with one more truth inside. If the world ever turns another way, we’ll know how the other sounds when he says yes. Until then, we keep this here,” he touched her chest and then his.

Marina nodded. They dressed in complicit silence. They had black coffee and toast breakfast. When Luis went out onto the street with his suitcase and key still in his pocket, the August sun dried the asphalt. He looked up at the fifth, and smiled barely, without bitterness.

He had betrayed a little. He had honored another as much. And the body still reminded him, in every muscle, of the exact price and the exact reward of having crossed the line with his eyes open and his mouth full of his name.

The End