My Confession: The Night I Discovered My Bisexuality

For years I convinced myself it was a phase. That looking at Camila in the gym locker room was curiosity, nothing more. That lingering on Andrea’s mouth when she spoke was aesthetic appreciation. That dreaming of women’s hands on my waist was some residual echo of a badly watched movie. I told myself that so many times I almost believed it.

I’m thirty-one, I’ve been with my partner for six years, I work at an advertising agency, and I have a cat named Hierba. On the outside, everything is in order. On the inside, a question kept eroding me every time I closed my eyes before falling asleep.

The night in question fell on a Thursday in October. Mateo was in Mendoza for work until Monday. I had eaten badly, a salad I didn’t finish, and I was pacing around the living room with that restless feeling you get when you know there’s something unfinished with yourself and you don’t dare face it.

I locked the door. Turned off my phone. Hierba was sleeping on the couch, not giving a damn about anything.

I went upstairs to the bedroom, switched on the floor lamp in the corner —the one that gives off yellow light— and left the rest in darkness. I put on an old Caetano Veloso record, with lyrics I couldn’t understand. I took an almond oil out of the drawer my sister had given me, unopened for months. I sat on the bed with my back against the wall.

Today I’m not going to judge myself.

That was the only thing I said before I started. Today I’m not going to correct myself every time my mind goes somewhere it shouldn’t. Today I’m not going to interrupt myself with a “but I like men.” Today I’m going to let my mind go wherever it has to go and let my body answer without filters.

I started with my breathing. Three minutes, maybe four. Inhale slowly, feel the air sink all the way down to the bottom of my stomach, let it out through my mouth. Then I touched my face, my neck, my arms. Without intention, without destination. Just rediscovering myself, as if it were the first time that skin had ever been mine.

***

The first image that came to me was Mateo. The way he shoved me against the kitchen counter when he came home in a bad mood from work. His three-day stubble scraping the left side of my jaw. The pressure of his hand on my hip, claiming me.

I let the scene grow. I added details that had never happened: him tearing the buttons off my blouse with one yank, biting one nipple through my bra until he made me moan, me unbuckling his belt without looking him in the eyes, slipping my hand into his pants and grabbing his cock already hard over his briefs. In the fantasy I knelt right there on the cold kitchen floor, yanked down his pants, and pulled his cock out. I sucked him all the way, to the back of my throat, until I felt the head knocking against my throat. He took my hair in both hands and fucked my mouth in and out at his rhythm, whispering things in my ear he never said in real life —“suck it all, bitch, don’t stop”— while I touched my pussy over my panties, feeling the fabric soak through with how badly I wanted it.

The arousal came quickly, familiar, almost automatic. My left hand slid down over my stomach and began moving slowly between my legs, still over my underwear. I pressed two fingers against my clit in slow circles while the fantasy went on: Mateo lifting me off the floor, turning me against the counter, hiking up my skirt, yanking my panties off in one pull. The head of his cock against my wet lips, sliding up and down, until he thrust once and pushed all the way inside. Me screaming against the formica, him holding my hips and fucking me hard, without tenderness, until the dishes in the drying rack trembled.

And then I did something different: I didn’t let myself come.

When I felt the image starting to push me toward the end, I stopped. I breathed. I let Mateo fade like smoke going out the window. What remained in me was only heat, the pounding between my legs, my breathing a little higher, my soaked panties sticking to my pussy. I emptied my mind to see what would come next if I didn’t decide anything.

***

What came next I didn’t summon. It arrived.

Camila —the one from the gym, the one who the previous Tuesday had held my gaze two seconds longer than necessary while I adjusted the bar— was sitting on the edge of my bed. I didn’t see her come in. She was just there, in that thin-strapped T-shirt she always wears, no bra underneath, her nipples showing through the fabric, her skin slightly damp with sweat that wasn’t from the gym.

I reached toward her with my hand. I felt the curve of her shoulder. A woman’s skin doesn’t feel like a man’s skin, I had read that a hundred times, but discovering it in my own imagination was something else. The texture was softer, yes, but what took my breath away was something else: the lack of urgency. Camila didn’t grab me like Mateo. She waited.

I leaned toward her mouth. In my head, she parted her lips just slightly and ran her tongue over my lower lip before biting it slowly. My right hand, the real one, traveled from my chest downward and the other went up to my neck. I touched myself imagining those were her fingers. Slowly, in circles, without urgency, as if we had all night.

I imagined her taking off her T-shirt over her head. Two small, firm breasts, with pink nipples standing up. I imagined sucking them, one and then the other, feeling them harden against my tongue, hearing her sigh softly, not moan theatrically —just a genuine breath that made me clamp my thighs together on the real bed. I had never sucked a tit in my life, but my mouth knew exactly what it wanted to do, as if it had been keeping the knowledge somewhere for years, waiting for the order.

My body answered in a way I hadn’t expected. It wasn’t the arousal Mateo gave me, intense and direct, like a blow against a wall. It was an arousal that grew from below, slow, enveloping, as if I were dissolving into the mattress.

I pulled down my pajama bottoms. I stayed in my panties. I felt the cool air of the room on my thighs and a shiver that had nothing to do with cold. I took my hand to my crotch over the fabric and I was so wet that my fingers stuck. I slipped my hand inside and ran the pad of my middle finger along my slit from back to front, and I shuddered all over when I touched my swollen clit.

***

Camila —the imaginary one— kissed my neck without leaving a mark. Her hands were smaller than Mateo’s and for some reason that seemed obscene to me, like an even bigger secret. I caressed my breasts over my bra, then underneath, then took it off completely and threw it on the floor. My nipples had gone hard as little stones. I pinched them imagining it was her mouth, tugging them lightly, and felt a jolt go straight down to my cunt.

In the fantasy, she laid me on my back and went down on me. She kissed between my breasts, then my navel, then my hip, then the inside of my thigh. She took her time. She made me wait. When she finally opened my legs with both hands and ran her tongue from bottom to clit, I screamed in real life —a short moan, muffled against the pillow— and slipped two fingers into myself at once.

I imagined how she ate me. Slowly, meticulously, with the tip of her tongue around my clit, then sucking it fully, then moving lower and pushing her tongue inside me. Her hands held my thighs open. I grabbed her head with both hands, pressed her face into my pussy, begged for more. And she gave me more. And more. Without rushing, without getting tired, as if eating me were the only thing she wanted to do that night.

What I discovered there, in that half-dark room, was that my body responded differently to the energy of each fantasy. With Mateo I clenched, I tightened, I received. With Camila I opened, stretched, invited. It was the same body. It was the same hand. But it was a pleasure in another language.

And the question I had asked myself so many times —is this real or am I making it up?— answered itself. The body doesn’t make itself up. The body responds or it doesn’t. And mine, without asking my permission, was responding. My fingers sank in with a wet sound that filled the room, mixing with Caetano’s voice.

I finally brought my hand all the way down. I touched where I was hot and wet and trembling. I slipped three fingers in now, curling them inward to find that spot only I know how to find, while with my thumb I rubbed my clit in quick circles. I didn’t rush. I wanted to stretch that discovery as far as I could.

***

At some point I stopped choosing between one and the other. I let the two images blend. Mateo standing behind me, his hard cock going in and out of my ass slowly, holding me at the waist with one hand. Camila in front, kneeling between my legs, eating my pussy while Mateo fucked me from behind. Two pairs of hands running over me at the same time from different places. One mouth on my nape, another between my breasts. Camila coming up to kiss my mouth with lips wet with me, letting me taste myself on her tongue, while Mateo shoved it in harder and whispered dirty things in my ear.

I imagined Camila sitting on my face. Her shaved pussy lowering slowly until it rested on my mouth. Me opening my tongue, tasting her for the first time, discovering a flavor unlike what I had imagined —cleaner, softer, more mine. Sucking her clit with years of delayed hunger, feeling her tremble above me, hearing her moan softly “like that, like that, don’t stop” while Mateo kept fucking me from behind and pushing all the way in.

The feeling of being in the middle of something that had no clear name had me on the edge. In the real bed, my three fingers were going in and out of me at a rhythm I no longer controlled, my thumb circling my clit without pause, my other hand squeezing one breast, tugging my nipple to the edge of pain.

I wasn’t scared. I didn’t stop to think whether I was betraying Mateo, whether I was inventing something that didn’t belong to me, whether this meant my relationship was going to end. Those thoughts came, they all came, but I let them pass like cars on the avenue when you’re waiting for a bus. I didn’t get on any of them.

Pleasure rose like a tide that gives no warning. I quickened my fingers. I felt the first contractions in my stomach, that pull that begins inside and rises searching for air. My cunt clenched around my fingers, sucking them in, and I felt a hot gush wet my palm and the sheets. I let myself go.

The orgasm wasn’t just one. It was three, four waves in a row, each one a little longer than the last. On the first I arched my back and screamed into the pillow. On the second I pulled my fingers out because I couldn’t stand the friction and just stayed there, pressing my clit with my open palm, shaking. The third came on its own, without my hand, with a long spasm that shook me from the tips of my toes to my neck. The last one left me breathless. I arched against the pillows, opened my mouth and no sound came out —only a long sigh, almost of relief.

***

After that I didn’t move. I stayed as I was: legs open, one hand over my stomach sticky with my own wetness, the other against the mattress, the damp stain beneath my ass slowly cooling. Hierba was purring far away, in the living room. Caetano kept singing in Portuguese, things I didn’t understand and that sounded like a farewell and something else at the same time.

What I felt in that silence wasn’t guilt. It wasn’t fear. It was a strange clarity, almost luminous. Like when you finish putting together a puzzle that had been scattered on a table for years.

No, I hadn’t liked Camila more than Mateo. No, I hadn’t liked Mateo more than Camila. Both images had stirred different things in me, deep and real, both of them. That was all. And that was all I needed to know.

I’m bisexual.

I thought it like that, in my inner voice, without theatrics. I thought it the way one says “it’s raining” while looking out the window. A fact, not a declaration.

***

I don’t know what I’m going to do with this. I don’t know whether I’m going to tell Mateo —not this week, maybe never, maybe next month at a café table—. I don’t know if someday I’ll touch a real woman or if it will be enough to know that the fantasy exists and is mine. I also don’t know whether next time I see Camila at the gym I’ll be able to look her in the eye without it showing all over my face.

What I do know is that that night I stopped lying to myself. After years of trying to convince myself it was a phase, that it was curiosity, that it was the Instagram account of some actress confusing me, that night I locked the door and told the truth to the only person who mattered: me.

And I discovered that the truth didn’t make me more or less. It made me, simply, more whole.

I’m writing this from the same bed, a week later. Hierba is dozing at my feet. Mateo comes back from Mendoza tomorrow. The yellow lamp is still on. Tomorrow I’m going to make him the dinner he likes and at some point I’m going to decide whether I tell him something or not.

But this time it won’t be from fear. It will come from somewhere else.

Because the body doesn’t make itself up. And mine, on that October night, told me everything I needed to hear.