My Best Friend Kissed Me the Night I Slept at Her House

We met in the first year of high school, when we were all strangers and nobody really knew where to sit. She chose the front bench. I chose the back one. I didn’t pay attention to Catalina for the first few months; I was too busy making noise with the girls we lived with, laughing at everything.

Then I started noticing her. The way she tucked her hair behind her ear when the teacher was explaining something. The way she bit the side of her lip when she was thinking. Her laugh, short and low, almost a secret she only let out with me.

By April we were talking during recess. By June we were staying in the courtyard after class. By September I already knew something in me had broken and there was no way to fix it.

Catalina was everything I wasn’t. Disciplined, quiet, intelligent without showing off. When she talked about a book, her eyes lit up in a way that made me stare at her mouth. And I couldn’t stop looking at her mouth or imagining what it would be like to have it over mine.

We finished high school without anything happening. I signed up for Business Administration out of inertia. She chose something in the health field. The idea of not seeing her every day squeezed my chest with a cold hand.

Two months later I changed majors. I told my dad I wanted to study the same thing she did. He lied well when he said it seemed impulsive; it wasn’t impulsive. It was the only decision in my life that made sense.

***

The first time I slept at her house was in May of my second year at university. Her parents had gone to a birthday party out of town. Her brother was at his girlfriend’s place. The two of us were alone in her room, with two glasses of wine we’d taken from the fridge without permission.

—You never told anyone? —Catalina asked, sitting cross-legged on the mattress.

—Told them what?

—What you feel.

I looked down at my glass. I didn’t know what to say.

—I’m going to tell you —she went on, with a voice I had never heard from her before—. I’ve known for two years.

I lifted my eyes. She was serious. Her hair was loose over her right shoulder, she had on an old T-shirt that slipped a little off her neck, and her bare feet were against mine in the middle of the mattress.

—So? —I asked, and my voice came out broken.

—So nothing. I was waiting for you to tell me.

She turned off the bedside lamp. The room was left lit only by the blue light coming in through the window. I felt her hand close around my wrist, slowly, and pull me toward her. When she kissed me, everything I’d been holding in for two years broke all at once.

Her mouth was warm and tasted faintly of white wine. She kissed me as if she’d been thinking for a long time about how to do it. Without hurry. Her fingers trembled a little against my neck. She slipped her tongue into my mouth slowly, searching for mine, and I sucked on it with a hunger that surprised me. I heard her moan softly against my mouth and felt my panties get wet all at once.

—Tell me to stop if you want me to stop —she murmured against my mouth.

—Don’t stop. Don’t stop, please.

She took off my T-shirt without breaking eye contact. Underneath, I wasn’t wearing a bra. She stared at my breasts for a few seconds, mouth parted, then ran her fingers over one nipple until it turned hard as stone. I had never been with anyone. She hadn’t either, she confessed later, but that night she moved with a confidence that undid me. She gently pushed me back until I was lying on the sheets, took off her own T-shirt, and was left with her breasts bare too, smaller than mine, with pink nipples already erect. She kissed my neck, my collarbone, the center of my chest. When she took one nipple into her mouth and sucked hard, I arched my back and let out a moan I didn’t even recognize as mine. I felt her hair falling over my skin, her tongue circling around it, her teeth barely marking me, and my whole body broke out in gooseflesh.

—Look at me —she asked when she reached the edge of my pants.

I looked at her. Her face looked different, her eyes dark, her lips slightly swollen. She was kneeling between my legs and holding my hips with both hands.

—I don’t want you to close your eyes —she said—. I want you to see everything.

I didn’t close them. I watched her lower my pants, watched her pull off my panties by hooking a finger in the elastic with her teeth, watched her lips part when she saw the shine between my legs. She spread my thighs with both hands, unhurried, staring at my cunt as if deciding where to begin.

—You’re soaked —she whispered.

—It’s because of you.

She lowered her mouth. The first stroke of her tongue shook me to the core, a hot lash from my clit to my entrance, and I had to bite the back of my hand not to scream. The house was empty and I didn’t care. She settled herself down there as if she had all the time in the world. She licked me slowly, bottom to top, with her tongue flat, and every time she reached my clit she stopped to suck it for a second before going back down. Moans kept slipping out of my mouth without permission. I grabbed her hair with both hands and pressed her face against me without thinking.

—Like that —I gasped—. Right there, Cata, right there.

She slid a finger inside me. Then two. She curled them inside me and found a spot that made me lift my hips off the mattress. While she licked me relentlessly, she finger-fucked me, in and out, with a rhythm that kept building until I started shaking. I felt everything gathering low in my belly, a fireball growing and growing, and when she closed her lips around my clit and sucked hard, I came apart.

I came against her mouth with my thighs clamped around her head, not remembering how to breathe. I felt her swallow. I felt her tongue keep moving slowly, milking me through the last contraction, while I fell to pieces in spasms over the sheet. Catalina came up slowly, her mouth shining, lay down beside me, covered me a little with the sheet, and kissed my temple. I could taste myself on her lips when she kissed my mouth again.

—Now you —I whispered, still trembling.

I pushed her onto her back and yanked down the waistband of her pajama pants. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. My breath caught when I saw her open there, her pubic mound barely covered in dark hair and her lips swollen and glossy. I settled between her legs and lowered my mouth without really knowing what to do, guided only by instinct. The first pass left my lips smeared with a salty, thick taste I had never tried before. She liked it. I felt her moan and grab my hair with one hand.

I learned that night, awkwardly and carefully, how her mouth opened when I ran my tongue right over her clit. How her nipple hardened between my fingers when I brought up my free hand and pinched it. How she grabbed my hair with both hands when she was about to finish. I slipped in a finger to test her and felt how she tightened around it, squeezing me, so wet she was slick. I slipped in another. I started fucking her with my fingers while I kept sucking her clit, copying what she had done to me, and after a few minutes I felt her arch, press my head against her cunt, and come with a groan, my name gritted between her teeth. My mouth filled with a hot gush I swallowed without thinking.

I learned her body the way you learn a new language: by stumbling, with the feeling that each word was worth an entire lifetime. That night we fucked three more times. I made her come with my tongue and fingers. She made me come riding on top of me, rubbing her cunt against mine, our hands clasped together, looking into each other’s eyes until we both moaned at the same time, soaked through with each other.

We fell asleep wrapped around each other at five in the morning, naked, sticky, with the smell of sex soaked into the sheets. When I woke up, she was already awake, looking at me. She kissed my forehead.

—Don’t tell anyone —she asked.

—No.

—Ever.

—Ever.

***

For the three years that followed, Catalina was everything and nothing at the same time. We saw each other almost every day. We studied together, ate together, slept together whenever we could. In private, her body was mine. In public, we were “best friends.”

No one knew. Not my family, not hers, not our classmates at university. To everyone, we were those two inseparable girls who always studied as a pair. And I accepted the secret because every night inside her bed was enough to carry me through the next day.

I learned how to read her. I knew when her desire was rising from the way she went quiet in the middle of a conversation. I knew that if she squeezed my thigh under the dining table, it was an invitation for me to follow her to the bathroom five minutes later. And I followed her. And I fucked her against the tiles, with my hand over her mouth so her brother wouldn’t hear her from the living room, while she came on my fingers with her eyes shut and her pants halfway down her thighs. I knew exactly where to put my fingers so she’d go still beneath me, mouth open and eyes closed, whispering words that were never “I love you.” She told me “more,” she told me “don’t stop,” she told me “fuck me harder, come on,” she asked me to suck her tits while she came. She never told me she loved me.

Because she never said I love you. Not once in three years.

She told me other things. “You’re the only good thing I have.” “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” “Stay tonight.” I built a version of love from those phrases that was enough to keep going, and I put my mouth on her cunt every time the silence threatened to tell the truth. I sucked her clit until she cried with pleasure and believed, naively, that was a way of getting her to say what she wasn’t saying.

—Why never say it to me? —I asked one dawn, exhausted from not asking.

Catalina was lying face down, naked, her face pressed into the pillow. I still had her stickiness on my thighs. She took a while to answer.

—Because if I say it, it becomes real —she replied—. And if it becomes real, I don’t know what I do with my life.

I rolled over. Stared at the ceiling.

—And if you never decide?

—Then nothing ever happened.

That sentence hurt me more than anything else she would ever say after that.

***

I was the one who ended it, in the end, one November afternoon, almost four years after that first night. I found her hugging a guy from our final year outside the university. They weren’t doing anything. They were just laughing. But I saw the way she looked at him, and I saw how she never looked at me like that in the street, and I understood that the secret wasn’t protecting me: it was erasing me.

I told her in her room that same night. She didn’t cry. Neither did I, until I got home.

It took years before I could sleep with another woman without thinking of her. I had short, lukewarm relationships that left me with almost nothing. Asses that weren’t hers, mouths that didn’t taste like hers, чужие fingers between my legs that made me come without ever reaching where she touched me. I went out singing with my cousins on the weekends, tried to become a person again instead of an echo. Sometimes I managed. Sometimes I didn’t.

A few months ago, at a dinner with friends, someone asked about first love. I said her name before I even thought about it. The next day I wrote to her for her birthday. We talked for weeks as if fifteen years hadn’t passed. And one night she wrote “I love you.”

It took me a full day to understand it was a friend’s I love you.

—I once felt something strong for you —she told me in another conversation—. But I never knew how to say it back then. And now I don’t feel that way anymore.

I asked for one last chance. She blocked me everywhere.

***

Today, almost twenty years after the first time I slept at her house, I still remember in detail how she kissed me that night. How she held my hips. How she spread my thighs with her hands and licked my cunt as if she’d been practicing for years. How she told me “look at me” and made me keep my eyes open while she made me come.

The memory doesn’t burn me anymore. It keeps me company, like an old song I know by heart. Catalina was my first woman, my first love, my first complete surrender. She taught me how to fuck with hunger and how to love without measure and, without meaning to, she also taught me how to let go.

And although my heart still says her name in silence some nights, it doesn’t ruin my days anymore. It just beats. Like everything that was ever true beats.