Camila’s Voice on the Phone That Night

The apartment had been far too quiet since Camila left. Four days in Buenos Aires for a design congress, nothing out of the ordinary, but I had never known how to be alone in that flat that smelled like her everywhere. By the third day I had already learned not to open her closet.

It was nearly eleven-thirty. I had my laptop open on my lap, but for twenty minutes I hadn’t read a single line of the report I was supposed to finish. The bed was half made. The book she’d left on the nightstand was still open to the same page since Tuesday. A graphic novel about a woman who built ships. I don’t know what page it was, but it was the same one.

The phone vibrated on the pillow.

“Hi,” said her voice.

Something in that greeting was different from the previous nights. I don’t know if it was the tone or the pause she left after it, or just that I’d spent three nights waiting for her to call and this time she did it later than usual. But I noticed.

“Hi,” I said. “Did you finish dinner with the people from the congress?”

“A while ago. I’m in the room.”

“What are you doing?”

“Thinking about you.”

I closed the laptop.

“Me?” I said, even though it was a stupid question.

“You,” she repeated. “And what I’d do to you if I were in that bed right now.”

There was a silence. One of those heavy silences. I leaned back against the pillow, not quite knowing what to say. With Camila, that always happened: when she decided something, she decided it all the way, and it took me a moment to understand that it wasn’t a joke or a vague hint. It was exactly what it sounded like.

“Seriously?” was the best I could come up with.

I heard her breathing on the other end. Calm. Self-assured, as always whenever she’d made a decision and there was no going back.

“Turn off the lamp,” she said. “I want you in the dark.”

I turned it off. The room was left only with the light coming in through the blinds from the street, long shadows on the ceiling that shifted every time a car passed. The comforter still smelled of her vanilla shampoo and something else, something green, something I wouldn’t know how to name.

“Done,” I said.

“Good. Now take off your T-shirt.”

I took it off. The apartment air was warm, but I still got a shiver, that kind of shiver that has nothing to do with being cold.

“Tell me,” I asked.

“No.” Her voice sounded almost amused. “You listen and I talk. All right?”

“All right.”

***

Her voice dropped an octave. It slowed down, became more deliberate, as if she were choosing each word before letting it go and measuring its effect before moving on to the next.

“Imagine I walk into the room. You’re wearing your usual thing: sweatpants and nothing else. The room is dark just like now. I’ve come out of the shower, my hair still damp and stuck to my neck, and I sit on the edge of the bed. I don’t say anything yet. I just sit there and look at you.”

I listened. I didn’t speak.

“I look at you for a moment without touching you. And you already know what’s coming, which is why you get tense, that kind of tension that isn’t anxiety but pure anticipation. Do you feel it now?”

I did. It was absurd: she was four thousand kilometers away in a hotel room with air conditioning and a minibar, and I felt her just the same.

“Yes,” I said.

“Put one hand on your chest. Don’t do anything yet, just let it rest there.”

I did.

“Now slide it down slowly. To your stomach. Stop there.”

I stopped.

“That’s it. Tell me how your heart is.”

“Fast.”

“Good,” she said, and I heard her smiling. “That’s how I like it.”

Camila talked for a long while. Not exactly giving instructions, or not only that: she built images in great detail. She described how she would have entered the room, what she’d be wearing, how her skin would smell after the shower, the texture of her damp hair against my neck if I leaned in to kiss her there, just below the ear where I always kissed her first.

“Now imagine I come closer,” she said. “I sit on your lap, slowly, with my knees on either side of your body. No rush. I put my hands on your chest, feel you breathing beneath my palms, and I look at you up close. So close that if I wanted to I could kiss you.”

I swallowed. My whole body was lit up now, my skin tight, my cock hardening under my sweatpants with a maddening slowness.

“I can tell,” she murmured, as if she could see it. “I can tell you’re hard.”

I didn’t answer.

“I want you to slip your hand into the waistband of your pants. Just a little. Touch the fabric, feel how tight it is before you pull it out.”

I slid my fingers in, and the rub against the fabric made me moan softly.

“That’s it,” she said, softer now. “Like that. Now pull your cock out.”

I did. The cool air hit it hard and my thighs prickled.

“It’s hot, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve got it hard for me and I’m not even there. God, I fucking love that.”

That tone of hers, so direct, squeezed me even tighter inside.

“Now grab it with your right hand. From the base. Slowly. Don’t squeeze too hard yet.”

I did. It felt heavy, firm, throbbing in my palm.

“There. Slide your hand up and then back down. I want to hear how you’re breathing.”

My breathing was already a mess. I did as she asked, slow at first, and then a little faster when she let out a small moan on the other end of the line.

“I love when you obey yourself,” she said. “I love hearing you touch yourself like that, as if I were watching you.”

She spoke with a calm that was almost cruel, and I got lost in that voice of hers that kept setting the rhythm for me.

“Imagine I lower my hand too. That I touch you slowly, without hurry, as if I didn’t know your body by heart but wanted to learn it anyway. Like the first time, but without the nerves of the first time.”

I did what she described. The shadows on the ceiling kept shifting.

“Good?” she asked after a moment.

“Very good,” I said, and this time my voice came out different, lower.

“I know,” she murmured. “I can hear you.”

There was something in that that threw me off more than anything she’d said before. That she was listening to me. That from the other end of the phone she was reading my breathing the same way I was reading hers.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

“Listening to you,” she answered. “And the same as you, more or less.”

The image of her in that hotel room, alone, thinking of me, the phone close by and her eyes perhaps closed. That affected me more than everything she’d described up to then.

“Camila…”

“Shhh. Don’t stop.”

***

I didn’t stop.

She kept talking. She described things we’d done together, variations, concrete moments the two of us remembered. One afternoon in the apartment when the power went out in the whole building and we spent two hours in the dark without either of us looking for candles. One night after dinner with friends when we got home laughing at something I can’t remember now and ended up naked in the hallway before we even reached the bedroom.

“Do you remember that night?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“The hallway one.”

“Yes, Camila.”

“Imagine it’s that night. That I’ve just kicked the door shut and I’m looking at you. Still wearing my coat. And you know exactly what’s coming.”

I remembered. The memory was vivid: her in the green coat, laughing at something, and then suddenly not laughing.

Her breathing on the other end of the phone had changed. Shorter. Closer to the microphone.

“Now,” she said, and her voice sounded different, tense in a different way. “Now don’t stop.”

I didn’t stop.

“I want to see you jerk off,” she whispered. “I want to imagine your hand going up and down your dick, steady, shameless. I want you to touch yourself like you’re already putting it in my mouth.”

The sentence hit me like a jolt. I leaned my head back on the pillow and spread my legs wider, rubbing the head with my thumb, feeling the pre-cum wet the tip.

“That’s it,” she panted, and now she sounded seized by the same hunger that was tearing my body apart. “Show me how you get when you grip it like that.”

I shifted my underwear aside so I wouldn’t make a mess and slid my hand from the base almost to the head, slowly, squeezing just enough to feel every vein under my fingers. The bed creaked under me as I arched my hips. On the phone, Camila was breathing harder.

“Are you touching your ass too?” she asked suddenly, with a voice that had nothing soft left in it.

“No.”

“Then do it. Put two fingers in. I want you to feel how it opens a little. I want you to know what it feels like to be filled with something more than your own hand.”

My thumb kept moving on my cock while the fingers of my other hand sank between my ass cheeks, sliding along the fold to the opening of my asshole. I was surprised by how strongly my body responded to that single pressure. I moaned louder.

“There,” she said. “That’s how I like it. Open for me.”

I heard her swallow. I imagined her now with her back against the hotel wall, one hand between her legs, eyes closed, watching herself come apart.

“Camila…”

“Not yet.”

Her voice had lowered again, but now it wasn’t calm. It was control by a thread.

“I want you to remember my mouth on your neck. The way I bite you right where it makes you tremble. I’m going to suck you slowly first, all of it in my mouth, until you can’t take it anymore. Then I’m going to ride you and take you all the way down, with my cunt soaking wet, so you can hear me swallowing your cock like a fucking son of a bitch.”

The heat surged up my chest and stole my breath. I was jerking off without thinking now, my forearm moving fast, the slick head brushing my palm on every stroke. My hips moved on their own, searching for more friction.

“Yes,” I said, almost voiceless.

“Yes what?”

“Yes, fuck.”

She let out a short laugh, broken by desire.

“That’s it. I want you dirtier.”

Then, for a few seconds that felt like minutes, she didn’t speak. She only breathed. And I understood that she was touching herself too, maybe with the same force with which I was going over the edge. That idea finished undoing me.

“Now imagine I lean over you,” she said at last. “That I take your cock with both hands and guide it against my cunt, soaking wet, throbbing. I feel you push and I stop you for a second, just to make you wait. I look you in the eyes and jam it into me all at once. All the way in.”

The image blew my head apart. My thighs trembled. I kept moving faster, filthier, until the foreskin started pulling at the skin and my breathing became a series of short grunts.

“Give me that,” she ordered. “Give me the cum.”

I couldn’t hold on much longer. With a rough groan I came over my stomach, hot and thick, staining my skin and the elastic of my pants. I kept rubbing myself by inertia while the spasms emptied me and she kept talking to me.

“That’s it. Fuck, yes. So good. I want to see you like that when I get back. Full of me before I even really touch you.”

And then everything else was easy. Everything was exactly what it had to be.

***

After that there was a long silence neither of us broke for a good while. The apartment was still dark. The street outside still hummed with the constant noise of cars and the occasional distant motorcycle. My eyes were open, staring at the ceiling and thinking about nothing in particular, which is one of the best ways to think.

“Hi,” Camila said after a while.

“Hi,” I said.

She laughed. And I laughed too, not really knowing why but unable to stop myself.

“I miss the bed,” she said.

“The bed misses you.”

“Just the bed?”

“Also the book you left open on the nightstand.”

“Is it still on the same page?”

“Exactly the same one.”

“Good. Don’t close it.”

“I won’t close it.”

There was another pause, shorter this time. The kind of pause that isn’t awkward but the opposite.

“Marcos.”

“Yeah?”

“This isn’t the same as being there.”

“No,” I admitted.

“But it’s not bad.”

“It’s not bad at all,” I said. “When do you get back?”

“Sunday at three. Will you pick me up?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” And another pause. “Good night.”

“Good night.”

She hung up.

I stayed still for a while, the phone resting on my chest, staring at the shadows on the ceiling still moving with the cars in the street. The apartment was still silent. Camila’s book was still open to the same page. The comforter still smelled of vanilla and that other thing I couldn’t name.

But the room felt different. Less alone, maybe. Or alone in a different way, which isn’t the same thing.

On Sunday she arrived on time, as she always does when she promises something. At three ten she appeared at the arrivals gate with her carry-on and her hair loose, looking for me among the people with her eyes a little narrowed the way she always did in bright places. When she found me, she lifted a hand and smiled, and I remembered her voice in the dark and thought that some distances shrink in ways nobody warns you about ahead of time.

“Hi,” I said when she reached my side.

“Hi,” she answered, and it was exactly the same tone as that night.

I took her suitcase. She took my hand. And we left the airport without saying anything else, which was exactly what was needed.