Her Thursdays Belonged to Another Woman

Every month, with the precision of a rite no one else knew about, Camila reserved a Thursday morning for herself alone. It was not a medical appointment or a yoga class or coffee with friends, although in front of her husband it could easily pass for any of those things. It was simply the third Thursday, and thinking about it was enough to make her body start responding with an anticipation no other plan in her diary could provoke. It was enough to mark the date in her phone calendar for her panties to be damp hours before, for her cunt to begin throbbing with that thick, sticky impatience she no longer knew how to hide.

She was forty-three, had a husband who worked at an investment firm, and two daughters in sixth form. They lived in a spacious flat in the Chamberí neighborhood, with bookshelves up to the ceiling and a terrace where they had breakfast on Sundays in summer. It was a good life. Orderly. Without visible cracks. Except for one.

The first time she had arrived at the building entrance with cold hands despite the October heat. She stood there in front of the intercom for almost three minutes, thumb a few centimeters from the button, telling herself she could keep walking, that no one would see her, that there was still time to forget she had looked up the address and saved it in her contacts as “new dentist.” But something deeper than reason held her there, on that pavement of uneven cobblestones, with her bag slung across her chest.

They let her into a softly lit lounge with warm light. Four women were waiting, seated or standing. Silvia, the owner of the place along with her partner Roberto, explained in a low voice how everything worked. Then the girls introduced themselves, one by one. Camila listened to the names without really retaining them until she reached the last one.

Elena had long blond hair, eyes of a gray that changed with the light, and wore only a beige lingerie set and low heels. She introduced herself naturally, without affectation, looking Camila in the eyes as if they already knew each other. Camila dropped her gaze, felt the heat rising in her cheeks, and thought of the excuse she would give at home if she returned earlier than expected.

She didn’t return early. Elena came closer, placed the pads of her fingers on her jaw with a delicacy that was at once a question and an invitation, and kissed her slowly. A short kiss, with lips barely parted. It took Camila a second to understand what her own body was doing when she discovered she was kissing back, parting her lips, seeking Elena’s tongue with a hunger that had been asleep for years.

The room was dim. Elena helped her undress without rushing, folding each garment over the chair as if giving her ample time to change her mind. Camila did not change her mind. She lay naked on the bed and closed her eyes when Elena’s lips began their slow descent along her neck, her collarbone, the side of her breasts. She paused at the nipples and sucked them one after the other, nibbling them with her teeth until they stood hard, tugging at them with her mouth until Camila arched her back. She moved down her belly with the tip of her tongue tracing a wet line, lingered at the navel, and kept going lower, opening her legs with the flats of her hands pressed to the insides of her thighs.

When Elena’s tongue settled over her cunt for the first time, Camila let out a sound she hadn’t known she was holding. Elena licked her slowly, from bottom to top, parting her lips with two fingers to reveal the clitoris and circle it with the tip of her tongue. She sucked it calmly, drawing it between her lips, alternating with long, flat licks that made Camila moan louder and louder. She slid two fingers into her cunt while continuing to eat her out, curling them against the inner wall with a precision only a woman who knows can have. Camila came with her hands clenched in Elena’s blond hair, pressing her face against her sex, shaking all over, forgetting everything else for a while. The daughters at school. The husband at the office. The years spent in a marital bed where no one ever sought anything with that urgency anymore.

That was sixteen months ago.

***

Now she was walking down the street in beige linen trousers and a white shirt under which she wore nothing. The midmorning sun warmed her shoulders. In her head, for the past half hour, she had been repeating the words she would say the moment Elena opened the door.

A middle-aged man passed her walking quickly. A young couple was leaving a bakery. A courier braked his bicycle on the opposite pavement. No one looked at her with any special interest, and yet Camila felt her body was too obvious, that the quick pulse and the wetness she could already feel between her thighs had to be somehow visible to anyone who knew how to look. She could feel her nipples pressing against the shirt, hardened by friction and by what awaited her upstairs. She could also feel the hot thread running down her groin that no pair of panties could have contained, because she wasn’t wearing any.

Today I’m telling her. Today this ends.

She had thought it before, in different versions. She had drafted it in her head in the taxi back, with Elena’s smell still on her skin, with the taste of Elena’s cunt still in her mouth, convincing herself it was a whim, an anomaly, something a sensible adult woman could decide to leave behind. But the next third Thursday always came, and with it the marked calendar and the feet that took her there with a fidelity that had nothing to do with reason.

This time it’s different, she told herself. This time I mean it.

***

The second encounter had been arranged by her, though it took three weeks before she dared to bring herself to ask for what she wanted. She told Elena on the phone, in a low voice from the bathroom at home, the shower running as an excuse. Elena listened without interrupting, and when she finished, simply told her to come as she had asked and leave the rest in her hands.

Camila arrived with her hair in two high pigtails, a short plaid skirt, and a white crew-neck sweater. The night before she had laid everything out in front of the wardrobe mirror, blushing at her own desire, unable to quite believe it was she who was thinking about this.

She sat on the edge of the bed and waited. She smelled Elena’s perfume before hearing her footsteps. Then she felt her presence behind her, the brush of blond strands against the nape of her neck, the warm breath beside the right earlobe.

—I understand —said Elena very slowly, pronouncing each syllable carefully— that you’ve been having thoughts you shouldn’t have. That has consequences.

Camila kept her eyes fixed on the floor.

—I’m sorry —she answered in a voice almost inaudible—. It won’t happen again.

—Of course not. —A pause long enough—. Stand up, take off your skirt and your panties, and lie face down across my legs.

She obeyed. Her heart was pounding at the base of her throat as she stood, unbuttoned her skirt and let it fall to the floor, and pulled her white cotton panties down to her ankles. She crossed the few steps separating her from Elena, who was sitting in the armchair with her legs together, and lay across her thighs with her arms hanging at her sides and her bare ass raised high. The position was uncomfortable. That was part of it too.

The first blow came without warning even though she had been expecting it. A sharp crack across her right cheek that drew a strangled gasp from her. Then another, preceded by a slow caress that made her skin burn in a different way. Camila had her teeth clenched, shoulders tense, fingertips digging into the carpet. She could feel the firm weight of Elena’s thighs beneath her, the hand that alternated caress and strike with a cadence she could not control. Between swats, Elena’s fingers dipped down to explore her cunt, found her soaked, sank two knuckles inside, and came back out wet to smear them over her asshole before delivering the next slap. Camila moaned with her face against Elena’s skirt, writhed without meaning to, spread her legs wider without realizing it, offering her open, gleaming sex as if pleading wordlessly.

—Look at how wet you are —murmured Elena, sinking three fingers into her again to the base—. Dripping. You’re a filthy slut.

—Yes —Camila panted against the fabric—. I’m a filthy slut.

When Elena pulled her upright and brushed her hair away from her face, Camila had wet eyes and flushed cheeks, her ass burning and her thighs sticky. Elena studied her for a moment, searching for something. Then she brought the fingers she had had inside her to her mouth and sucked them slowly, never taking her eyes off her.

—Good? —she asked softly.

—Good —Camila replied. And it was true.

Elena laid her back on the bed, spread her legs until her knees folded against her chest, and buried her face between her thighs. She ate her punished, drenched cunt with an almost cruel slowness, sucking her clitoris until she screamed, sliding her tongue in as deep as she could. She sank three fingers inside her and with the other hand pinched one nipple, twisting it until Camila came in jets, hips pushing against Elena’s mouth, her buttocks still burning from the spanks, her throat hoarse from shouting another woman’s name for the first time in her life.

Elena kissed her with a slowness that felt very much like tenderness, or maybe it was exactly that, her mouth still full of the taste of her cunt, and then whispered something in her ear that Camila had been unable to forget in all the months that followed.

***

The entrance hall had an evergreen in a ceramic pot by the door, always the same, always green. Camila recognized it from the pavement and thought, not for the first time, that that tree was part of her life in a way she had never set out to make it. She keyed in the code, pushed the door open, and went up in the elevator.

The elevator mirror returned her image: high cheekbones, the first fine lines beside her eyes, the serious expression of someone about to say something difficult. She ran her fingers through her hair. Took a slow breath in and let it out.

As soon as I see her. Straight to it, no preamble. Elena, I’ve come to say goodbye.

The elevator stopped on the third floor. The girl who walked her to the bedroom —a young brunette she knew by sight— served her a glass of cava without asking and closed the door when she left. Camila drank half of it standing, in front of the window overlooking an interior courtyard where a pigeon was walking along the ledge.

She set the glass down on the little table. Went back to the bed. Sat in the armchair and crossed her legs. Stood up. Sat back down. Looked at her hands, which no longer trembled like they had the first time but were not entirely still either.

She stood up once more and looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. The crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, which had been with her since she was thirty-nine. The soft line crossing her forehead. I’m not bad, she thought, and was surprised to think it without the usual filter of doubt. I am me. This is me.

She went back to the bedroom and stood beside the bed with her arms crossed. Still dressed. Waiting.

Then the door opened.

Elena came in slowly, her blond mane gathered over one shoulder and her body covered only by a short silk slip, almost transparent, so fine that her dark nipples and the shadow of her blond pubis showed through. Her lips painted a deep red. Bare feet on the wooden floor. She crossed the room without taking her eyes off Camila, with that calm Camila had always perceived as a form of power. When she reached her, she placed her palm against Camila’s cheek and looked at her carefully, as one reads something that matters.

Camila opened her mouth.

The words she had rehearsed all the way there —the reasoned goodbye, kind but firm, with the explanation that it was the right thing for both of them— did not come out. They had dissolved somewhere between intention and the moment Elena’s gray eyes rested on hers.

What came out instead was something else. She grabbed the back of Elena’s neck with both hands and kissed her with an urgency that had nothing controlled about it. Elena responded without surprise, as if she had known it in advance, as if she had expected exactly that and nothing else.

When they finally broke apart to breathe, Elena rested her forehead against hers. She stayed like that for a few seconds, without speaking, breathing close, lips centimeters from hers.

—Today —she said at last in a very low voice— we won’t fuck.

Camila heard those words the way you hear something you have already dreamed before.

—Today —Elena continued— I’m going to make love to you.

She undressed her patiently, unfastening each button of the white shirt without hurrying, letting the clothes fall to the floor piece by piece like untying a knot that had been pulled tight too long. When the shirt fell away and Camila’s naked breasts were bared, Elena bent and kissed each nipple with reverent slowness, closing her lips around them and sucking until they hardened, nibbling them carefully before moving lower. She unfastened the linen trousers and slid them down her hips. When she discovered she wasn’t wearing panties, she smiled faintly and bit her bare hip.

—You came already dressed like that —she said—. I love it.

She laid her naked on the bed and pulled her own slip off over her head. Elena’s body, which Camila already knew by heart, still surprised her every time: small firm breasts, a flat belly, a trimmed blond mound, long thighs. She climbed onto her on all fours and kissed her again on the mouth, letting their nipples brush, letting their cunts seek each other through the heat of their thighs.

She moved down her neck, her collarbone, her sternum. She paused at the breasts and devoted time, a lot of time, sucking one nipple while pinching the other between two fingers, tugging, twisting gently until Camila arched her back. She went down over her belly tracing circles with her tongue around the navel. She lingered at the groin, biting the thin skin right at the edge of the pubis, breathing over the open sex without touching it, forcing her to wait.

When she finally set her mouth on Camila’s cunt, she did it with an almost devotional slowness. She licked her whole from bottom to top, gathering the wetness with the tip of her tongue, tasting her. She parted her lips with two fingers and found the swollen clitoris, throbbing. She circled it with her tongue, kissed it as if it were a mouth, sucked it with pressed lips until Camila moaned out loud. She slid her tongue in as deep as she could, then two fingers, then three, curling them against the exact spot Camila could no longer deny Elena knew better than anyone.

Camila buried her hands in the blond hair and pushed her hips against that mouth. She came slowly, in a long wave that made her tremble from head to toe, moaning Elena’s name into the pillow. Elena did not let her stop. She kept licking her while Camila shook, carrying her from one orgasm to the next, until Camila had to push her head away with both hands because she could take no more.

Elena climbed back up her body, kissing her everywhere until she reached her mouth and let her taste her own flavor on her tongue. She straddled Camila’s thigh, pressing her soaked cunt against the skin, moving slowly. Camila held her by the hips and guided her, feeling Elena’s hot wetness sliding over her, watching her face transformed by pleasure. She slipped one hand between them and found her clitoris with her thumb, while two fingers sank inside. Elena threw her head back, bit her lip, and came riding her hand, never taking her eyes off Camila at the end.

Then they found each other again in a position they already knew, lying on their sides, face to face, with their legs braided together and their sex pressed tight. They rubbed against each other slowly, clitorises brushing, wetness mingling between them, looking into each other’s eyes without looking away. Camila reached out and stroked Elena’s cheek as she moved against her. Elena did the same. They came almost at once, in a slow, prolonged tremor that did not resemble any other orgasm that morning, neither the first nor the one in the middle, because this one held inside it something neither of them dared name.

They remained embraced, soaked, without speaking. Camila felt Elena’s hands tracing her shoulders, her ribs, her hips, with an attention that was not mechanical but genuine, and that difference —subtle, hard to name— was precisely what Camila had not found anywhere else.

She did not think about any of the things waiting for her. She did not think about the unprepared lunch or the school meeting next week or the years ahead making reasonable decisions and living a life that was good but not enough.

She only thought that Elena’s hair smelled the same as always, and that, in a way she could not name, was the closest thing to being in the right place she had felt in a long time.

Elena brushed the hair from her face, looked at her without saying anything, and then leaned over her with the same slowness as the first time, when Camila still didn’t know what she was going to discover about herself, and began kissing her again slowly, moving once more down her body toward the cunt already surrendered, ready to make her come one more time before letting her go.

Outside, the city remained just as indifferent. The sun had crossed noon. The daughters were in class. The husband in his office.

And she, wrapped around Elena like someone who has stopped fighting something that was always going to win, was exactly who she wanted to be for as long as that lasted.