I Learned My First Time by Spying in the Kitchen

On a Friday in March, the assignment landed on the table at the university bar. A group project on the region’s ecosystems, due Monday first thing. Cami, Vale, Romi, and I looked at each other over our coffees and decided on the only thing we knew how to do: turn the assignment into an excuse.

—I’ve got the country house —Cami said, already fishing for her keys among the notes—. My parents are going to Europe tomorrow for their anniversary. Three whole days for us.

I was nineteen, no longer a virgin, and yet there was one thing I still didn’t dare to do. I thought about it before falling asleep. I imagined it with any boy I liked even a little. But between desire and action there was a gap I didn’t know how to cross. I needed to see in order to understand.

We left the university in Cami’s car and stopped at each of our houses to let our families know and pack our bags. By mid-afternoon we were taking the provincial route with the windows down and the music loud enough to annoy the cars around us.

The country house appeared after a green gate and a road lined with rosebushes. The house was colonial, with moss-colored walls and red tiles, and out front there was a pool with water so clear you could see the tiles at the bottom. On the porch Marta and Hugo, the couple who looked after the property, were waiting for us. They helped us with our bags and then withdrew with the politeness of people used to receiving strangers.

We went upstairs to the bedrooms. There were three, each with its own bathroom, and a hallway opened onto a long balcony overlooking the grounds. Without discussing it, we split into two rooms. I ended up with Romi; Cami and Vale in the one next door.

There was still enough daylight to stretch out on the loungers. We went down in bikinis, sunscreen, and a pitcher of lemonade, and settled onto the deck as if we owned the place. Then we saw him.

Iván was trimming the rosebushes with his torso bare. Cami had told us about him in the car: the caretakers’ son, almost our age, studying veterinary medicine sixty kilometers away and coming back every weekend to help his parents. He had a swimmer’s back and hair that was too long, and he moved among the plants with such concentration that he didn’t so much as glance at us.

—I told you —Cami murmured, without opening her eyes.

—You told me hardly anything —Vale replied.

Romi laughed. I said nothing. I was calculating how long it would take him to look at me and, more importantly, what I was going to do when he did.

At night, Marta and Hugo served us homemade empanadas and a pitcher of red wine on the veranda. Iván had invited two friends from town, who showed up with a guitar and a fire already built at the back of the grounds. Cami asked if we could join them. Marta looked at us as if she already knew the answer.

—Go on, girls. Don’t get in the pool at night.

We crossed the grass barefoot, each with a blanket tucked under one arm. The fire was small and smelled of eucalyptus. Iván set the speaker on a log and turned the volume down until we could hear the crickets. We sat in a circle. I ended up beside him, not by accident.

He barely spoke at first. Then, when the guitar changed hands and the songs started, he leaned toward me and asked my name. I told him Florencia. He said he liked that name. He poured me wine from a bottle he pulled from who knows where and offered me a plastic cup. We talked about animals, about college, about the ridiculous idea of doing serious research on a weekend.

—And if instead of researching I kiss you? —he said at some point, with the most serious face in the world.

—Try it —I answered.

He kissed me. It was a slow kiss, with his hands still, as if he were measuring. Then he took the back of my neck and pressed in deeper. I tasted the wine, felt the heat of the fire on one side of my face and the cool grass on the other. When we pulled apart, he wore the smile of someone who knows he’s won something.

At one-thirty, the girls decided to head up. Iván offered to walk me there. We walked down the rose-lined path hand in hand, without speaking. At the door of my room he kissed me again, pressed against the wood, and slid a hand over my waist. I felt him through his pants. He was hard. I was soaked.

And then we heard the sound.

It came from the kitchen, one floor below, and at first I thought it was the refrigerator. Then came another sound. A muffled, restrained moan. Then a woman’s voice saying something that couldn’t be made out but was understood perfectly.

Iván froze. So did I. We looked at each other. And without saying a word, we went downstairs barefoot.

The kitchen opened onto a large dining room separated by a thick masonry column painted white. The light was off, but a table lamp on the far side cast a long shadow across the tiles. We pressed ourselves against the column. Iván held my hand too tightly.

They were there. Esteban and Lucía. Cami’s parents. He, naked from the waist down, sitting on the edge of the long dining table, shirt open. She, kneeling in front of him, in a robe, the belt undone and her shoulders bare. Lucía had her hands resting on Esteban’s thighs and her face against his groin, and she moved with a calm that was not the calm of someone rushing to finish.

She licked him slowly. Ran her tongue the whole length of him, from bottom to top, and when she reached the tip she took him into her mouth without hurry and went down as far as she could. Then she pulled back, looked at him for a moment, and went again. Esteban had his head thrown back, eyes closed, one hand tangled in her hair, not pulling, only resting there, as if he didn’t want to set the pace but simply be there.

—Not so fast —I heard him say—. Stay there.

Lucía obeyed. She stayed with her mouth closed around the base, kissed him there, and went back up. When she reached the tip, she opened her mouth just a little and let the saliva spill down. Then she took him whole again.

I didn’t realize I was breathing through my mouth. Iván squeezed my hand and guided it to his groin over his pants. I felt him throb against my palm. I leaned in slightly, never taking my eyes off the scene, and started moving my hand.

Esteban groaned softly. Lucía kept going. That slowness was the point, I thought. That pleasure wasn’t about hurrying the tongue, but stretching time. That every pause mattered. That you could look the other person in the face and eat slowly, as if it were a conversation.

We stayed like that for I don’t know how long. Five minutes, ten. Esteban came without warning and she didn’t pull away. She held on, swallowed, kissed him again, and ran her hand over his face as if consoling him. He laughed under his breath. Said something in her ear. Lucía answered with a longer laugh.

Iván and I went back up the stairs without looking at each other. At the door of my room, he pressed me against him one more time and said “tomorrow” in a rough voice. Then he went down the hall.

Romi was already asleep. I got into bed with my panties wet and my heart in my throat, and I touched myself until I came three times before I could close my eyes.

***

The next morning, Cami’s parents left early. We went out onto the porch for breakfast and watched them load the suitcases into the car, thanking Marta for having prepared a thermos of coffee. Lucía looked at me a second longer than necessary. I don’t know if it was a coincidence. I lowered my eyes to my cup.

We did the research with surprising discipline. We walked the grounds taking notes, photographed birds, identified shrubs, found a snake that made us scream and a wasp nest we sidestepped by two meters. Romi carried the notebook. Vale, the phone. Cami, the scientific names she remembered from some manual. I went on thinking about something else, and they all knew it.

—Did you fuck him last night? —Vale asked, while writing down an orchid.

—No.

—But?

—But something.

Cami laughed. Romi looked at me with curiosity. I didn’t tell them about the kitchen. That one I kept to myself.

We had lunch on a barbecue Hugo prepared in the grill house. Iván wasn’t there. Cami told me he’d gone to town to buy something for his mother. He came back in the afternoon, when we were already in the pool, and stood on the veranda for a moment, looking at me without bothering to hide it. I waved at him. He answered with a tilt of his head, as if we had a secret none of the girls knew.

At night, second bonfire. Iván’s friends showed up with beer this time. The moon was huge. We danced on the grass, sang songs none of us knew all the way through, flopped onto our backs to search for shapes in the stars.

Iván beckoned me. We walked down the path until we were outside the circle of firelight. He kissed me against the trunk of an ash tree and slid his hand inside my bikini. His finger found me without effort. I was wet from the moment I saw him cross the grounds.

—I want to go to the kitchen —I told him.

He looked at me, not understanding.

—The kitchen. You and me.

He understood.

We crossed the grass without holding hands so as not to draw attention. We climbed the three steps of the veranda. I pushed open the kitchen door and told him to sit on the edge of the dining table. The same table. The lamp light was still exactly the same, as if it had been waiting for us.

I unbuttoned his jeans without rushing. I spent a long time on my knees, looking at him, without touching him yet. Iván looked at me as if he didn’t know what was about to happen and was afraid to speak. I kissed his thigh, above the knee, and slowly moved up to the beginning of his boxer briefs. I pulled them down.

I did everything I had seen. I started at the base, with my tongue flat, and went up very slowly. When I reached the top, I kissed him the way you kiss a mouth. I took him into my mouth and went down as far as I could, and stayed there for a moment, the way she had. I let him go. Took him again. I changed the rhythm whenever I felt he was about to come. I remembered the pause, remembered the calm, remembered the hand resting in the hair.

Iván didn’t hold out for long. But before he came, he said my name twice, and for the first time I understood why some women speak of pleasure as if it were a power.

I swallowed because I wanted to. I ran my hand over his face the way I’d seen her do. He laughed softly, just like his boss without knowing it. He helped me stand. He kissed my forehead.

—No one had ever done that to me —he said.

—No one had ever done that to me either —I answered.

He lifted his eyebrows. He said nothing.

***

On Sunday afternoon, Cami told us she was staying behind to close up the house with Marta, and that Iván would drive me back to the city. Vale and Romi left in another car with a friend who came to pick them up.

Iván drove with one hand. I was looking out over the fields through the window, my hair still damp from the last dive into the pool. Twenty minutes in, without thinking too much about it, I unbuckled my seat belt and leaned over his lap.

—You’re going to crash —he said.

—You’re not going to crash —I answered.

I unzipped his pants again. This time I knew what I was doing. I took him into my mouth and felt him harden in a matter of seconds. The pause, the tongue, the rhythm. His fingers clenched around the steering wheel. He sped up without meaning to and then let off. I heard him breathing as if it were costing him.

He came before the city. And I, for the first time, understood that I had learned something that was already mine.

When he dropped me at my building, he looked at me for a long moment.

—Good luck with the research —he said.

I smiled.

—I got a nine.

—How do you know?

—I just know.

I climbed the building steps with my notes in one hand and my bag in the other. In the elevator I looked at myself in the mirror. I had the face of someone who had stopped having a single unanswered question.