My Daughter's Friend Confessed She Wanted Me

I want to tell what happened to me because writing it helps me believe it. For years I’ve secretly read stories like this, and I never thought one day I’d have something of my own to add. But here I am, writing from the sofa in my house, with a cup of coffee that’s already gone cold, trying to explain how, at forty-four, I discovered something about myself I had never even suspected.

My name is Mercedes. I’ve been divorced for four years. I left my daughters’ father when I could no longer take his shouting in the kitchen or the way he spoke to me in front of the girls, as if I were a slow employee who had to be told everything twice. The eldest, Daniela, was eighteen when I signed the papers; Sara, the little one, had just turned thirteen. Today one is finishing her degree and the other is starting high school next year. They both took it better than I expected. I think, deep down, they were tired of him too.

I’m an ordinary woman. I’m five foot two, I weigh just what I should, I have a fairly generous chest for my frame and, after raising two girls on breast milk, that shows. I don’t complain. I look in the mirror and see a woman who has survived. That’s enough for me most days.

My life after the divorce settled around the routine of the neighborhood. I live on a narrow street of houses pressed close together, where everyone has known each other for decades and the doors are usually open. My neighbor across the street, Begoña, was my lifeline in the hardest months. We talked every day, sometimes on the landing, sometimes sitting on the corner bench while smoking a cigarette hidden from her children and mine. Begoña has a daughter a year younger than Daniela. Her name is Lucía, and from the time they were little, they were inseparable.

Lucía was always a different kind of girl. She wore her hair very short, dressed in baggy pants and men’s shirts, and walked with the kind of confidence I lacked at her age. The whole neighborhood knew it, even if no one said it to her face. I didn’t care; she was a good girl, friendly, polite, and I was very fond of her. When Daniela went away to study on weekends, Lucía would come by the house to see me. She’d say she didn’t want me to feel alone. We’d split our sides laughing at gossip shows and eating sunflower seeds on the sofa. We were friends. That was all. Or that’s what I thought.

***

One May afternoon, a little over a year ago, Lucía came to my house looking different. I knew her well enough to tell when something was going around and around in her head. She sat on the edge of the sofa, not leaning back, and started twisting the bracelet on her wrist.

“Mercedes, I have to tell you something and I’d rather just blurt it out,” she said.

I turned down the television and looked at her.

“Go on, sweetheart.”

“I like you. Not as a friend. I like you.”

I was speechless. I don’t know how long it took me to react. I could have said anything, I could have made a joke, but I just stared at her with my mouth slightly open like an idiot. She stood up, ran her hands through her hair, and kept talking, now faster, as if she were afraid of backing out.

“I’m not telling you so anything happens. I’m telling you because keeping it in was choking me. I know you’re not like that and I’m not expecting anything. I just wanted you to know. And I wanted to tell you that you need to get out more, that you deserve someone who loves you properly, that you shouldn’t settle for being alone because of the way he left you.”

I swallowed hard. I tried to answer coherently.

“Lucía, you’re a girl. You’re nineteen.”

“I’m twenty next week,” she said with half a smile. “And I’m not a girl.”

We sat in silence for what felt like forever. I told her I needed to think, that I didn’t know what to say, that I cared about her a lot as a friend and I didn’t want this to ruin anything. She nodded, kissed me on the cheek, and left.

That night I didn’t sleep a wink. I realized two things at once. The first, that I wasn’t angry. The second, that I had liked hearing it. I hadn’t felt desired by anyone in years, and suddenly the girl across the street, that pretty young woman with dark eyes and steady hands, had made me see straight to my face that I was still something. I slid my hand under my pajamas without thinking, almost without permission, and found my cunt wet like it hadn’t been in years. I rubbed my clit slowly, imagining her mouth there, and came biting the pillow so I wouldn’t wake the girls. That kept me tossing and turning until dawn.

***

Lucía disappeared for almost two weeks. She didn’t come to the house, I didn’t run into her in the street, and when I asked Begoña, her mother would shrug and say she was acting strange. I knew why. I felt terribly sorry for her.

In the end I was the one who knocked on her door. I asked her to come down for coffee at the bar on the corner. She agreed without looking me in the eye. We walked in silence to the back table, the one almost nobody uses because it’s under the air conditioner.

“I don’t want to lose my friend,” I told her. “That’s first. And I want to apologize for going mute the other day. You caught me so off guard I didn’t know how to answer.”

“You don’t have to apologize to me,” she said.

“Yes, I do. Because what you said to me made me feel good. It made me feel good, and I hid it from you.”

She slowly lifted her head. Her eyes were shining with tears.

“Really?”

“Really. I don’t know what to do with it, Lucía. I don’t know what to think. But I don’t want you to pull away from me.”

That afternoon we went home together. I asked her to come with me to run a few errands downtown, and we walked for a while through the old quarter, talking about everything and nothing. It was strange. At times it felt like I was with my daughter. At times it didn’t. At times I felt she was looking at me when I wasn’t noticing, and when I turned my head I’d catch her looking away. It was a new game and I didn’t know the rules.

A few more days passed, we went back to sofa afternoons and laughter, and little by little we relaxed. The looks were still there, but they no longer burned.

***

One Thursday afternoon the two of us were alone in my house. My daughters had gone out and the TV was showing a program neither of us was really watching. We were laughing at some nonsense, I don’t remember what exactly, and suddenly I turned to her and said:

“Kiss me.”

Lucía went still.

“Are you sure?”

“I want to know what it feels like. That’s all.”

She moved closer slowly, not touching me with her hands. She pressed her lips to mine with a tenderness I had never received from a man. It was a clean kiss, unhurried, no tongue at first. She smelled of shampoo and white soap. When I pulled back, my heart was in my throat.

“Again,” I asked her.

This time she wasn’t so shy. She held the back of my neck with one hand and parted her mouth a little. I felt her soft tongue brush mine, and a heat slid down my neck into my stomach, straight to my panties. I let my hands rest on her waist, under her shirt, and felt her firm skin, untouched by scars or surgery, a young skin I had forgotten existed. She slowly brought one hand up my side and squeezed a breast over my bra, and I let out a moan against her mouth that even surprised me.

“Fuck, Mercedes,” she murmured against my lips.

We kissed for a long time, each time rougher, with our whole tongues in each other’s mouths, biting at each other’s lips. I started touching her clumsily, not knowing where to put my hands, until I grabbed one of her small, firm breasts under her shirt and pinched the nipple that was already hard. She gave a little laugh and slid her hand under my skirt, up my thigh until she brushed my cunt over my panties. I was soaking. A gasp slipped out of me when she pressed my clit with the pad of her finger through the fabric.

“You’re absolutely drenched,” she said in my ear.

I was scared of what was happening inside me. I asked her to stop. She pulled away at once, without protesting, and sat there waiting for me to breathe normally again, her hand still trembling on my knee.

“Easy, Mercedes. Nothing has to happen that you don’t want.”

The next day I called her. We talked for almost two hours. I told her I wanted to try, that I couldn’t promise her anything, that I didn’t know where this was going but I didn’t want to stop it. She accepted without asking for guarantees.

***

The following Saturday the planets aligned. Daniela was going away with a friend’s family to spend the weekend in Peñíscola. Sara was sleeping out, at a classmate’s birthday party being held at a country house. I was going to be alone at home for the first time in months. I sent Lucía a message.

“Come for dinner. And bring a toothbrush.”

She arrived at nine, with a bottle of white wine and the most nervous smile I had ever seen on her. We ate whatever, pasta with a couple of cans, sitting at the kitchen table. We didn’t talk much. She got up to fetch the corkscrew, I got up to fetch the salt, and every time we crossed paths in the half meter between the fridge and the counter, we brushed against each other on purpose.

After dinner we sat on the sofa. We turned on the TV for background noise. Lucía rested her hand on my thigh, over my pants, and left it there, unmoving. I closed my eyes. That stillness made me more nervous than any caress.

We started kissing like teenagers, first on the sofa, then standing in the hallway, then against the bedroom door. She slipped her knee between my legs and I started rubbing myself against her thigh without being able to control it, like a bitch in heat, pressing my cunt against her over my jeans. She undressed me slowly, one piece at a time, as if she were stripping off a bandage. She unzipped my skirt and let it fall to the floor. She pulled my blouse over my head. When she saw me in my bra, she looked at me for a second and said:

“You’re beautiful.”

I let out a weak laugh and told her not to be ridiculous. But she said it with so much conviction that I believed her half an hour later, when she had me lying on the bed with my breasts bare and was kissing my neck with that small, hot mouth.

She unclasped my bra with one hand, looking me in the eyes, and when my breasts dropped free onto my chest she let out a soft growl and bent her head to suck them. She took one nipple fully into her mouth and began circling it with her tongue while squeezing the other breast with her hand. I arched my back against the mattress. No man had ever sucked my breasts like that, so hungry, as if they were the only thing in the world that mattered. She moved from one nipple to the other, biting them softly, tugging with her lips until they were swollen and red. She slid a hand inside my panties and found my cunt dripping.

“Jesus Christ, Mercedes. You’re soaked.”

“Shut up and keep going,” I told her, in a voice I didn’t recognize as mine.

She yanked my panties off my ankles in one hard pull. She knelt at the foot of the bed, looking at me spread open before her, and didn’t say anything for a few seconds. I felt the most shame of my life and, at the same time, the greatest heat. She came closer slowly, parted my thighs with both hands, and blew on my cunt before touching it, and just that sent a tug through me. She started kissing the inside of my thighs, moving up, down, never quite reaching where I wanted, until I grabbed her head with both hands and begged her.

“Please, Lucía, eat me out already.”

She lowered her mouth to my cunt and licked it from bottom to top, flat tongue, unhurried, as if savoring an ice cream. I cried out. She ate me out for long minutes, alternating broad licks with direct sucking on my clit, sliding her tongue between my pussy lips and pulling it back out shining with my juices. When she noticed my thighs starting to tremble, she slid two fingers into me without stopping sucking my clit, and curved them to find that spot no man had ever found in twenty years. She found it at once. I came screaming, clinging to the headboard with both hands, my legs closed around her head. She didn’t stop. She kept sucking me while I trembled, until I came again, harder, so hard I lost my voice.

When she finally lifted her face, her chin was shining all the way down to her neck and she had a silly smile on her face. She climbed onto the bed, got on top of me, and kissed me on the mouth, and I tasted myself on her tongue. It felt like the dirtiest and most beautiful thing in the world at the same time.

“Your turn,” she said.

I undressed her with clumsy hands. I took off her button-up men’s shirt one button at a time, pulled her baggy pants down over her narrow hips, and found her without a bra underneath, with two small breasts and dark nipples. I kissed each one before going lower. I had never in my life touched a cunt that wasn’t mine. I stared at it for a few seconds, terrified and desperate all at once. She spread her legs and guided my head without pushing, letting me take my own rhythm.

“Do whatever you want. I’m going to like all of it.”

I ran my whole tongue over her vulva, from bottom to top, the way she had done to me. It tasted of salt and something sweet at the same time. I lost my fear on the second lick. I found her small, hard clit and started sucking it slowly with my lips while I carefully slid one finger inside her. Lucía moaned loudly, grabbed the sheets, arched her hips against my mouth. That gave me courage. I slid in a second finger and sped up my tongue. She started telling me filthy things.

“Just like that, fuck, suck my cunt, I’m coming, I’m coming, Mercedes...”

She came by pressing my face against her cunt, her thighs closed around my head and a string of short moans that got me hot all over again without anyone touching me.

We made love for hours. I’m not exaggerating. We started around eleven and watched the sun rise while holding each other. We took turns eating each other out, rubbed our cunts together with our legs tangled, fingered each other until we no longer knew whose hands were whose, came together with our tongues in each other’s mouths. She did things to me I had never tried, and others I had, but never like that. She licked my ass too, without warning, and tore a moan out of me I hadn’t known was inside me. The most surprising thing wasn’t the sex itself; it was the patience. Lucía was in no hurry. She took her time with every part of my body, asking nothing in return, until I stopped thinking and only felt.

At dawn we were both silent, staring at the ceiling. I turned to her and said half joking:

“So what are we now? Girlfriends?”

“That depends on you,” she answered.

“Then girlfriends.”

She propped herself on one elbow, looked at me with shining eyes, and asked me to sit on her face. I climbed onto the bed with my knees on either side of her head, holding on to the headboard in front of me, and lowered myself slowly until I rested my cunt on her mouth. She gripped my ass with both hands, dug her fingers into my cheeks, and pulled me down, forcing me to sit fully on her face. She started eating me like a starving woman, her tongue deep inside, shaking her head against my cunt. I held on to the headboard with both hands and started grinding against her mouth without being able to stop, riding her tongue, watching my cunt rub over her face while she opened her eyes to look at me from below. She licked my asshole too, alternating, and with one finger she played with my clit at the same time. She made me tremble in a way I thought only happened in movies. I came over her mouth twice in a row and collapsed beside her, drenched in sweat and saliva, my cunt throbbing as if it had a life of its own.

***

Talking to Begoña was easier than we thought. Her mother listened to us, stayed quiet for a moment, and then burst out laughing and said she’d been waiting for that conversation for years. It was different with Daniela. She was surprised, needed a couple of days to process it, and in the end she hugged me and said she only wanted me to be happy. Sara, at sixteen, accepted it the way teenagers accept strange things: with a shrug and a “okay, Mom, whatever you say.”

We’ve been together a little over a year. We don’t go shouting it from the neighborhood rooftops, but we don’t hide either. Lucía stays over several nights a week, even when the girls are home. They know where she sleeps. They respect it. Sometimes the four of us have breakfast together and it feels like the most natural thing in the world.

My sex life is the one I never had. I have orgasms I used to think were made up in novels. I laugh more, sleep better, dress with more care. I’ve felt like a woman again, not because someone told me so, but because I believe it myself when I look in the mirror, with my cunt still sore from the night before and a smile that won’t leave my face.

I’m writing all this with her permission. Lucía has read the draft and laughed at some parts. I think I’m going to keep telling what we live, because there are still many things I’d like to share. For now I’m keeping this first one, the day I dared to tell her to kiss me and discovered that desire doesn’t understand age, or gender, or what the neighborhood expects of a woman.