Four Years of Talking Through a Screen Before Touching Her
Almost four years passed after I met Helena on one of those dating apps you download without much faith. I had just come out of a marriage that had quietly deflated, without drama, and I needed something different. Talking to someone who didn’t share any of my codes, my city, or my mother tongue. She lived in Antwerp; I lived, at the time, in Montreal.
Our entire story was made of screens. Messages at five in the morning because the time zones worked against us, video calls that cut out at the best part, photos sent and deleted. When the pandemic brought the world to a halt, those connections became a daily routine. I told her what I cooked, what I read, what scared me. She did the same. Without meaning to, we ended up falling in love with a woman and a man who only existed through the lens of a phone.
When the borders opened again, I had already moved back to live in my country. I had a good salary, a rented apartment in the old district, and a routine that didn’t make me unhappy. But Helena started appearing in my head more and more often. One night, during one of our calls, I asked her whether it was crazy to suggest I move there. She asked for time to think about it. She had a little daughter and couldn’t improvise.
I waited three weeks. The answer came on a Tuesday at dawn, in a voice message I listened to three times before believing it. “Come,” she said, in a Spanish worn down by years of not speaking it. “Come and we’ll take it from there, calmly.”
I talked to my boss, asked for my severance, sold the furniture, gave away the books I couldn’t carry, emptied an entire apartment in less than a month. My parents thought I was having a breakdown. My friends threw me a going-away party with beers and funeral faces. I had zero certainties, except one: if I didn’t try, I’d regret it for the rest of my life.
***
The plane landed in Antwerp on a March morning. The immigration line was endless. The officer asked me why I was entering Europe, and while I explained in schoolboy French that I was visiting someone, he looked at the bags under my eyes and spared me the rest of the interrogation. When I walked through the arrivals gate, my legs were shaking as if I were a teenager.
Helena was leaning against a pillar, wearing a tight black skirt, sheer black stockings, and a white blouse opened at the neckline. Over that, a short jacket she had put on in the car. She had one of those cheap airport balloons in her hand, with silver letters: “Welcome home, baby.” When she saw me, her face split into a smile I had seen hundreds of times on a screen, but never this close.
We hugged without saying anything. She smelled like citrus perfume and clean fabric. When she lifted her face, she kissed me with an intensity that didn’t belong in a public airport at eleven in the morning. I felt her tongue before her greeting. Behind us, a family with three children was waiting for a grandfather and looking at the floor so they wouldn’t be embarrassed.
“Come on,” she whispered in my ear. “I’ve got the car on the second level.”
In the elevator I kept staring at her without hiding it. The skirt outlined hips that had never quite come through in the photos. Her breasts, medium-sized, moved just slightly beneath the blouse every time she breathed. When we got into the car and she sat behind the wheel, the skirt rode up a little and I saw the edge of her underwear’s lace, white.
“Do you like what you see?” she asked, without taking her eyes off the rearview mirror.
“Much more than I expected,” I told her.
She laughed. She reached out and rested her hand over the bulge in my pants. She kept it there for the twenty minutes it took us to get to her house.
***
Helena lived on the ground floor of a renovated old house, with high ceilings and tall windows overlooking an inner courtyard. As soon as she closed the door, everything changed. She pushed me against the wood, hung from my neck, and kissed me as if she wanted to make sure I was real. The keys fell to the floor. The suitcase ended up sideways in the hallway.
Without stopping kissing me, she unbuckled my belt with a skill that surprised me. She pulled my pants and boxers down to my knees. Then she knelt in front of me on the cold parquet, looked up at me with those big green eyes—on the photos they always looked lighter—and took my cock into her mouth without warning.
I still had my jacket on. The day bag hung from one shoulder. Less than four hours had passed since my plane had touched down, and I was already braced against a foreign door, with a woman I had only known through a screen, devouring me with a care that didn’t feel improvised.
She moved up and down with a precise rhythm, looking up every few seconds. One hand held me firmly at the base; the other squeezed one thigh. Her tongue worked the tip, the underside, the entire contour, and when she took more than half of me into her mouth she made an obscene sound swallowing and coming back out. Every time I tried to say something, she picked up the pace a little to shut me up. I felt my knees starting to give.
“Helena…” I murmured, grabbing the blond hair she wore a little shorter than in the photos. “Helena, wait.”
She didn’t wait. She tilted her head back just a little, without taking me out of her mouth, stroking me with her hand. She took the time to lick me from the base to the frenulum, lips tightening, loosening, taking me deep again. When she realized I was on the edge, she pulled her tongue back and left her mouth open, staring straight at me, as if she wanted to see me completely fall apart in front of her.
I was shaking all over. Heat climbed into my chest and my head was buzzing. I grabbed her hair and her shoulders so I wouldn’t fall. She kept the rhythm exactly right until the tension became unbearable, and then she let me come between her tongue and her lips, swallowing what she could, gathering the rest with her fingers so she wouldn’t lose a drop. She stayed still for a second, breathing through her nose, mouth shining and chin smeared.
Then she stood up, wiped the corner of her mouth with her thumb, and kissed me on the lips with the same naturalness as if she’d just offered me a coffee. I still tasted myself on her tongue.
“Welcome home,” she said softly, in Spanish, with that accent of hers.
I melted. It took me ten minutes to speak again.
***
That afternoon I went with her to pick up her daughter from school. I stammered out very basic Spanish, handed the little girl a stuffed toy as a gift, and she studied me with that seriousness children have before deciding whether to let you in. We went to the supermarket, I bought bread and a cheese I didn’t know, and at night, when the girl was already asleep with her lamp on, Helena locked the bedroom door.
I was in bed watching a movie with no sound. She came in wrapped in a short robe and stood at the foot of the bed looking at me.
“Tired from the trip?” she asked.
“Not at all.”
She let the robe drop. Underneath she wore a red lace set, the bra sheer, the panties the same color. She climbed onto the bed on all fours, with deliberate slowness, until she sat on top of me. I turned on the lamp and turned the TV volume all the way down.
That was when I saw it. Blond strands of hair were peeking out from the edges of her panties, light, abundant. She wasn’t waxed. She wasn’t shaved. Her pubic mound was completely covered, like nobody used to have it anymore, and I looked at her in surprise, unable to hide it.
“Do you remember that conversation about fetishes?” she said, with a smile that was part shy, part proud.
I remembered. One random dawn, while we were talking about the things that turned us on without filters, she had mentioned that she hated the millimeter-precise shaved-body model and that she had spent years keeping herself exactly as nature had made her. I had told her, honestly, that I thought it was sexy. I hadn’t expected the proof to be so literal.
I grabbed her hips and lifted her until she was sitting on my face. The smell of her—clean, intense, real—made me let out a sigh. I started by tracing the edges of her panties with my tongue, feeling the hair mix with my saliva. Helena, without getting off, slid the fabric to one side with two fingers, and with her other hand opened that blond jungle to show me the warm pink hidden beneath. Her pussy was wet and shining, open with arousal, and the heat coming from it hit me full in the mouth.
I didn’t let her cover herself again. I worked her slowly, first with my tongue flat, then with the tip, parting her lips, licking her entrance, circling her clit until her abdomen tightened. She braced her hands on the headboard and started moving her hips, seeking more friction, more pressure, more tongue. Every time I ran my tongue from bottom to top, her body arched a little; every time I slid two fingers into her and opened her from within, she let out a short, strangled moan, and then another longer one, which ended up buried in the pillow so as not to wake the girl.
She took her bra off without moving from the spot and started squeezing her nipples with both hands. Her breasts rose and fell with her breathing, and I kept alternating my mouth between her pussy and one of her breasts, sucking her hard nipples until the skin went sensitive. She muttered things in Flemish that I didn’t understand but that sounded like orders, like thanks, like a filthy mix of all of it.
“Like that,” she said after, in Spanish, remembering my language again. “Like that, don’t stop. Lower. I want your tongue there. Yes, there.”
I laid her on her back, lifted her legs onto my shoulders, and went at her again from a different angle. I ran my whole tongue over her clit, slow and long, and pushed two fingers into her until I felt the inner walls clench around them. Her thighs framed my head, hot and firm, and she clutched the edge of the mattress so hard her knuckles turned white. Every thrust of my fingers made her moan deeper; every movement of my mouth brought her a little closer to the edge. When she came, she did it with her whole body tensed, her back arched, her mouth open over forced silence, shaking as if she’d been split from side to side.
She came once right there, muffling herself with her hand so as not to wake the girl, biting the back of her knuckle with a strange violence. She stayed panting, with her legs still open, her pussy wet and throbbing, and I kept licking her until she stopped trembling.
While she was still shaking, she sat up and gently pushed me to my knees. She settled underneath me, legs spread, feet planted firmly on the bed. I guided my cock to her entrance myself. She was so wet I slid in without effort, but she was gripping me in a way that made me close my eyes.
“Look at me,” she asked.
I looked at her. There was no play or performance anymore. Her face had gone red, her eyes glassy. I started slowly, sinking all the way in and coming out almost completely, feeling how her walls embraced me and let go little by little. She lifted her hands, grabbed the back of my neck, and pulled me to her mouth to kiss me while we moved. Her hips met each thrust in advance, adjusting the depth, searching for the exact spot where the impact would draw out a dirtier moan.
“I was afraid it would feel different in person,” she whispered in my ear.
“Me too.”
She wrapped her legs around me, pressed her heels into my back, and started tightening again. This time she didn’t try to hold back. She moved under me with a desperate urgency that had long since lost all elegance, moaning louder, telling me to keep going, not to ease up, to fill her. I took her by the hips, setting the rhythm with deep strokes, and every time the tip of my cock brushed deeper inside, she answered with a short, brutal shiver. She bit my shoulder hard when she came, leaving me a mark that would last a week. I held on for a few seconds longer, letting her feel every spasm, and when she told me softly, “Inside, I want to feel you inside,” I let go completely. I came all the way, my face buried in her neck, smelling her perfume mixed with sweat, while she squeezed me even tighter, as if she wanted to keep me trapped inside her body.
We stayed like that for a long while, without speaking. Then we went to the bathroom, showered with warm water, and went back to bed, no underwear on anymore, holding each other as if we had been doing that all our lives.
***
I’ve been in this country for four years. Helena’s daughter is already starting to not be a little girl anymore, and she calls me “daddy” without warning when it suits her. I learned just enough Flemish not to look like a tourist. I work in something similar to what I did back there, I earn less, I spend differently, and I care very little.
Sometimes, when I remember that first afternoon—the door, the suitcase lying sideways, her kneeling there with her jacket still on—I think about the version of me who arrived at the airport with no guarantees. I had sweaty hands and a ridiculous balloon waiting for me. Any reasonable person would have told me I was doing something stupid.
Luckily, at that moment, I wasn’t listening to any reasonable person.