My Childhood Friend Waited for Me Twenty Years

Her name was Lucía, Lu. We shared a desk for the six years of primary school at the neighborhood school. She was freckled, short, with green eyes that seemed too big for her face and breasts that appeared before any other girl in the class. She loved me more than I was able to love her back, and that happens sometimes; it has happened to me in other corners of my life too, not just with her.

I lost track of her when eighth grade ended and didn’t hear anything about her for years. Back then I was living with a girl from the neighborhood who, on one of our first dates, had told me without any filter and as if it were nothing that she had slept with a female friend and the friend’s boyfriend and that it had ended up in something even more tangled, with him on his knees watching as she ate the other girl’s cunt while she jerked him off, and the two of them laughing at the hungry-dog look he was left with. I told myself that story twenty times in my head, always with a hard cock, before I kissed her for the first time.

We’d been dragging ourselves along for months with no enthusiasm when one ordinary morning I ran into Lu in the entrance hall of my building. She was with a man who turned out to be her husband, and she introduced him to me as Ricardo. She blushed when she saw me and, after some hesitation, let slip a half-baked invitation.

—One day you should come over for lunch, we can catch up —she said, not quite looking at me.

Ricardo nodded out of politeness, gave a couple of little claps in the air, and offered me his hand. It was strange. We were no longer the two kids who held hands to go out to recess, neither physically nor in any other way. I forgot the offer the moment I closed the elevator door.

Months passed, maybe more. One afternoon my mother, with whom I was still living, said from the kitchen without looking up from the newspaper:

—A woman named Lucía called for you. She left her number written down beside the landline.

I called that same night, more out of curiosity than anything else. She asked if I could come for lunch the next day. She said she’d be alone, and asked me not to tell my mother anything, neither who she was nor that she had invited me. “Your mother may remember me from when we were little, I’d rather she didn’t find out about this.”

I showed up at her place with a bottle of red wine that cost twice what I usually spent back then. When she opened the door, she quickly glanced at the landing before stepping aside.

—Come in, I’ve got nosy neighbors —she said in a low voice, as if gossip were serious business.

The kitchen smelled of a stew just made. She offered me a beer before lunch.

—I’m not much of a cook, fair warning —she laughed, blushing again.

She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, no makeup. Inside she was still the Lu from school, but her face had learned things. It took us a while to get going. We talked about the neighborhood, dead teachers, the classmates who had stayed in the town and the ones who had gone far away. The wine smoothed out everything formal in the conversation.

—We loved each other a lot, didn’t we, Iván? —she said after a while, looking at me over the rim of her glass.

—A lot —I lied.

I lied because by then she had already told me, with the loose tongue of her second glass, that she had married at nineteen, that Ricardo had been her only real boyfriend, and that for the last couple of years she’d had this feeling of not really knowing why she was still there, washing dishes and making the bed for a man who fell asleep before she did every night.

We moved to the sofa with the third glass. Lu took off her shoes and sat with her legs tucked under her body. There was a long silence, the kind that fills itself. Then she looked at me as if she were about to confess to a crime.

—A few months ago something happened —she said.

—Tell me.

—A customer at my parents’ bar had been hitting on me for months. A man from the neighborhood, wealthy, older than me. He invited me to his house. I hesitated a lot. But I went.

—You went.

—I went, Iván. He let me in with two glasses already poured and didn’t even let me finish mine. He sat me on the edge of his bed, lifted my skirt, ripped my panties off in one pull, and shoved his tongue into my cunt until I got his hair wet. Then he fucked me against the headboard, and when he was about to come he pulled out his cock, turned my face, and put it in my mouth. He filled my teeth with his milk, Iván. I swallowed as much as I could. And that night I served dinner to Ricardo and the kids as if nothing had happened. There you go.

She said it with a mix of pride and regret, probably waiting for a word from me that would absolve or condemn her. I gave her neither. I hugged her, and her body stayed in my arms a second too long. Her green eyes went through me, calculating now, and I kissed her on the mouth.

She let me. She kissed me back with her head tilted and her lips parted, but before my hands could go any further she pulled away, gathered the glasses, and said something about coffee. I didn’t push. There was no rush. That’s what I felt then, though I was wrong: there was rush, all right, but the rush belonged to the calendar.

***

Years passed. Ten, twelve, fifteen. I got married to someone else, had two children, and a desk job that didn’t thrill me but paid the mortgage. My wife would sometimes see one of her university colleagues whom she called her “special friend,” and I did my own thing with no commitments, no names to remember the next morning. We had built ourselves a domestic cold war with a truce signed for the children and for Christmas.

And then my father died. My mother was left alone in her apartment in the neighborhood, and I started visiting her almost every Saturday. I’d go for a while, buy her bread, take her blood pressure, and then take a walk and have a coffee at one of the old terraces that were still holding out against the onslaught of the chains. It was on one of those terraces, smoking a cigarette while I waited for my coffee, that I saw her pass by.

It was her. Grown, of course, like me, with hips a little wider and her hair cut to shoulder length. She was walking distractedly, talking to herself or going over an invisible list, and she passed so close to my table that I could smell her perfume. She didn’t see me.

I paid quickly and followed her at half a block’s distance, not quite knowing what I’d do if she turned around. When she stopped, I saw it was the same doorway from so many years before. I quickened my pace and caught up to her just as she was putting the key in the lock.

—Lucía?

She turned, startled, then surprised, and finally, after an eternal second, she smiled with a full, open smile.

—Iván! My God, you haven’t changed at all!

—Liar.

—Well, almost.

We hugged in the doorway, for several seconds while time waited in line outside. When we pulled apart, she invited me upstairs.

The apartment was the way I remembered it, but the photos on the sideboard were no longer of children. The children were adults now, one dressed in military uniform, the other at a graduation ceremony with a mortarboard. The walls had yellowed and the ceiling lamp was the same as always.

—Will you have lunch with me? Ricardo gets back late from the workshop, he won’t be home before nine —she said, setting her bag on the table.

I offered to take her to a restaurant on the promenade, a new one people in the neighborhood were talking about.

—No, no. Better here. More relaxed. If you don’t mind, I’m going to change. I’m coming from the doctor and this blouse is weird.

She came back in five minutes wearing a dark blue strappy dress, no bra, barefoot. Her nipples showed through the fabric every time she moved. She brought everything from the fridge to the table and uncorked a bottle someone had brought her long ago and she had never dared to open.

The wine, once again, loosened our tongues. I told her about my wife, my children, and, when we got there, about my infidelities too. Lu bit her lip when she heard me, just as she had that afternoon on the sofa fifteen years earlier.

—So many nights I’ve dreamed I was sleeping with you, Iván… —she said, and laughed with teenage embarrassment—. So many nights I’ve put my fingers in myself thinking of you, with Ricardo snoring beside me. It’s so hot in here, isn’t it?

It was hot and it wasn’t hot. It was March. She turned her face toward the window with that expression people make when they have something on the tip of their tongue and don’t dare say it. She made as if to get up for more wine. I stopped her by the wrist, pulled her back into the chair, and kissed her.

—Iván… —she said on a sigh—. How embarrassing, for God’s sake.

I didn’t say anything else. I looked into her eyes.

—Take your clothes off, Lucía.

She stood up slowly, as if the order belonged to another time, and positioned herself in the middle of the living room with her back to me. She took off the dress over her head, pulled down her panties, and let them fall onto the rug. Her back was narrower than I remembered, with a small scar above her right shoulder blade and a big mole on her side. Her ass split into two broad, white cheeks, with the shadow of her cunt peeking between her tight thighs. She did not turn around.

I approached without touching her. I put one hand on her hip, the other on the back of her neck, and bit her shoulder. I felt her whole body shiver.

—Let’s go to the shower.

She took me to the bathroom naked, without looking back, and there she did turn around. I asked her not to cover herself. She didn’t. Her tits hung low, the tits of a woman who has given birth, with big dark nipples, and a thick triangle of brown hair between her legs. Hot water fell over us, and we stayed like that for a while, not talking, looking at each other as if we were twenty years younger and there was still time to make mistakes or get things right.

I knelt in the tub and opened her thighs with my hands. I ran my tongue over the slit of her cunt, from bottom to top, very slowly, and when I reached her clit I sucked it like it was a small fruit. Lu gripped the shower curtain rail and pushed her hips forward, offering me her flesh.

—Oh, Iván… Oh, God… like that, like that, don’t stop, fuck, don’t stop…

I slipped two fingers inside her while I kept sucking her clit, moving them upward inside her with the pads of my fingers, looking for that swollen spot. I found a rough patch and pressed there, in circles, and she began to tremble on her knees as if they were about to give way. She came out with a muffled cry, covering her mouth with her hand, and drenched my wrist with a hot liquid that the shower water carried away.

—No one had ever done that to me —she whispered, sliding against the tiles—. Never, Iván, never.

I stood up and grabbed her head. She understood without me saying a word, knelt where I had been, and took my cock halfway into her mouth. Her mouth was hot and her tongue rough, and she sucked me awkwardly at first, as if she were remembering how it was done, but soon she found her own rhythm. She pulled it all the way out, looked at it, spat on the tip, and swallowed it again. I squeezed the back of her neck and pushed a little. She gagged, coughed, tears sprang to her eyes, and she laughed with a mouth full of me.

—Let’s go to bed —she said afterward, spitting out water and saliva, handing me the towel.

In bed she was awkward and voracious in equal measure, inexperienced or very out of practice, I couldn’t tell which. She kissed me all over, lingering in places no one lingers unless driven by old hunger: behind the ear, on the inner thigh, in the hollow of the navel. She sucked my cock again, this time more calmly, while stroking my balls with the other hand, and then came back up to my mouth with a new smile and her breath thick with my own smell.

I opened her legs and settled between them. I ran the head of my cock along her slit, up and down, smearing myself in her wetness, tapping her clit with the tip. Lu writhed beneath me, arching her back, seeking me.

—Put it in me, Iván, please, put it in already. Put it in slowly. I want to feel it go in.

I entered her, bracing her hips with both hands, very slowly. I slid into her centimeter by centimeter, watching her face: mouth open, eyes closed, eyebrows drawn together as if in pain and pleasure at the same time. She was wet beyond doubt, but so tight that I had to push in two stages to get all the way in. When I was buried to the root, I held there, still, feeling her cunt contract around my cock.

—My God… My God, so big… it’s been so long since I…

I started moving, first with slow, long thrusts, pulling almost all the way out and then sinking back in to the hilt. Her moans were thin, broken up by sighs that seemed to laugh at themselves. I sucked her nipples while I fucked her, nipping at them, tugging with my teeth until they were hard as little stones. I let go of her hips, grabbed one breast in each hand, and sped up, first restrained, then without restraint. Her eyes were shut and she shook her head from side to side, as if saying no to a ghost.

—Put me on all fours —she panted suddenly—. I want you to fuck me like a bitch.

I pulled out, turned her over, and put her on her knees on the mattress, face buried in the pillow and ass raised. I spread her cheeks with my thumbs. Her cunt was swollen, glossy, and a little higher up her asshole was tight, brownish, throbbing. I drove into her in one stroke and she let out a cry against the pillow. I grabbed her hair with one hand and her hip with the other, and started pumping into her hard, pulling out and thrusting back in until her cheeks slapped against my pubis.

—Yes, like that, like that, fuck me hard, rip my cunt apart, Iván, rip it apart, I’ve been waiting twenty years for this…

I spat on her ass and ran my thumb over the hole, pressing without going all the way in, and Lu started trembling all over. She came with her mouth open against the pillow, with a long howl that came from her belly, and I felt her cunt closing around my cock in waves.

I let her go, turned her face-up again, and climbed on top of her once more. I put her legs over my shoulders and fucked her folded in half, burying myself to the hilt, supporting myself with my hands beside her head. She looked up at me from below with glassy green eyes, mouth open, panting every time I drove my cock into her.

—Come inside me, Iván. I want to feel your heat for once. Fill me up, please, fill me up…

I sped up until the bed creaked and the headboard hit the wall. I felt the cramp rise from my balls and emptied myself inside her with three deep thrusts, growling against her neck. I felt her hot inside, clenching, milking me. I came so hard I could feel my cum overflowing and dripping out along the crease of her ass and onto the sheet. She moaned for a long time, holding the back of my neck, not letting me go.

—Don’t pull out. Stay in there. Kiss me. Give me all the kisses you saved up for twenty years.

I kissed her until our mouths dried out, with my cock still inside her, feeling myself go soft inside her. When I finally pulled out, a thick strand of semen slid down her thigh to the sheet. She brought her hand to her cunt, gathered some of it up with her fingers, and sucked them while looking me in the eyes.

—It tastes like you —she said, and smiled.

Then I lay beside her, staring at a crack in the ceiling that formed a pretty decent map of Italy. Lu had her head on my shoulder and was breathing slowly, as if she had fallen asleep without warning.

—Are you coming back? —she asked after a while, without opening her eyes.

—I don’t know.

—That’s better.

I got dressed in silence. Before leaving the bedroom, I picked up from the living room floor the panties she had taken off in the middle of the rug and stuffed them into my trouser pocket without thinking, like someone picking up a stone from the beach.

I went down in the elevator with a quiet heart and a loaded pocket. When the lobby door opened, I ran straight into Ricardo, who was back earlier than expected. He didn’t recognize me. He was wearing a grease-stained coverall and smelled like a closed workshop.

—Good morning —I said.

—Morning —he replied, without looking at me.

I went out onto the street feeling the pocket, checking that the panties were still there, still damp, and walked to the bus stop thinking about the map of Italy on the ceiling and whether it would be worth calling her again. I decided not to. I decided yes. I decided, above all, not to decide anything until the following Saturday.