The excuse to go piss that changed our friendship

This happened years ago, but I remember it with a clarity that few things in my life have. I have that kind of memory for certain moments: the ones that should not have happened and that, nevertheless, one keeps with more care than many others. The ones you don’t say out loud, but you don’t forget either.

It was a Friday in August with no special plans. The usual group had gotten together in the Chueca neighborhood to drink in the street, as we had done every summer since we were around twenty. We would arrive at the same spot as always, take over the same stretch of sidewalk, talk about the same things with the same people. There was something comforting about that ritual, about knowing exactly what was going to happen the night before it even began. That night almost everyone was there. And among them was Sofía, with her boyfriend at the time, Rodrigo, who that day seemed more interested in his phone than in anything in the real world. I was with Clara, my girlfriend of three years, who had stayed chatting with the girls in the group at the other end of the circle.

Sofía and I had been friends since university. The kind of friendship that survives everything: breakups, moves, periods of silence that mean nothing, late-night misunderstandings that sort themselves out with time. We had always had that ambiguous chemistry we both pretended not to see. It was easier that way. Safer. More reasonable, too. We had lives, we had partners, we had all the shared history that makes crossing a certain line seem like a terrible idea.

We had already been standing in the street for a good while when I realized I wasn’t going to last any longer without going to the bathroom.

—I’ll be right back —I told Clara—. I’m going to find a bar.

—Do you want me to come with you? —Sofía asked from the other side of the group, with her usual easy manner.

It was nothing extraordinary. We had done that hundreds of times over the years. One of us would say they were going and the other would tag along, and nobody gave it any more importance than it had.

—Sure —I said.

We walked a couple of streets. The bars in the neighborhood were packed that night, with lines stretching from the doorway out onto the sidewalk. The kind of Friday when the whole city seems to have decided to go out at the same time. I told her I wasn’t going to be able to hold it until we found somewhere free.

—What bars? Forget it —she said—. Over there, between the cars. There’s nobody around at this hour.

She said it without making a big deal of it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And in principle, it was. We had been in situations like that before: at summer festivals, on weekend trips, on long nights when the world shrinks to a group of friends and a stretch of dark street. Nothing that hadn’t happened before.

But something about that night was different. Or maybe it was me, noticing things for far too long that I shouldn’t have been noticing. The way her hair fell over her collarbone when she turned her head. The way she laughed at bad jokes with that laugh of hers that always came a second after everyone else’s. The way she had looked at me twice that night without saying anything. How her tits outlined under the thin T-shirt when she crossed her arms, with no bra underneath, the nipples showing through with that summer insolence that makes you look away twice a minute.

We turned down a side street, darker than the rest. Two vans parked there, one dead streetlight, the sound of the neighborhood reaching us muffled from the main street. She slipped between the vans without hesitation and pulled down her jeans. I turned my back, looking toward the street.

Supposedly keeping watch.

—If you look at me —she said from behind me—, I’ll kill you.

—I’m not looking at you.

I was looking at her.

Only out of the corner of my eye, only for a second. But enough to see the white ass outlined in the gloom, the black panties lowered to her thighs, the dark pubic hair against her pale skin. And she noticed, because Sofía always noticed everything.

—You’re a pig —she said. But with a voice that had not the slightest trace of real anger. It had that other thing, that thing I had spent the whole night trying not to see.

—Like you haven’t known that for years —I replied.

Silence.

Not the awkward silence that comes when someone says something they shouldn’t have said. The other kind of silence. The one that means the two of you are thinking exactly the same thing at the same time and neither of you knows yet who’s going to move first.

I heard her finish. But I didn’t hear her pull her pants up.

—What? —she said—. Want to watch?

I turned around.

She was standing between the vans, jeans at mid-thigh, black panties bunched above her knees, looking at me with that expression of hers I’d learned to read over years of friendship. It wasn’t a question. It was a half-open door, and both of us knew it perfectly well.

—Watching isn’t exactly what I have in mind —I said.

She held still for a moment. Two seconds, maybe three. A very small smile at the corner of her mouth.

—Then do what you have in mind —she said.

***

I walked up slowly. I put my hands on her hips, turned her gently, and she let me turn her without resistance, as if she had expected it. She rested her palms on the side of the van, spread her legs as far as her clothes pulled them apart, and stuck her ass out behind her in an invitation that left no room for doubt.

I lifted her T-shirt from behind and bit the small of her back. I slid one hand around to the front, under the fabric, and found her tits, bare beneath the shirt she’d been hinting at all night. Her nipples hardened under my fingers as soon as I touched them, and she let out a short, contained gasp, that first sound that slips out when you’ve spent hours pretending you didn’t want this. I pinched one, then the other. Rolled them between my fingers until her back arched against my hand.

I slid my other hand between her legs from the front. She was soaking. Absolutely soaked, long before I got there, as if her cunt had made the decision three streets ago without consulting anyone. I ran two fingers up and down her folds, without going in yet, spreading her own wetness over the whole area until her hips started trembling.

—Fuck —she whispered—. Don’t make me wait, bastard.

I shoved both fingers in at once, all the way. A louder moan escaped her than she wanted, and she bit her arm to muffle it. I finger-fucked her like that, against the van, with my palm hunting for her clit on every thrust, while with my other hand I kept massaging one tit through the T-shirt.

—Oh God, oh God —she kept whispering—. Like that, don’t stop, like that.

I dropped to my knees on the asphalt without thinking about the cold or the dirt or anything except the smell coming off her. I spread her cheeks with both hands and drove my tongue between her thighs from behind, finding her cunt from below. Her legs were warm when I held them open. I took a moment before really starting. A moment for my brain to finish processing that this was really happening, after all the years in which it hadn’t happened, when both of us had pretended it was never going to happen.

I started slowly. No rush, no theatrics. My tongue flat, running all the way up her slit, bottom to top, top to bottom, sucking with my lips when I reached her clit, pressing the tip of my tongue in when I came back down. She held on in silence for a while that must have taken real effort, then let out a short, almost surprised sound, as if her body had reacted before her mind authorized it.

—Stop —she said, with no conviction at all—. Someone might see us.

I didn’t stop. I pushed my tongue deeper and sucked her clit between my lips until her whole thigh shook against my face.

—Stop —she repeated, and dug her fingers into my hair. But she didn’t pull me away. Quite the opposite: she pulled me closer, crushed me against her cunt, started grinding against my mouth as if she were in a hurry to explode.

I kept going. More deliberately now, more focused, paying attention to every signal her body gave me. I heard her breathing harder. I noticed how she tried to control the sounds she was making and how that got harder and harder for her. I slid two fingers into her again while I kept sucking her clit, and her hips began moving almost involuntarily, that small, reflexive motion that is the most honest signal there is.

—I’m going to come —she whispered, her voice tight—. I’m going to come in your fucking mouth, don’t stop.

There was something about that darkness, about the distant noise of the group waiting for us two streets away, about the fact that we both had partners and were both here anyway, that made each second feel far more loaded than it would have under any other circumstances. We were not invisible. Someone could have come by at any moment and found my face buried between my best friend’s legs. And yet neither of us did anything to end it.

I took my time. I paid attention to her as if I had all the time in the world, which is exactly how you have to do these things when you’ve been thinking about them for a long time. I wanted it to last. I wanted her to remember it. I curved my fingers inside her and searched for that spot in front while my tongue kept working her clit in quick circles. I knew when she got close to the edge: the pressure of her fingers in my hair suddenly increased, her thighs tensed on either side of my face, her cunt started clenching around my fingers in short spasms. I sped up, kept pushing, without stopping.

She came in silence. Or almost in silence. A muffled sound lost in the distant traffic and the echo of the street. First slowly, then all at once, with that contained intensity of things that have been waiting a long time. She shoved her knuckles into her mouth to keep from making noise and smashed my face against her cunt until she was done, trembling over me, leaving my chin shining with how wet she was.

I stayed still with my fingers still inside her until the last tremor passed. I pulled them out slowly and licked them in front of her. Then I stood up.

***

We looked at each other. She was still leaning against the van, breathing hard, hair mussed, T-shirt bunched up over her tits, and with an expression I had never seen on her in all the years I’d known her. Her eyes shining in the dark, her breathing still unsteady, her thighs glistening inside.

—You’re an idiot —she said.

Then she took my face in both hands and kissed me. A long, unhurried kiss, sucking on my own tongue with the taste of her cunt still on it, neither of us making any effort to shorten it. Her hands slid down, explored, found what was obvious they would find. She squeezed my cock through my jeans, hard as a rock for half an hour, and let out a little laugh into my mouth.

—Well, look what we’ve got here —she murmured against my lips—. This can’t be left like that.

Before I could say anything, she was already crouching. She pulled my jeans and underwear down in one motion, with a decisiveness that left no room for interpretation. My cock sprang out almost hitting her in the face, and she let out another short, satisfied laugh, the kind a woman only lets out when she finally sees confirmed what she’s suspected for years.

—Holy shit —she said—. Okay.

She grabbed the base with her right hand, ran her tongue the full length of me from balls to tip, and then took me all the way into her mouth, without preamble, without hesitation, with the same determination she did everything else. I felt her taking me down my throat and felt her gag for a second and come back down again, and again, and again, with a technique that confirmed for me that Sofía had done this far more times than I would ever have imagined.

I rested my palm on the roof of the van and looked up for a moment, biting my lip so I wouldn’t let the whole groan out. Then I looked down again because I couldn’t not look.

What I remember most from that night, what I see most clearly when I think about it, is that she never stopped looking at me. Not once. With that expression of concentration and amusement only Sofía knew how to wear, her eyes fixed on mine while she had me buried to the hilt, as if saying: I know exactly what I’m doing and I know exactly what effect it’s having. Without looking away for a single second, saliva running down her chin, her left hand massaging my balls with a rhythm that left no doubt she wanted me to come soon.

She pulled back, ran her tongue over the tip, took me again. She sucked just the head with tight lips, made suction, let go with a wet sound, and swallowed me whole again. She spat on me and took me back in, using her own saliva as lubricant, her hand working the shaft at the same rhythm as her mouth. Every couple of minutes she pulled back to lick my balls, one first, then the other, never stopping the motion of her hand.

—Tell me you’re going to come in my mouth —she whispered, with my cock resting against her cheek—. Say it.

—I’m going to come in your mouth —I told her.

—All of it —she insisted—. Without taking it out.

—All of it.

She took me back to the hilt and didn’t let me go after that. It was too much to hold out for very long.

It would be dishonest to say I tried with determination. I’d had too much tension built up for too long, and Sofía knew exactly what she was doing: it wasn’t the first time she had done this in her life, and you could tell in every movement. When I came, when I warned her with a tight groan that I was about to, she knew it before I did, and instead of pulling back she shoved me deeper, and didn’t stop sucking until I had emptied my whole load into her mouth. I felt every spasm come out of me and felt her swallow without stopping the sucking, pressing her lips around the shaft to get the last drop out of me. She didn’t stop until there was nothing left, until she was completely sure, until my whole body trembled from overstimulation and I had to gently move her head away.

She stood up. She ran her thumb along the corner of her mouth, gathering a white thread that had escaped, and sucked it off while looking me in the eyes, without drama, without fuss. She looked at me.

—Well —she said.

—Well —I repeated.

We both started laughing at the same time. Slowly at first, then unable to stop, leaning against the van with our pants still badly pulled up and the neighborhood behind us. One of those laughs that are equal parts relief and complicity, that acknowledge without saying it everything that has just changed.

***

It took us a little while to look presentable. Enough for anyone with common sense to have drawn conclusions about why we had taken so long to get back. While we straightened ourselves out, we agreed on the excuse: the bars were packed, the lines were endless, we had to go far away to find somewhere. It wasn’t entirely a lie.

As we walked back, with a distance between us that was exactly the same as always but now weighed completely differently, Sofía said:

—This has to be our secret.

—In case we want more? —I asked.

She glanced at me sideways. That small smile at the corner of her mouth, her lips still a little swollen from having sucked me off five minutes earlier.

—In case we want more —she confirmed—. And I do. Just so that’s clear.

—Clear enough.

—Next time you fuck me all the way —she added without looking at me, with the same naturalness as someone ordering a beer—. In a bed. With time. What you just did was just an appetizer.

I didn’t answer. There was no need.

We got back to the group. Clara asked me if I’d gotten lost. I told her the neighborhood bathrooms were a disaster that night. Rodrigo had his arm around Sofía’s shoulders, still not looking up from his phone. The rest of the group went on with their conversations, their drinks, their usual jokes. The world exactly the same as before.

Sofía and I avoided each other’s gaze for exactly fifteen minutes, with the studied concentration of two people who know that if they look at each other they’ll give something away. In the end our eyes found each other on their own, as they always do. And we both laughed at the same time, out of nowhere, for no apparent reason, which forced us to invent that we had seen something funny in the street when the others asked what was going on.

Nobody insisted too much on knowing.

There are nights that seem not to change anything. We went home, each with our own partner, everything the same on the surface. We kept meeting on the following Fridays, the same as always, in the same places. Things continued as they had for years.

Except that now there was something between Sofía and me that hadn’t been there before. A shared frequency that didn’t need words. A crossed look at exactly the right moment was worth more than any conversation we could have had. A detail, an oblique reference in the middle of a group dinner, a smile nobody else understood.

We didn’t talk about it out loud for a long time. There was no need.

But there were more nights. Of course there were.