My Mother’s Best Friend Taught Me How to Feel

I still don’t know how to explain what happened that afternoon. When I remember it, I have trouble separating shame from desire, because both arrived at the same time and stuck together. I was eighteen and thought I knew myself. It turned out I knew nothing.

The one who taught me was Renata, my mother’s best friend. They had known each other since adolescence, had grown up in the same neighborhood, and to me she had always been a sort of honorary aunt who showed up for birthdays and stayed late drinking wine in the kitchen. She was nearly forty, divorced, childless, and carried the quiet certainty that she would reach old age alone. Twenty years separated us. Never, not even during my worst bouts of insomnia, would it have occurred to me that what ended up happening between us could happen.

There’s something I have to confess first, because without it none of this makes sense. At eighteen, I had never gone all the way with anyone. I’d gone out with a couple of guys, kissed, had clumsy hands in the back seat of a car, but I had never lost my virginity and, what weighed on me most, I had never had an orgasm. Not alone, not with someone else. I was beginning to believe there was something broken inside me.

The closest I ever came was with Tomás, a guy my age, handsome, attentive, one of those people who seemed to come highly recommended. We were alone at his house that afternoon.

“Are you comfortable?” he asked me every two minutes.

“Yes,” I lied, even though inside I was anywhere but there.

He sat me down on a couch, knelt between my legs, lifted my skirt with a patience I hadn’t asked for, and pulled my panties down to my ankles. He began licking my pussy slowly, from bottom to top, parting my lips with his fingers, sucking my clitoris as if he knew by heart where to touch. He did everything right. That was the problem. He did everything right and I kept staring at the ceiling, counting the cracks, waiting for some sign from my own body that never came.

“Tell me what you like,” he whispered, his mouth still glistening with saliva.

I didn’t know what to say. I had no idea what I liked. He took off his shirt, lowered his pants and boxers, and I found myself staring at his erect, thick, tense cock pressed against his navel without feeling anything at all. He grasped it and ran it over my lips, rested it against the entrance to my pussy to see whether I was wet. I wasn’t. He insisted with two fingers, trying to open me, and only managed to make me tense up even more. After a long while he sat up, frustrated, and I was even more frustrated than he was. Since I hadn’t gotten wet, I wouldn’t let him inside either; I was sure it would hurt. That was the last time he called me, and I understood. Nobody wants to waste an afternoon with someone who seems made of stone.

***

I could never talk about these things with my mother. Not because she was unkind, but because between us those subjects were covered by a layer of silence neither of us knew how to break. So one day, almost without thinking, I ended up talking about it with Renata.

It was at her apartment, one of those afternoons when my mother had sent her to pick me up and we stayed there alone, waiting for her to get off work. Renata asked me about my life, about the guys, with that natural ease of hers that judged nothing, and suddenly I heard myself telling her everything. About Tomás. About my body not responding. About my fear that I was defective.

“You’re not broken,” she told me, and she said it so confidently that I almost believed her. “You’re waiting to feel safe. Those are two different things.”

From that afternoon on, we saw each other more and more. Renata became my refuge. She bought me books, recommended things to read, sent me accounts to follow, talked to me about pleasure as if she were talking about the weather, without solemnity or prurience. She explained concrete things to me: how to touch my clitoris with two fingers in circles, how to put a finger inside and look for that rough spot toward the front, how to learn to make myself come before asking anyone else to bring me off. And I, who had never had anyone to tell my fantasies to, began telling her mine. All of them. Without filters, without taboos, certain that nothing was wrong when I was with her.

What I didn’t realize was that those conversations were changing her too.

She confessed it to me much later, when there was nothing left to hide. Those afternoons had stirred up things she thought she had buried. That at almost forty, divorced and resigned, she had begun to suspect that perhaps her path lay beside another woman. What she had never imagined was that woman would be an eighteen-year-old girl. Her best friend’s daughter.

***

Words carry a weight you don’t measure. I told her my fantasies without realizing that, by doing so, I was planting them in her too. And alone in my room at night, I began to notice that whenever I remembered the things Renata had told me, the body that had never responded began to respond. Barely, like a murmur. But it was there. I would slip my hand beneath my panties and find myself wet for the first time, my fingers sliding between the lips of my pussy, and although I couldn’t make myself come, I felt that something was moving inside me that had once been dead.

Later I learned that the same thing was happening to her. That she masturbated thinking about me. That she imagined me naked, my tits bare and my legs spread, while she pushed two fingers inside herself and sucked them, imagining they tasted like me. That she remembered the times we had gone to the pool together, or that afternoon when I accompanied her to buy underwear and she, without my noticing, looked at me more than she should have, watching my nipples show beneath the fabric, the curve of my ass when I turned around. Her fantasies were broader than mine, more detailed, filled with things I didn’t even know how to name: how she imagined eating my pussy until she made me scream, how she would ride my face so I would suck her swollen lips, how she wanted us to come together, rubbing pussy against pussy. The experience I lacked, she had in abundance.

We didn’t talk about it or plan it on the day it happened. It had simply been imagined so many times that it already seemed to have happened.

Renata had texted me that afternoon. A stupid question, whether my mother had arrived home yet. I told her no, that I was alone, that she wouldn’t be back until the evening.

“I’m coming over,” she replied.

Three words. I read them and my mouth went dry. Something about the way she wrote them told me she wasn’t coming over for tea. I could already feel her between my legs before she rang the bell.

***

I opened the door and there was no greeting. She kissed me before I could say hello, and I kissed her back as if I had been practicing my whole life. It wasn’t a gentle kiss. It was the kind that collects weeks of waiting, with her tongue thrust deep, biting my lips, hands searching beneath my clothes, squeezing my tits over my bra, without permission because neither of us needed it.

“Wait,” I managed to say, breathless.

“No,” she answered against my neck, and she was right.

She slid one hand inside my shorts and felt my pussy through my panties. The fabric was already soaked, and she let out a hoarse moan when she felt it.

“Look how you’ve been waiting for me,” she said in my ear, her voice changed, deeper. “Look how wet your cunt is.”

No one had ever spoken to me like that. My knees went weak.

We went up the stairs stumbling, laughing and breathing hard at the same time. We stripped each other along the way, one item of clothing on every step, as if we were leaving a trail behind us. By the time we reached my room, there was almost nothing left to take off. She was in a black bra and panties; I was naked except for the panties she tore off me in the doorway. I didn’t feel a trace of the shame I had felt with Tomás. With him I had hidden myself. With her I didn’t want to hide anything. I watched her breasts when she unclasped her bra—bigger than mine, slightly sagging, with dark, hard nipples—and felt my mouth water without deciding to.

Renata gently pushed me onto the bed and stood there for a second, looking at me, running her eyes over me before her hands did. She opened my legs with one knee and stayed there, gazing at my pussy spread open for her.

“You have such a pretty cunt,” she murmured. “Pink, tiny. I’ve wanted to eat it for months.”

“Relax,” she added afterward, in another voice, gentler. “You don’t have to do anything. Today, just feel.”

And for the first time in my life, I obeyed my body instead of my head.

She began with my mouth, with a deep, lingering kiss, then moved down my neck, leaving marks with her teeth. She paused at my breasts with a slowness that made me arch my back without meaning to: she sucked one nipple into her mouth, squeezed it between her teeth, then moved to the other, tugging at them, leaving them hard and shining with saliva. She licked my sternum, my navel, the fine line of hair descending toward my pubic mound. Everything she did came with her voice; she asked me quietly what I was feeling, just as Tomás had that afternoon, but this time I had answers. This time my body spoke before I did.

“There,” I begged, and I didn’t recognize my own tone. “Renata, please, there.”

She lowered herself between my legs and opened my pussy lips with her thumbs, with a calm that was killing me. She came so slowly that I felt her breath before her tongue. When she finally licked me, she did it from bottom to top, in one long, hungry stroke, ending with a firm kiss on my clitoris. I thought I was going to cry from sheer relief. It wasn’t pain, it wasn’t waiting, it wasn’t a ceiling full of cracks.

“You taste so good,” she said with her mouth full of me. “You’re sweet, baby. You’re sweet.”

And she buried her face in me again. She sucked my clitoris with her lips, released it, tapped it with the tip of her tongue, and every so often went down to the entrance of my pussy and penetrated me with her whole tongue, sliding it in and out like a small, eager cock. She slipped one finger inside me slowly, curling it inward, searching for something she knew better than I did. When she found it, I understood what she had been talking about all those months: a rough spot that made me lift my hips off the bed when she pressed it.

“There,” I gasped. “There, there, don’t stop.”

She inserted a second finger. Then a third. She moved them inside me in a steady rhythm while continuing to suck my clitoris without pause, with an even suction that never let up. It was something that grew from within and spread like a current, slow at first, then unstoppable. I squeezed my breasts with my hands, pinched my nipples, felt my whole body tense toward a single point. My thighs closed on their own around her head. I grabbed her hair and pulled it without meaning to, and she moaned against my pussy, and that vibration was what finally broke me.

I came. For the first time, at last, I knew what I had been searching for all those years. It was a wave that began in my clitoris, shot inward, rose through my belly and shook me all the way to my toes. I let out a scream I hadn’t believed I could release. I felt my pussy contracting around her fingers, squeezing them, wetting them, and she left them there, still, feeling me slowly come down.

The moans escaped me without my being able to contain them. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything. I was discovering that I wasn’t broken, that I had never been broken, that all I had been missing was this place, this person, this certainty that I was safe.

“Look at me,” Renata asked from below, her mouth and chin shining with my juices, and I opened my eyes and looked at her, and that made it even more intense.

Still trembling, I pulled her upward. I wanted to taste her. I found her mouth and sucked my own flavor from her lips, then pushed her so she would sit on my face. She didn’t hesitate. She settled astride me, removed her black panties, and lowered her pussy onto my mouth. She was soaked, as wet as I was or wetter, her lips swollen and her scent strong and heavy. I stuck out my tongue and licked her without really knowing what I was doing, guided by what she had just done to me.

“That’s it, my love,” she guided me, moving slowly over my mouth. “Suck my clitoris. There. That’s it. Just like that, my girl, just like that.”

I grabbed her ass with both hands and pulled her against me. She began to move, riding my face, gasping harder and harder. I felt her pussy pulsing against my tongue, saliva and her wetness mixing and running down my chin. She came within a few minutes, with a long moan, squeezing my head between her thighs, and I kept licking her until she laughingly asked me to stop.

She slid down, lay on her side, and hugged me, pressing her whole body against mine. We were still breathing hard. She draped one leg over me, and I felt her wet pussy against my thigh, and something stirred inside me again, with an urgency that no longer knew fear.

“Again,” I begged without shame. “Renata, again.”

She laughed softly and climbed on top of me, positioning herself so that her pussy pressed against mine. She began to move, rubbing herself against me, and the friction was an immediate jolt: clitoris against clitoris, lips against lips, sliding against each other because we were both so wet. I gripped her hips and helped her keep the rhythm. She leaned forward to take one of my tits into her mouth, and I lifted my hips to meet her, and like that, scissoring, we began to climb together.

“Come with me,” she said through clenched teeth. “Come with me, come on.”

And I came. Again. And she came with me, on top of me, moaning into my mouth.

So intensely that neither of us heard the car in the driveway. Or the key in the lock. Or the footsteps on the stairs, which we later learned had been quick because my mother had been following the sounds from downstairs.

The bedroom door flew open.

And there she was.

Time split in two. Renata was still on top of me, her pussy pressed to mine, both of us naked and soaked, me still trembling, frozen in an image my mother would never be able to erase. Her face went from bewilderment to fury in less than a second.

“How is this possible?” Her voice was barely a thread, worse than a scream. “I suspected it. All those calls, all those meetings. Since when? Since when have you two been doing this?”

Neither of us answered her. Renata slowly sat up, looking for something to cover herself with, and I curled up against the wall, my heart still pounding for two reasons I no longer knew how to separate.

And that’s the most confusing part of all. Because that night I should have felt nothing but shame. The shame of my mother discovering the relationship I had been carrying on for weeks with her childhood friend, a woman twenty years older than me. And I did feel it, of course I did.

But beneath the shame, stubborn and impossible to extinguish, something else was still throbbing. The certainty that my body finally worked. That something inside me had awakened and had no intention of going back to sleep. That whatever happened with my mother, with Renata, with everything that lay ahead, I was no longer the same broken girl who counted cracks in the ceiling.

I still don’t know how to explain what happened that afternoon. But if I learned anything, it’s that desire doesn’t understand plans, or ages, or who is supposed to feel it for whom. It arrives when you feel safe. And mine arrived at the worst possible moment, in the wrong arms, in the most forbidden way. And even so, I wouldn’t change it for anything.