Mariela Called Me When She Was Home Alone

I had just turned eighteen when I joined the theater workshop at the neighborhood cultural center. I went two afternoons a week, after getting off work, and at first I had a hard time recognizing myself among so many strangers. The first performance was scheduled for December, and rehearsals moved forward with that strange mix of laughter, nerves, and sideways glances.

That was where I met her. Her name was Mariela and she was exactly my age, although she seemed older by the way she moved: with calm confidence, unhurried. She had cinnamon-colored skin, chestnut hair down to her shoulders, coffee-colored eyes that narrowed when she smiled. She wasn’t very tall, maybe five foot four, but she had long, firm legs, full breasts, and hips that announced themselves before she did in every hallway. When she wore a skirt and bent down to pick a script up off the floor, I lost the thread of the scene.

I remember her perfectly that first afternoon. She was wearing a dark blue dress that cut off her leg a little above the knee, and the neckline showed the beginning of a black bra. I gave her my hand to introduce myself, she leaned in to kiss my cheek, and I felt the warm brush of her perfume against my neck. It gave me an instant erection, so absurd and so honest that I had to sit in the nearest chair to hide it.

Mariela was polite, attentive, easy to laugh. She talked to everyone and didn’t seem particularly interested in me, but luckily the director put us in the same scene, and that forced me to see her almost every day. We started leaving rehearsals together. I walked her to the bus stop, then to the corner of her house, then inside to have tea. Some afternoons we sat in a café on the avenue and kept talking until they closed.

—You’re weird —she told me once, stirring her coffee—. You get nervous every time I laugh.

—It’s because you have a dangerous laugh.

She bit her lip and looked down. I learned that gesture of hers: when she liked something and didn’t want to admit it, she would bite her lower lip and look at the table. I was going to see it a thousand more times in the months that followed.

The trust grew in layers. First we talked about family, the workshop, school. Then, without really knowing how, the conversations started slipping into another territory. One Thursday night, in her living room, with the lights low and an old record playing in the background, she asked me what my first time had been like.

—I didn’t have one —I answered—. I haven’t been with anyone yet.

Mariela looked at me for a long moment. Not mockingly, not with surprise: with a kind of relief, as if a weight had just been lifted.

—Me neither —she said—. Never.

There was a strange silence, neither uncomfortable nor comfortable. She kept talking. She told me she touched herself sometimes, that she imagined scenes, that she had a favorite position under the sheet when everyone was asleep. She spoke without shame, in an almost clinical tone, looking me in the eye. I returned the favor: I told her I masturbated too, that I thought about her sometimes, that that very confession was driving me crazy at that moment. When I left her house that night I had wet underwear and my head on another planet. I got home walking slowly, not wanting the sensation to end.

***

The following Saturday, around eight at night, my cell phone rang. It was her. She was bored, she said. Her parents had gone to visit an aunt in another city, her brother was out with his girlfriend, and the house was empty.

—Do you want to come over? —she asked—. I don’t feel like being alone.

I said yes before I even thought about it. I showered, changed my T-shirt three times, and went out into the street with my heart pounding against my ribs. I got off the bus two blocks away and walked those two blocks like I was about to take an exam.

When she opened the door, I almost forgot to say hello. She was wearing a short skirt, much shorter than any I had seen on her before, and a thin cotton blouse, without a bra, that hinted at everything underneath. Her hair fell wet over her shoulders, freshly out of the shower. She smelled like coconut and something else, something warmer.

—Come in —she said, without her usual smile. This time it was something else, a smile more from the inside.

We went up to her room. She was tidying up a mess of clothes she had on the bed, she explained. I walked up the stairs behind her, and when I looked up I caught my breath: the skirt barely covered what it had to cover, and every step was a little hell. By the time we reached the room, I had such a visible erection that hiding it was pointless. She looked at me, looked down, and said nothing. She only bit her lip.

She started folding T-shirts on the bed. I sat in a chair in the corner, trying to focus on anything that wasn’t the outline of her legs. In one movement, she bumped her hip against the corner of the nightstand and let out a groan.

—Ow.

She sat on the bed, rubbing her thigh. I stood up before thinking.

—Want me to help?

—Yes. Here, look. Right above the knee.

I knelt on the floor in front of her. I put both hands on her thigh and started rubbing, slowly. Her skin was warm, soft, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from hers. I went up very gradually, with some made-up excuse about circulation, about blood, about warming the muscle. Every centimeter was a new decision. She was breathing harder. So was I.

—Better?

—Better —she murmured.

My hand kept going up. It reached the fold where her leg met her hip, and a little higher, until it brushed the fabric of her underwear. She was wet. Soaked. I pulled my hand away for a second, not knowing if it was the right thing, and she grabbed my wrist.

—Sorry —she said softly—. I couldn’t help it. I’ve been like this for a while.

That sentence finished burning me alive. I kissed her. I put my hand behind her neck and kissed her like I had imagined a thousand times, and she answered the same way, parting her lips, letting my tongue in. It was a clumsy and voracious kiss at once, the kiss of two people who had been waiting for months.

I gently pushed her onto the bed and climbed on top of her. She spread her legs and I settled between them, rubbing my pants against the fabric of her underwear. The friction was torture. Mariela arched her back, grabbed a handful of my hair, made a sound I had never heard from her before.

***

I went down her body slowly. I kissed her neck, the hollow between her collarbones, the curve of her breasts through the thin blouse. I lifted her skirt to her waist, pulled down her underwear with both hands, and stopped for a second to look at her. Her eyes were closed and her fists were clenched too, gripping the sheets.

I leaned down and kissed her between her legs. At first I didn’t really know what to do: I had never done that, only seen and read about it. But my body guided me. I learned in a few minutes. I learned to read her movements, the little jerks of her hips, the way she squeezed her thighs against my ears. When she came, she did it in silence, without screaming, only with a long shudder that ran from her legs all the way to her neck.

Then she sat up. She gently pushed me and made me lie back on my back. She took off my T-shirt, unbuckled my belt with fingers that trembled, pulled down my pants and underwear. When she saw my cock, she looked at it for a moment as if studying it. Then she leaned down and took it into her mouth.

For someone who had never done it, she did it with such devotion it left me breathless. Sometimes she went too deep, choked, laughed nervously, tried again. I stroked her hair, told her to stop when I was close, told her I didn’t want to finish yet, not like that.

—Come here —I told her.

She climbed up with me. I pulled her blouse over her head. Her breasts were exactly like I had imagined them on every lonely night in my bed, exactly what I had drawn so many times in my head while masturbating: warm, round, with dark, hard nipples. I licked them, bit them carefully, and she moaned again, this time louder.

—Slowly —she asked me when she understood what was coming—. Remember I’m a virgin.

—Me too —I answered.

We smiled at each other. For an instant, in the middle of all that fever, we were once again the two kids from the workshop, the two friends who accompanied each other to the bus stop. That mixture, that tenderness inside desire, is what I will never be able to forget.

I laid her on her back. I knelt between her legs and lined myself up against her. She was so wet that going in was easier than I had feared. I pushed slowly, millimeter by millimeter. At some point I felt resistance, the slightest change, and she closed her eyes tightly. She didn’t say anything. I stayed still, waiting. When she opened her eyes again, she nodded.

I started moving. Slowly at first, then a little less slowly. Mariela dug her nails into my back, bit my shoulder, said things in my ear that I wouldn’t later remember clearly, broken phrases, requests. I tried to hold out as long as possible, to focus on anything else, but her body was a perfect trap. When I understood I couldn’t last any longer, I pulled out for a second, asked if I could finish inside, she said yes, she was taking the pill, and I went back in. I came while holding her against me, biting her neck, feeling her clench around me in long waves.

We both stayed still, sweating, without separating. I rested my forehead against hers. She stroked the back of my neck with one hand. We looked into each other’s eyes for a long while, saying nothing, because there was nothing to say.

***

That year was one of the strangest and happiest of my life. We saw each other alone whenever we could, at her house when we could, at mine when we could, sometimes in cheap downtown hotels. We tried things we had only read about. We learned together what you learn best with someone who is also learning: to be patient, to laugh at awkward moments, not to be afraid to ask.

Then she left to study in another city. At first we talked every day, then some days, then only on Sundays. University demanded more and more from her, she met new people, I did too. One day we stopped talking without ever agreeing to it, like those things that fall apart on their own.

I never saw her again. Sometimes, when I cross paths with a girl with cinnamon skin and chestnut hair down to her shoulders, I go back for a second to that Saturday afternoon, to the smell of coconut, to the tremble of her legs when she came for the first time. And after so many years, I understand that there are first times you end up carrying forever, not because of what happened that night, but because of everything that night meant.