The Visit to My Friend I Shouldn’t Tell You About

Valeria and I had known each other since university. More than ten years of friendship, the kind that survives moves, new partners, and long distances. She married Marcos four years ago, an engineer who worked on oil platforms off the coast. Every rotation took him away from home for two or three months. At first she handled it well. She went out with the group, organized dinners, showed up to every plan. But when the baby was born, eight months ago now, we stopped seeing her.

We knew she was there, of course. She sent pictures of the boy to the WhatsApp group, replied with emojis, sometimes dropped a long voice note saying she wasn’t sleeping. But she didn’t go out. And nobody went to see her, because all of us had lives full of things that seemed more urgent.

One Saturday morning she wrote to me privately. “If you don’t come, no one will,” the message said. Marcos had left on another rotation two weeks earlier. She’d been alone with the boy for fourteen days, with no company but her mother’s calls and the odd stray audio from the group. I told her I’d come after lunch. I bought a ridiculous stuffed toy in a shop on the way and showed up at her door at four in the afternoon.

She opened it with the baby propped on her hip and her hair tied up in a bun that was slipping down one side. She wore a gray T-shirt that had slid off one shoulder and faded cotton shorts. She wasn’t wearing makeup. She didn’t need it. Valeria had always had that kind of beauty that works better without adornment: high cheekbones, dark eyes, a mouth that smiled easily and made you feel like the most important person in the room. After the pregnancy her body had changed, but not for the worse. Her hips were a little wider, her breasts fuller, her skin with that particular glow recent motherhood gives. The shorts clung to her ass in a way that made me look away faster than I would have liked.

“Come in, come in, I’ve got coffee ready,” she said, stepping aside from the door.

The house smelled like baby cologne and something sweet I couldn’t identify. She set the boy in the living-room bouncy seat and poured us two cups without asking how I wanted mine. We sat on the sofa, each in a corner, as we had hundreds of times before. But something was different. There was a new silence between us, a space that had once been filled by the other friends, overlapping conversations, background music, and now sat empty.

The conversation started where it always started: the baby, work, the group gossip, who had hooked up with whom at the last dinner she’d missed. But little by little it sank into layers we usually didn’t touch. She told me about the sleepless nights, the exhaustion no nap could fix, how she felt her body no longer belonged to her. And then she told me about Marcos.

“When he calls, he only asks about the boy,” she said, looking into the bottom of her cup. “How much has he eaten, whether he slept well, whether he has a fever. He doesn’t ask anything about me. Not how I am, not what I need, not whether I feel lonely.”

“He probably takes it for granted. That you’re okay, I mean.”

“That’s the problem. He takes it for granted.”

She fell silent for a moment, running her thumb along the rim of the cup.

“Sometimes I think I’ve become invisible,” she added without looking at me. “Like I’m just another appliance in this house. Useful, functional, but no one sees me. It’s been four months since he fucked me, you know? Four months. And before that, the same again because of the pregnancy, or whatever it was for him. He doesn’t even jerk me off anymore.”

I didn’t know how to answer that. I put my hand on her knee and squeezed for a second, a gesture that between us had always been harmless, comforting. But this time she looked at me with an expression I had never seen before. It wasn’t sadness exactly. It was something deeper, hungrier. As if she’d gone months without anyone touching her in such a simple way, and that small contact had opened a crack she hadn’t known was there.

The baby started to wriggle and whimper. Valeria lifted him from the bouncy seat, cradled him for a moment against her chest, and looked at me uncertainly.

“I have to breastfeed him. Do you mind?”

“Of course not. You’re in your house.”

“I know, but some people get weird about this stuff.”

“I’m not some people,” I said. “I think it’s the most natural thing in the world. And if I’m being honest, you’re in incredible shape for what you’ve been carrying around these past months. So don’t worry about me.”

Something changed in her expression when I said that. A brief flash, almost imperceptible, like pushing a door you expected to be locked and having it give.

She pulled her T-shirt over her head in one motion and let it fall over the back of the sofa. She wasn’t wearing a bra. It was such a fluid gesture, so matter-of-fact, that it took me a couple of seconds to process that she was sitting in front of me with her torso completely bare. Her tits were generous, full, with taut skin and areolas darkened and widened by breastfeeding. Her nipples were hard, swollen, pointing slightly upward under the weight. The boy found the nipple with his open mouth and latched on instantly. Valeria let out a sigh of relief.

“Thank God,” she said, sounding tired. “I’m sick of having to police myself in my own house because of what other people might think.”

I tried to keep my eyes on her face. I didn’t quite manage it. She noticed.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said with a half smile, without lifting her eyes from the baby.

“Like what?”

“Like you’ve never seen tits in your life.”

I laughed. So did she. The tension loosened for a moment, but underneath the humor there was something that wasn’t dissolving. Something warm and heavy had settled between us without asking permission. I could already feel my cock waking up against the fabric of my pants, blood rushing downward without asking me either.

“You look amazing, seriously,” I said. “It’s hard to believe you had a baby eight months ago.”

“That’s because you don’t see the dark circles up close.”

“The dark circles give you an interesting edge.”

Her cheeks colored. It had been a long time since anyone had said something like that to her, and it showed in the way she looked away, in how she bit her lower lip so she wouldn’t smile too much. I felt I’d given her something she needed more than coffee or conversation: the certainty that someone was looking at her as a woman, not as a mother.

The baby let go of the right breast and she switched him to the left. A thin thread of milk ran down the curve of the breast that had been left free. She wiped it with the back of her hand, but not all of it. The drop slid down to the lower part of the breast and disappeared into the fold of skin. The right nipple, now vacant, was still hard, wet, gleaming under the afternoon light with a warm bead showing at the tip.

I shouldn’t be looking at this like this.

But I couldn’t stop. And she knew it.

“What?” she said in a tone that was no longer casual. “You want a taste too?”

She said it half as a joke. But her eyes weren’t joking. There was an invitation disguised as humor, thrown into the air, waiting to see if I’d catch it or let it drop as if nothing had happened.

“Would you let me?” I replied, and my voice sounded lower than usual.

She didn’t answer with words. She took her free breast in her hand, lifted it, and offered it to me, squeezing the flesh with her fingers until another thick drop appeared at the nipple. She held my gaze without blinking.

I moved closer slowly, giving her time to pull back. She didn’t. I covered the nipple with my lips and the first thing I felt was the milk, warm, with a soft sweetness unlike anything I could describe. I sucked carefully and the milk filled my mouth, overflowed it, slid from the corner of my lips and down my chin to my neck.

“What a mess,” she said, laughing, but her hand was already at the back of my neck, pushing me against her. “Suck harder. Like you’re milking me yourself.”

I did as she said. I sealed my lips around the entire areola and pulled with my mouth, sucking until I felt the hot stream fill my palate. Valeria threw her head back and let out a low groan, one of those that escape without warning, straight from the throat. I ran my tongue around the nipple, drawing circles, feeling the blue veins crossing her skin. I pressed it between my lips. I bit gently, barely brushing it with my teeth, and felt her whole body tense, felt her hold her breath and then let it out in a long gasp.

“Fuck, I needed this so badly,” she whispered. “You have no idea how much I needed it.”

The baby had fallen asleep in her other arm, mouth slightly open, breathing deep. Valeria stood carefully, laid him in the bouncy seat, covered him with the blanket, and checked that he was still asleep. Then she closed the sliding door separating the living room from the hallway, leaving the boy on the other side. When she turned back to me, there was no trace of joking or doubt left in her expression.

She sat beside me. Right up against me. One knee on the sofa and her torso still bare, her tits swaying slightly with each movement. She put her hand on my thigh and slid it upward slowly, never taking her eyes off mine, until her fingers brushed the bulge in my pants. She closed her hand over it, squeezed, and smiled when she felt how hard I was.

“And what about me?” she said softly. “Aren’t you going to give me anything? You’re going to leave me like this after I’ve fed you?”

The sentence hung between us for a second. I felt the pressure of her hand on my groin and blood pounding in my ears. I’d been hard for a while already. Since before I touched her breast. Maybe since she opened the door in that T-shirt slipping off her shoulder. Without thinking any more, I unbuttoned my pants, pulled my underwear down to my thighs, and took myself out. My cock sprang up against my stomach, swollen, hard, the tip already damp.

Valeria looked down. Her lips parted without her noticing. She licked them slowly.

“What a cock you’ve been hiding,” she murmured. “And I didn’t know all these years.”

She leaned over me and gripped me at the base with one hand. She started with a slow lick from bottom to tip, taking her time, feeling things out. Her broad, wet tongue traced the vein underneath up to the glans. She closed her lips around the head and sucked once, twice, testing it. Then she took me all the way in, in one fluid motion that made me grab the sofa cushion and let out a groan.

“Fuck, Valeria…”

She knew exactly what she was doing. She alternated deep sucks, swallowing me until I could feel the tip against the back of her throat, with long passes of her flat tongue, moving all the way up the length to the tip and back down again. Her hand accompanied what her lips couldn’t reach, twisting at the base, squeezing just enough. She breathed through her nose, steady, unhurried, as if she had the whole afternoon ahead of her and no intention of wasting it.

Suddenly she pulled off with a wet pop and looked up at me from below with lips shining with saliva.

“How much are you going to cum, huh?” she said, stroking me slowly with her hand. “With all you’ve got stored up, I can tell it’s going to be a lot. I want all of it in my mouth, you hear me? You’re not wasting a drop.”

“All yours,” I managed to say.

She took me in again. Now without mercy. She lowered her head until her nose touched my pubic hair, and stayed there for a few seconds, swallowing with her throat pressed against the glans. When she lifted her head, a thread of saliva hung from her lower lip to the tip of my cock. She broke it with her thumb and put it in her mouth. Then she went lower, cupped my balls in her hand, and started massaging them gently while focusing on the head, sucking me like I was a candy, circling the glans with her tongue.

I brushed the hair out of her face to see her better. Her eyes were half-lidded and the concentration in her expression was tremendously erotic. I stroked her cheek with my thumb and she opened her eyes to look up at me, lips stretched around my cock and an expression that mixed desire and challenge. That image alone almost finished me: my ten-year friend, recent mother, tits still out and dripping milk, eating me like she’d been hungry for this for months.

I let her set the pace at first, enjoying every variation, every calculated pause, every suck that ran through my whole body. But then something changed inside me. I held her head with both hands, fingers in her hair, and started moving my hips into her, slowly at first, then with more intent. Valeria didn’t pull away. She loosened her jaw, stuck out her tongue to make room for me, closed her eyes, and let me fuck her mouth at my own rhythm. Each thrust a little deeper. Each gag of hers muffled against my cock. Each guttural moan a vibration running through me from top to bottom.

Saliva was already streaming down her chin, dripping in thick drops onto her milk-wet tits. The nonexistent eye makeup had run with the tears coming from forcing her throat. And still she kept looking up at me each time she opened her eyes, with that challenging expression of “give me more, don’t hold back.”

“I’m going to cum,” I warned her, giving her the chance to pull away. “Valeria, I’m about to cum.”

She didn’t pull away. She sped up. I felt her squeeze the base with her hand while her mouth swallowed me to the hilt, and I came in a long spasm, emptying myself down her throat. She swallowed the first spurt in one gulp, without blinking. The second slipped out at the corner because she hadn’t pulled off far enough. On the third she relaxed her lips and let the rest spill onto her tongue, across her palate, onto her gums, to taste it. She took it all without a trace of discomfort, her eyes locked on mine, swallowing little by little, never stopping sucking me until I stopped shaking. When she released me, she slid me out slowly, gave the tip one last wet kiss, and wiped the corner of her lip with her thumb. She sucked that too. Then she leaned back on the sofa like someone who had just finished a coffee.

“Fuck,” she whispered with a half smile. “You had a lot stored up too.”

***

I stayed still for a moment, hands on my thighs, trying to get my breathing back to normal. The baby was still asleep behind the sliding door. The kitchen clock kept ticking as always. The same golden midafternoon light came through the window. Everything was exactly the same as before, and we both knew it wasn’t at all.

I went to the bathroom. I splashed cold water on my face and looked at myself in the mirror without really knowing what I was looking for. When I returned to the living room, Valeria had put her T-shirt back on and was pouring another round of coffee. She asked if I’d seen the latest season of a series we both watched. I said no. She recommended it. We talked about a new restaurant that had opened in the neighborhood and a trip the group was organizing for the October holiday.

As if the last twenty minutes had never happened.

She walked me to the door when I left. The baby was still asleep in the bouncy seat, mouth slightly open and fists clenched. We looked at each other a second longer than necessary.

“Come by more often,” she said, leaning against the door frame. “It does me good to have company. And next time, if you feel like it, we won’t stop halfway.”

“Whenever you want,” I replied.

And I meant it completely.

I went downstairs without looking back. In the car I sat for a couple of minutes with my hands on the steering wheel, not starting the engine, staring at the façade of her building. I didn’t feel guilty. I also didn’t feel like I’d crossed a line. I felt like that line had never really existed between us, that it had been drawn in chalk on the floor for years, and that on that Saturday afternoon we simply stopped pretending it was there.