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

We met in our first year of secondary school, when we were all strangers and nobody really knew where to sit. She chose the desk in front. I chose the one in the back. I didn’t notice Catalina during the first few months; I was too busy making a racket with the girls I was always laughing about everything with.

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

By April we were talking during recess. By June we stayed in the courtyard after class. By September I already knew that something inside 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 forced me to look at her mouth. And I couldn’t stop looking at her mouth or imagining what it would be like to have it on mine.

We finished secondary school without anything happening. I enrolled in Business Administration out of inertia. She chose something in the health-care field. The thought of not seeing her every day squeezed my chest with a cold hand.

Two months later I changed majors. I told my father 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 our second year of college. Her parents had gone to a birthday party outside the city. Her brother was at his girlfriend’s place. The two of us were alone in her bedroom, with two glasses of wine we’d taken from the fridge without permission.

“Have you never told anyone?” Catalina asked, sitting cross-legged on the mattress.

“Told them what?”

“What you feel.”

I lowered my eyes to the glass. I didn’t know what to say.

“I’m going to tell you,” she continued, in a voice I had never heard from her before. “I’ve known for two years.”

I looked up. She was serious. Her hair hung loose over her right shoulder, an old T-shirt slipping a little off her neck, and her bare feet rested against mine in the middle of the mattress.

“And?” I asked, my voice coming out broken.

“And nothing. I was waiting for you to tell me.”

She switched off the bedside lamp. The room was lit only by the blue light coming through the window. I felt her hand close around my wrist, slowly, and pull me toward her. When she kissed me, everything I had kept inside for two years broke apart all at once.

Her mouth was warm and tasted faintly of white wine. She kissed me as if she had spent a long time thinking about how to do it. Unhurriedly. Her fingers trembled slightly against my neck. She slipped her tongue in slowly, searching for mine, and I sucked on it with a hunger that surprised me. I heard her moan softly against my mouth and suddenly felt my panties grow wet.

“Tell me to stop if you want me to stop,” she murmured against my mouth.

“Don’t stop. Don’t stop, please.”

She pulled my T-shirt off without taking her eyes off me. I wasn’t wearing a bra underneath. She stared at my tits for a few seconds, her mouth slightly open, then ran her fingers over one nipple until she made it hard as a stone. I had never been with anyone before. Neither had she, 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, pulled off her own T-shirt, and was left bare-breasted too, her tits smaller than mine, her nipples pink and already erect. She kissed my neck, my collarbone, the center of my chest. When she took one nipple into her mouth and sucked it hard, I arched my back and let out a moan I didn’t even recognize. 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 goose bumps.

“Look at me,” she asked when she reached the waistband of my pants.

I looked at her. Her face was 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 watch me do everything to you.”

I didn’t close them. I watched her pull down my pants, watched her strip off my panties by tugging the elastic with her teeth, watched her lips part when she saw the wet shine between my legs. She opened my thighs with both hands, unhurriedly, looking 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 sweep of her tongue shook me all over, a hot lash from my clitoris to my entrance, and I had to bite the back of my hand to keep from screaming. The house was empty and I didn’t care. She settled down there as if she had all the time in the world. She licked me slowly, from bottom to top, her tongue flat, and every time she reached my clitoris she stopped to suck it for a second before going back down. Moans escaped my mouth without permission. I grabbed her hair with both hands and pressed her face against me without thinking.

“Like that,” I panted. “There, Cata, there.”

She slid one finger inside me. Then two. She curled them inside me and searched for a spot that made me lift my hips off the mattress. While she licked me without stopping, she fucked me with her fingers, in and out, with a rhythm that kept building until I began to tremble. I felt everything gathering in my lower belly, a ball of fire that grew and grew, and when she closed her lips around my clitoris and sucked it hard, I exploded.

I came against her mouth with my thighs clamped around her head, forgetting how to breathe. I felt her swallow. I felt her tongue keep moving slowly, milking me through my last contraction, while I came apart in spasms on the sheet. Catalina slowly came back up, her mouth glistening, lay down beside me, barely covered me with the sheet, and kissed my temple. I tasted 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 her pajama pants. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. My breath caught when I saw her open there, her mound barely covered with dark hair, her lips swollen and glistening. I settled between her legs and lowered my mouth without really knowing what to do, guided only by instinct. The first pass coated my lips with a thick, salty taste I had never experienced before. She liked it. I felt her moan and grab my hair with one hand.

I learned that night, clumsy and attentive, how her mouth fell open when I ran my tongue right over her clitoris. How her nipple hardened between my fingers when I lifted my free hand and squeezed it. How she grabbed my hair with both hands when she was about to finish. I slipped one finger inside her experimentally and felt her close around it, squeezing me, so wet that it slipped in by itself. I added another. I started fucking her with my fingers while continuing to suck her clitoris, imitating what she had done to me, and after a few minutes I felt her arch, press my head against her cunt, and come, moaning my name through clenched teeth. My mouth filled with a hot gush that I swallowed without thinking.

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

We fell asleep in each other’s arms at five in the morning, naked, sticky, the smell of sex embedded in the sheets. When I woke up, she was already awake, watching me. She kissed my forehead.

“Don’t tell anyone,” she asked.

“I won’t.”

“Ever.”

“Ever.”

***

For the next three years, 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.”

Nobody knew. Not my family, not hers, not our classmates. To everyone, we were those two inseparable girls who always studied as a pair. And I accepted that secret because every night in her bed was enough to get me through the next day.

I learned to read her. I knew when desire was rising in her from the way she fell silent in the middle of a conversation. I knew that if she squeezed my thigh under the dining-room table, it was an invitation to follow her to the bathroom in five minutes. And I followed her. And I fucked her against the tiles, one hand covering her mouth so her brother wouldn’t hear her from the living room, while she came on my fingers with her eyes squeezed shut and her pants halfway down her thighs. I knew exactly where to put my fingers to make her go still beneath me, mouth open and eyes closed, whispering words that were never “I love you.” She told me “more,” told me “don’t stop,” told me “fuck me harder, come on,” 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 out of those phrases that would be enough to keep me going, and I put my mouth on her cunt every time silence threatened to tell the truth. I sucked her clitoris until she cried with pleasure and naively believed that was a way of getting her to tell me what she wouldn’t say.

“Why do you never say it?” I asked one dawn, exhausted from not asking.

Catalina was lying facedown, naked, her face against the pillow. My thighs were still sticky with her. 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 to do with my life.”

I turned over. I looked at the ceiling.

“And what if you never decide?”

“Then nothing ever happened.”

That sentence hurt me more than anything else she ever said afterward.

***

I ended it, in the end, one afternoon in November, almost four years after that first night. I found her hugging a guy in his 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 the way she never looked at me in the street, and I understood that the secret wasn’t protecting me: it was erasing me.

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

Years passed before I could fuck another woman without thinking of her. I had brief, lukewarm relationships that left me with almost nothing. Asses that weren’t hers, mouths that didn’t taste the way hers had, other women’s fingers between my legs that made me come without touching me where she touched me. I went out singing with my cousins on weekends, trying to become a person again instead of an echo. Sometimes I managed it. Sometimes I didn’t.

A few months ago, at dinner with some friends, someone asked about first love. I said her name before I could think. The next day I messaged 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 an entire day to understand that it was a friend’s “I love you.”

“I did feel something strong for you,” she told me in another conversation. “But I never knew how to tell you back then. And now I don’t feel that way anymore.”

I asked her 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 opened my thighs with her hands and licked my cunt as if she had 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 limits and, without meaning to, she also taught me how to learn to let go.

And although my heart still names her silently on some nights, she no longer ruins my days. It simply beats. The way everything that was once true keeps beating.