The Confession That Gave Me My Body Back

I still remember the last time I saw Damián walk out the door.

He was wearing a pale shirt tucked badly into his pants, his hair tousled, and that usual hurriedness of his that drove me crazy. He was late, as he was almost every morning, but this time he didn’t turn around to smile at me. This time he kept his hand on the doorknob, drew a deep breath, and said:

—I don’t want to keep doing this right now, Vera. I mean it.

My arms were crossed, and pride was lodged in my throat. I answered him with a harshness that still claws at me from the inside.

—Sure, we’ll talk whenever it suits you. Like always.

He looked at me wearily. No fury, no sadness. Just weariness. Then he left and closed the door carefully, as if even slamming it seemed like too much to him.

Lunch was still on the table when my cell phone rang. Unknown number. I let it ring once. The second time, I answered.

A man’s voice. Polite. Tense.

He asked whether I was his partner. Then he said a few disconnected words I couldn’t quite put in order: accident, intersection, impact, identification, didn’t survive.

The phone fell from my hand. Then I fell too.

I don’t remember much of that first day. Only my own voice calling him like an idiot, dialing him again and again, hearing his voicemail, leaving messages soaked in tears.

—Baby, please, answer me. Tell me they made a mistake. Tell me you’re still angry and that you’re coming back to finish the argument.

But he didn’t come back.

The days that followed were a pit. The apartment remained full of him: his glass with a tiny crack in it, his chair in front of the computer, his toothbrush in the bathroom, the dry scent of his cologne still clinging to his clothes.

I didn’t eat well. I slept worse. I answered the bare minimum at work because I had no other choice. Together, we had built a small content agency from scratch. I was the face and the driving force; behind the scenes, he held together everything I didn’t know how to handle or didn’t want to look at. Accounts, payments, platforms, reports, silent fires.

Now every open file was proof of his absence.

The only person who didn’t invade my space was Mara. She texted me sparingly. Precisely. Without empty phrases.

“Do you need me to review the payments?”

“Yes.”

“Should I stop by tomorrow for the folders?”

“Do it.”

That was all. No “be strong,” no “time heals.” I thanked her for that silence more than once, though I never told her.

Mara had been a friend of ours for years. She had been there for dinners, short trips, work meetings, and wine-soaked nights when Damián would end up making bad jokes just to hear me laugh. She had also been there on a night I had put away like a sealed box.

A night at the beach, two summers earlier, when the three of us got a little drunker than we should have and our looks began to last too long.

It hadn’t been a betrayal. Damián had been the first to say so, lying on the hotel bed, the window open and the sea sounding in the distance.

—If anything ever happens between the three of us, I want to see everything. I want it to be honest, not behind anyone’s back.

I had laughed then, nervously, thinking it was another fantasy to turn the early hours of the morning on. Mara, sitting at the foot of the bed, looked at us with half a smile and replied:

—If it ever happens, it’ll be because you both want it.

It didn’t happen that night. We kissed amid laughter, clumsy hands, and quick breaths, but we stopped halfway. The next day, no one insisted. It became a memory charged with electricity, one more among so many games, shared desires, and boundaries touched carefully.

Then Damián died, and I buried that part of myself too.

***

Weeks passed. Maybe months. Time stopped functioning logically.

One afternoon I found a folder on the computer containing photos from that trip. The beach, the terrace, the kitchen of the rented apartment, Damián teasing me while I posed, Mara flipping off the lens and laughing. I slammed the laptop shut in anger, as if the images had insulted me.

That same night I got into the shower and stood motionless beneath the cold water. My body was numb. Not merely sad. Numb.

Then I remembered something Damián had said. One ordinary Tuesday, I had a headache and he had come home exhausted from work. He gave me a pill, sat on the floor beside the couch, and after a while in silence, said:

—The best thing about us is that even broken, we’re still us.

In the shower, I repeated that sentence several times until my voice broke.

I didn’t know who I was without that us.

Two days later Mara showed up at my apartment with a grocery bag, a folder of papers, and a bottle of wine. She didn’t ask if she could come in. She entered like someone arriving to hold up a wall before it collapsed.

—You’re going to eat something —she said.

—I’m not hungry.

—I didn’t ask you that.

I let her move around the kitchen. She opened windows, put away receipts, and forced me to sit down. When she set a plate in front of me, I looked at her properly for the first time in weeks.

She was still brutally attractive, but not in a put-together way. Her hair was tied back effortlessly, she had dark circles like mine, and her mouth always seemed to contain more than she said. She was a few years older than me, and at another point in my life I would have noticed immediately the way her arms flexed when she lifted the pot.

That night, I noticed. And I hated myself for noticing.

We ate almost in silence. Then we opened the bottle. The second glass loosened my tongue a little, and my anger too.

—I let him leave angry —I blurted out.

Mara set down her glass without taking her eyes off me.

—I know.

—I didn’t tell him I loved him.

—I know that too.

—You don’t know shit.

She swallowed. She didn’t defend herself.

—I know you’re tearing yourself apart over it —she said at last.

Anger rose from my chest. I stood so quickly I almost knocked over the chair.

—And what am I supposed to do? Forgive myself just because? Repeat that it wasn’t my fault and call it done? He died after hearing me talk to him as if he were a burden. He died, and I was left with that last fucking look I gave him.

Mara stood too. She didn’t come too close.

—Damián knew you loved him.

—You weren’t inside his head.

—No. But I was there for enough moments to see it.

I burst into tears with such violence that my body folded in on itself. Mara held me when my legs stopped responding. She took me to the couch and hugged me tightly, without saying anything. My face sank into her neck. She smelled of soap, wine, and cold streets.

It had been so long since anyone had touched me like that that the simple weight of her arms shook me all over.

—I miss him so much —I said, my voice broken.

—I know.

—And I don’t know what to do with my body. It’s there, but it isn’t me.

I felt her tense slightly. Then she stroked my back very slowly.

—You don’t have to do anything today.

I lifted my face. Our faces were too close. I saw her eyes drop to my mouth and rise again. Just one second. Long enough.

—That makes me angry too —I confessed.

—What does?

—That sometimes I remember... that night. The beach. The three of us. And I feel like trash.

Mara closed her eyes for a moment.

—Vera...

—Not because of you. Because I feel something. Because I still have a body capable of remembering pleasure when he’s dead.

A thick silence settled between us. She released me just enough to look me straight in the face.

—Desire isn’t betraying him.

I shook my head, still crying.

—You don’t understand. Sometimes I wake up remembering his hands between my legs and end up masturbating while I cry. I come, and then I feel like throwing up. What the fuck does that say about me?

Mara didn’t look away. Her voice came out lower.

—It says you’re alive.

The words pierced me.

I don’t know which of us moved first. Maybe both of us. What I do know is that her mouth ended up on mine, soft at first, as if there were still room to pull back. I didn’t pull back. I grabbed her by the nape and kissed her hungrily, angrily, with months of feeling nothing and suddenly feeling too much.

Her tongue entered my mouth slowly, tasting me. I moaned against her lips, and that frightened me more than the kiss. It had been too long since a sound like that had come out of me.

—Tell me to stop —she whispered, pressed against my mouth.

—Don’t stop.

She kissed me again, deeper this time. Her hand traveled up my waist, along my ribs, until she squeezed one breast over my shirt. My nipple reacted at once, hard, sensitive, almost painful. I exhaled through my nose, trembling.

—Look at me —she said.

I did.

—If we keep going, I’m not going to treat you like glass.

I felt heat in my lower belly for the first time in months. Raw. Unexpected.

—I don’t want you to treat me like glass.

She took off my shirt slowly, watching me as if she wanted to give me time to change my mind. I didn’t. I removed my bra with clumsy hands and stood naked from the waist up in front of her. Her breathing changed when she saw me. She lowered her head and sucked one nipple with an avidity that made me arch my back sharply.

—Fuck —I gasped.

Mara licked me in circles, catching it between her lips, while her other hand kneaded my other breast. It wasn’t a careful caress. It was firm, wet, direct. Exactly what my body seemed to have been silently begging for.

I gripped her shoulders when she moved down, kissing my stomach, and knelt between my legs. I was still wearing my pants, which made me feel ridiculous and exposed. She looked up at me from below and undid the button without breaking eye contact.

—If you want to stop, stop now —she said.

—Take them off.

She did. Pants and underwear in one motion, dragging them down to my ankles. Then she spread my knees with her hands and let out a rough sigh when she saw me.

—You’re soaking wet.

The embarrassment lasted half a second. Then she gripped my thighs, opened me wider, and ran her tongue from bottom to top, slowly and completely, from my entrance to my clitoris. The moan that came out of me was hoarse, filthy, as if it had been trapped for years.

Mara didn’t stop. She sucked my clitoris with obscene precision, alternating short sucks with long licks that made my legs give way. Whenever I tried to close them, she forced them open again.

—Stay like that —she murmured against my pussy.

She thrust two fingers inside me, deep and all at once, and I nearly kicked her from the jolt. Her mouth remained fixed to my clitoris while her fingers slid in and out, soaked, curling inside me until they found the exact spot that made me see white.

—Fuck... yes... there —I babbled.

She was fucking me with her hand and her mouth without pause, as if she knew by heart the exact violence I needed. The sound of my wetness, her tongue, and her fingers moving in and out filled the apartment with an obscene rhythm that would have embarrassed me at any other time.

That night, I only wanted more.

—Don’t be gentle with me —I said, barely recognizing my own voice.

Mara lifted her face. Her mouth was shining.

—I wasn’t planning to be.

She turned me around and pushed me until I was on my knees on the couch, my chest against the backrest. She lowered my hips and spread my ass with her hands to look at me while her other hand returned to rub my clitoris from the front. The moan I let out was almost a scream.

—This is how I wanted you —she whispered.

I felt a stab of guilt as strong as my desire.

—Mara...

She slapped one of my ass cheeks. Not brutally, but hard enough to leave it burning.

—Don’t leave here. Stay with me.

The order brought me back into my body. I nodded, panting. She slapped me again, harder this time, and the brief pain mingled with the pleasure of her wet finger rubbing my clitoris. Then she pushed three fingers inside me at once.

—Fuck —I screamed.

—That’s it. Tell me how you want it.

—Harder.

She drove them all the way in and began fucking me with her hand in a hard, steady rhythm, while her thumb punished my clitoris in quick circles. Each thrust of her fingers made my open, wet pussy smack. I pushed back desperately, seeking more depth, more friction, more punishment.

—You’re squeezing like no one’s touched you in years —she said.

—Because no one has touched me.

—Well, today someone has.

I came with a violence that left me breathless. The orgasm shook my thighs, my belly, my entire back. I felt myself spill over her fingers while she kept moving them, giving me no respite, forcing me to go all the way through it.

—No, no, wait... —I panted.

—Not yet.

She withdrew her fingers only to push me onto my back again. She stripped off her clothes in seconds. When I saw her naked, grown, confident, with that expression of restrained hunger, I felt another wave of heat lower down, heavier.

She sat on my face without asking permission. Instinctively, I grabbed her hips and opened her lips with my tongue. Her taste filled my mouth, thick and salty. Mara let her head fall back and began moving over me, rubbing herself against my tongue with little thrusts that grew more and more impatient.

—Like that... like that, fuck —she moaned.

I licked her open, sinking my tongue as deeply as I could, alternating with sucks on her clitoris that made her thighs tremble over my shoulders. She lowered one hand, grabbed my hair, and began guiding me without care, using me. She liked to be in control. I had always suspected it; now I was experiencing it.

With her other hand she pushed two fingers into my pussy again. I sucked her while she fucked me with her hand, and the doubled pleasure left me lost, wet, moaning inside her body.

Mara came on my mouth with a broken moan. I felt her pelvis tense and then throb, felt her press my face between her thighs while I kept licking her to draw out every last contraction. She climbed off me, breathing hard, looked at me for a second, and smiled almost ferociously.

—Now it’s your turn again.

She went to her bag and pulled out a small harness with a black dildo that made me hold my breath. She must have seen my expression, because she came to the bed and stroked my cheek with her knuckles.

—Damián knew I had this —she said softly—. That night at the beach, he asked me not to bring it because he wanted to take things slowly with you.

The mention of his name didn’t extinguish my desire. It lit it in another way, charging it with memory and a brutal tenderness that nearly made me cry.

—He wanted to see me enjoy myself —I whispered.

—Yes.

—Then fuck me.

Mara put on the harness without taking her eyes off me. I opened myself over the couch, still trembling. She held one of my legs over her shoulder and rubbed the tip of the dildo over my entrance, wetting it with everything that was still spilling from me.

—Look at you —she said—. You’re dripping.

Then she entered slowly at first, stretching me inch by inch until I had to bite my lip to keep from screaming. When she was fully inside me, she gave me barely a second.

—Good?

—Move.

The first thrust was deep and dry. The second harder. By the third I was clutching the sheets, offering my hips, opening myself wider to receive her. The harness struck my pussy with a firm rhythm that made my whole body bounce. Mara knew how to use it; she wasn’t playing at anything. She was really fucking me.

—That’s it —she said through her teeth—. That’s how I wanted to hear you.

Each thrust tore a different sound from me. Sometimes a moan. Sometimes an insult. Sometimes her name. She touched my clitoris while continuing to thrust, and I felt my second orgasm building too quickly, like a hot knot rising through my pelvis.

—I’m going to come —I said, undone.

—Then come.

She increased the pace. The sound of the harness striking my skin and my pussy swallowing it again and again was obscene, wet, animal. I came screaming, my legs spread wide, Mara’s hand pressing against my belly while she continued penetrating me, prolonging the orgasm in almost painful spasms.

I thought it would end there, but it didn’t. She made me get on all fours on the bed. She lubricated me with my own arousal, opened me with her fingers, and entered me from behind again, deeper in that position, driving my body forward with every thrust.

I was crying again. Not from pure sadness or pure pleasure. From both, mixed together until I couldn’t tell them apart.

—I’m sorry —escaped me.

Mara grabbed my hair and arched my back.

—Don’t apologize to me for this.

—I don’t know if it’s because of you.

—It doesn’t matter. Keep going.

She fucked me like that, hard and steadily, while her other hand circled my throat without squeezing too tightly, simply reminding me that she was there, that I had a body, that I was still breathing. I pushed back in rhythm, offering her more, needing to feel her all the way inside me.

—Say it —she ordered.

—Say what?

—That you’re alive.

One thrust made me moan before I could speak.

—I’m... alive.

—Louder.

—I’m alive!

Everything inside me clenched. A third orgasm crashed over me like a brutal electric shock. I came trembling, my clitoris throbbing and my pussy contracting around the dildo while Mara kept thrusting a few more times, drawing broken moans from me, until she stopped and rested against my back.

We were both breathing as if we had just come out of a fire.

***

Afterward she took me to the shower. She washed my neck, my breasts, my belly, my thighs. Not like a satisfied lover, but like someone who knows that sometimes taking care is also a form of desire.

I leaned against the tiles and let her do it. When she finished, she wrapped me in a towel and took me to bed.

We lay naked on our sides, facing each other. I expected to feel guilt. A clean, immediate guilt that would put everything in order. But it didn’t come that way.

Something else came instead. A less frozen pain.

—I didn’t want to forget him —I said after a while.

—You didn’t.

—I was afraid that if I felt pleasure again... I would be erasing him.

Mara brushed a damp strand of hair from my forehead.

—You don’t erase someone who built you from the inside. What we did doesn’t replace him. It only gave part of you back.

I closed my eyes. I thought of Damián laughing in the kitchen, stealing kisses from me that tasted of sauce, saying outrageous things to provoke me, talking to me about impossible futures in cities we would never visit together. I also thought of that night at the beach and the way he had looked at Mara and me, as if desire could be another kind of trust between us.

I cried silently again, but this time without feeling emptied out.

—He would have wanted me not to die with him, wouldn’t he? —I asked.

Mara took a while to answer.

—Yes. And you know it.

We stayed quiet for a long time.

Outside, the city continued to exist: distant motorcycles, an elevator rising, some neighbor closing a door. Inside, for the first time in an incredibly long time, my body wasn’t a tomb. It was a tired body, sensitive, even sore between the legs. But it was mine.

Before falling asleep, Mara kissed my forehead.

—You don’t have to decide anything tomorrow —she murmured.

—I’m not going to ask you for promises.

—Good.

—But stay tonight.

—I’ll stay.

I took her hand beneath the sheet and fell asleep like that.

Not healed. Not at peace. Not suddenly transformed into someone new.

Just less broken.

And when I woke in the early hours, my body still warm and my face pressed against her shoulder, for the first time in a long while I didn’t think about that final slam of the door. I thought of something else.

That it still hurt. That I would go on loving him. That life could still pulse and come inside me even though part of me had remained with him forever.

And in that truth, harsh and tender at once, I found my most difficult confession:

I didn’t want to die with the memory.

I wanted to learn to touch the world again without ceasing to miss him.