The Last Night with My Ex Before Leaving It All Behind

We had been in a long-distance relationship for a year and two months when I decided I couldn’t take it anymore. It wasn’t for lack of affection. It was everything else: the messages that turned into arguments at three in the morning, the jealousy that appeared every time I went out with friends, the promises to see each other that were canceled a week beforehand. What we had had become a cycle of fights, reconciliations, and silences that lasted for days.

His name was Andrés. We met through a dating app, something I never thought would work. But it did. At least at first. The video calls that lasted until dawn, the voice messages that made me smile at work, the plans we made together for when we finally lived in the same city. All of that was real. And so was the moment when it stopped being enough.

I made the decision on a Tuesday night, after another absurd fight over a photo I had posted on social media. I was tired. Exhausted from justifying myself, explaining things that needed no explanation, feeling like every conversation was a minefield. But I didn’t want to do it over the phone. Not after everything we had shared. So I bought a bus ticket for the following Friday and told him I wanted to see him.

“Really?” His voice changed completely. He sounded like he had at the beginning, when everything was new. “I thought you were angry with me.”

“I need to see you,” was all I said.

The trip lasted five hours. Five hours to think, to go over the words I was going to use in my mind. I had a speech prepared, something about how we both deserved something better, how the distance was destroying us, how it was better to end things before we came to hate each other. I had rehearsed it in front of the bathroom mirror as if it were a presentation for work.

I arrived at eight that night. He was waiting for me at the terminal with a paper bag in his hand. He had bought the empanadas I loved, from a street vendor we had discovered together the first time I visited him. Those kinds of details were what complicated everything. Because Andrés wasn’t a bad person. He was thoughtful, funny, able to make me laugh until my stomach hurt. The problem wasn’t who he was, but what we had become together.

“You’re thinner,” he said, hugging me tightly. He smelled like the same cologne as always, the one his mother had given him and that I had told him drove me crazy.

“And you’re taller,” I lied. He hadn’t grown at all.

We walked to his apartment. It was a small studio on the third floor with no elevator, with a window overlooking the street and a mattress on the floor because he still hadn’t bought a bed. The first time I came, I found it charming, bohemian. Now it just seemed sad.

We ate the empanadas sitting on the floor, our backs against the wall. He played music from his phone, something soft I didn’t recognize. He told me about his new job, a coworker who drove him crazy, a cat the neighbor from the second floor had adopted. Ordinary things. The kind of things a couple catches up on after not seeing each other for weeks.

Tell him now, I thought. Before it gets harder.

But I didn’t.

“I missed you so much,” he said, turning his head to look at me. His eyes were dark, almost black, and when he looked at me like that, I felt as if he could see everything I was thinking. I hoped that wasn’t true.

“I missed you too,” I replied. And it wasn’t a lie. I had missed him. I missed the version of us that no longer existed.

He kissed me slowly, one hand on my cheek. His thumb caressed me just below the ear, at that spot he knew made my skin prickle. He knew me well. He knew my body better than anyone, and that was part of the problem. Because every time he touched me, I forgot all the reasons I had come.

I kissed him back. Softly at first, then with more urgency. My hands moved up his chest to his neck, and I pulled him toward me. He shifted until he was facing me, on his knees, and held my waist with both hands. I felt his fingers slip beneath my T-shirt, the warm contact of his palms against my skin.

“Wait,” I said, pulling away an inch.

“What’s wrong?”

Tell him. Tell him now before you can’t.

“Nothing,” I replied, and kissed him again.

***

He pulled my T-shirt over my head and tossed it aside. He looked at me as if it were the first time, his eyes traveling over every inch from my neck to my navel. He always did that. He took his time looking at me before touching me, and that pause made my heart race more than any caress.

He unfastened my bra with one hand. With the other, he supported my back, easing me down toward the mattress. I felt the cool sheet against my skin and his mouth moving down my neck, leaving a wet trail that made me close my eyes.

His lips reached my breasts and stopped at my left nipple. He circled it with his tongue, slowly at first, then with more pressure, sucking the whole thing into his mouth until it hurt. With his free hand he grabbed my other tit, squeezing it, pinching my nipple between his thumb and forefinger until I arched my back and let out a hoarse moan. My hand found the nape of his neck and I pressed him against me, forcing him to bite me, to suck me harder. His other hand moved down my abdomen, tracing a straight line with his fingers to the edge of my pants.

“Can I?” he asked, his mouth still against my skin.

“Take everything off me, now,” I told him, lifting my hips.

He took off my pants and underwear together in a single movement. My panties had stuck to me, soaked through, and he noticed because he smiled that half-smile of his before tossing them onto the floor. He knelt between my legs and looked at me from below, his eyes fixed on my open pussy. He had that expression that melted me, a mixture of animal desire and something like adoration. No one had ever looked at me like that before him. No one has looked at me like that since.

“Look at you,” he murmured. “All wet for me.”

“Shut up and eat me,” I shot back, in a voice that didn’t sound like mine.

He began by kissing the inside of my thigh, moving upward inch by inch with a slowness that made me twist the sheets in my fists. His breath against my skin was calculated torture. He knew exactly what he was doing; he knew that every second of waiting aroused me more, that by then my thighs were already trembling and my pussy was throbbing, begging for his mouth.

When he finally placed his tongue between my lips, flat and broad, dragging it from below to my clitoris in one slow lick, I let out a long moan I couldn’t contain. It escaped me so loudly that I brought a hand to my mouth. He knocked it away.

“I want to hear you,” he said, and lowered his mouth again.

His tongue moved with a precision that only familiarity could provide, alternating firm pressure on my clitoris with soft strokes that made me tremble. Then he moved lower, pushing his tongue inside my pussy, in and out, taking me with his mouth as if he wanted to drink me dry. My juices ran down his chin and he didn’t even bother wiping them away. My hips moved on their own against his face, seeking more contact, more rhythm, more of everything.

He slid one finger inside me while his tongue returned to my clitoris. Then two. He curled them right at the spot, that rough place inside that only he knew how to find, and began moving them quickly, forward, as if beckoning me, while he sucked my clitoris with his lips sealed around it. I felt that familiar tension building in my belly, like a wave growing in the distance.

“Don’t stop, don’t stop, I’m going to come,” I begged breathlessly, and he obeyed, increasing the rhythm of his tongue and fingers at the same time.

The orgasm hit me hard, a jolt that began at my center and spread to my fingertips. My back arched, my thighs closed around his head, and I felt my pussy tighten in spasms around his fingers. He didn’t stop until I stopped trembling, licking me slowly to prolong it, drinking up everything that came out of me.

***

He took off his clothes while I caught my breath. I saw his body outlined against the light from the bedside lamp, lean and familiar, every mark and angle engraved in my memory. And his cock was standing hard, pointing at me, the tip already glistening. My mouth watered.

“Come here,” I told him, sitting up. “Before anything else, come here.”

He understood. He knelt beside my face on the mattress, and I took hold of him, feeling the weight, the pulse of the veins against my palm. I ran my tongue over the tip first, tasting the salty fluid already there. Then I took him all the way into my mouth, as much as I could, until he hit my throat and brought tears to my eyes.

“Fuck,” he groaned, grabbing my hair with both hands.

I sucked him slowly, with my whole mouth, moving up and down, letting saliva run along his shaft to his balls. With my other hand I grabbed and massaged them while continuing to take him deep. He began moving against my face, fucking my mouth slowly, and I let him, choking a little on purpose because I knew how much he liked hearing those sounds.

“Enough, enough or I’ll come,” he said, pulling my head away. “And not yet.”

He laid me down again, then lay over me, bracing himself on his elbows so he wouldn’t crush me, and I felt his cock pressing against my thigh, hard and hot and wet with my saliva.

“I love you,” he said against my ear.

Something broke inside me when I heard it. Because I loved him too, and that wasn’t going to change what I had to do.

“Put it in me,” I said, guiding him with my hand and pressing the tip against the entrance to my soaked pussy.

He entered slowly, inch by inch, his forehead against mine, opening me little by little until he filled me completely. We both let out our breath at the same time. I felt every vein of his cock against the walls of my pussy, every inch of him inside me. He began moving with a slow, deep rhythm, pulling almost all the way out and then burying himself inside me again, as if he wanted to memorize every sensation. I wrapped my legs around his waist and pulled him closer, needing to feel his full weight on top of me.

“Harder,” I begged. “Don’t hold back with me.”

His thrusts gathered speed. He drove his hips into me, all the way to the back, and I felt his balls slap against my ass with every thrust. My nails marked his back and traveled down to dig into his buttocks, pushing him to fuck me deeper. His hands gripped my hips, leaving marks I would see the next day. Our breathing mingled, ragged and loud, and beneath it came the wet, obscene sound of his cock entering and leaving my dripping pussy. The mattress on the floor creaked with every movement, and neither of us cared.

“Turn around,” he told me hoarsely. “I want to see your ass.”

I turned over and got on all fours, my face against the pillow and my ass raised. He grabbed it with both hands, spreading my cheeks, taking a second to look at me open like that. Then he spit on my pussy and rubbed his cock up and down between my lips before pushing it into me again, this time harder, in one thrust. I screamed into the pillow. The angle was different, deeper; every thrust reached a place that made me lose my mind and tore a sound from me I didn’t recognize as my own.

He started fucking me hard, without mercy, gripping my hips and pulling me back against his pelvis. The sound of skin against skin filled the studio. His hand slid up my back to my shoulder and pulled me toward him, bending me over, pressing his chest against my back. He gripped my neck with one hand, not squeezing, just holding me, while with the other he found one of my tits and squeezed it.

“Like that,” I begged. “Don’t stop like that. Fuck me harder.”

“You like that, huh?” he whispered in my ear without slowing down. “Tell me how you like it.”

“Like that, hard, don’t stop.”

His hand moved from my breast to my clitoris and began rubbing it in quick circles while he continued thrusting into me from behind. The combination was too much. His fingers on my clitoris, his cock pounding inside me, his breath on my neck, his weight bent over me. The second orgasm took me by surprise, more intense than the first, and I clenched all around his cock, squeezing him with my pussy in waves while I screamed into the pillow, unable to hold back.

“You’re squeezing me so tight,” he panted. “Fuck, I can’t hold out like this.”

“Come inside me,” I told him in a broken voice. “Come inside me.”

That was all it took. A couple more brutal thrusts, deep to the hilt, and I felt him explode inside me with a long, low groan, his cock pulsing as he filled me with cum. He stayed there, buried to the balls, trembling against my back, then collapsed on top of me, panting, crushing me against the mattress. I felt his come run down my thigh when he slowly pulled out of me.

We stayed like that for a while, tangled together, sweaty, sticky, silent. His hand lazily stroked my hair, and I listened to his heart beating against my navel. The ceiling fan turned slowly, and from the street came the distant sound of a bar closing.

***

I waited for him to fall asleep before I cried.

I did it silently, my face buried in my side of the pillow, staring at the wall while his arm encircled my waist. I cried because I knew that had been our last time. I cried because the sex had been incredible, as always, and that only made everything more confusing. I cried because I wanted to stay and knew I shouldn’t.

The next morning I made coffee while he was still asleep. The apartment smelled like us, like last night’s empanadas, like sex, like the cologne that would haunt me for months. I sat on the edge of the window with the cup between my hands and watched the street wake up. A woman walked a tiny dog. A deliveryman chained his bicycle to a post. The ordinary life of people who aren’t about to break someone’s heart.

Andrés appeared, shuffling his feet, his hair tousled and his eyes still puffy with sleep. He came up behind me, hugged me, and kissed my neck.

“Good morning,” he murmured.

“We need to talk,” I said. And the words tasted like ash.

I’m not going to go into detail about the conversation because that isn’t what matters in this story. It was long, it was painful, there were tears and silences and questions that had no good answers. I explained that we were hurting each other, that the distance had turned us into two people who hurt each other more than they cared for each other. He listened. He argued a little. Then he fell silent, staring at the floor.

I left at two in the afternoon. On the bus ride home I put in my headphones and closed my eyes, but I didn’t sleep. Every time I tried, I felt his hands on my waist, his mouth on my pussy, his cock filling me, his voice saying he loved me against my ear. All of it had ended barely four hours earlier, and already it hurt as if years had passed.

Several months have passed since that night. We haven’t spoken again. I know from mutual friends that he’s doing well, that he changed jobs, that he adopted a dog. I’m happy for him, sincerely. But sometimes, at three in the morning when I can’t sleep, my body remembers things my mind tries to forget. The way he looked at me. How he curled his fingers inside me. The way he filled me. That pause before he kissed me.

I know I made the right decision. Relationships aren’t sustained by good sex alone, no matter how extraordinary it is. But if I’m honest—and this is a confession, after all—a part of me wonders whether I’ll ever feel anything like that with someone again. That mixture of anger, tenderness, desire, and sadness that existed only with him.

Probably not. And that’s probably okay.