My Math Student Came Back to My Bed Years Later

I ran into Lucía on a Tuesday in March in the line at a neighborhood bakery. We hadn’t seen each other since our final year of high school, and she was the last person I expected to see with a six-month-old baby on her hip and a bag of croissants in the other hand. We hugged as if twenty-eight years hadn’t gone by, exchanged phone numbers, and promised to meet up. We kept that promise a week later, at her place, with her partner Patricia pouring wine and Patricia’s daughter arriving late for dessert, hair a mess and eyes on the floor.

That girl was named Renata. She was twenty-one. When she heard that I gave private math lessons at the university, Patricia got excited: Renata was about to take the entrance exam for Engineering and still hadn’t quite gotten calculus. I said yes because I liked Lucía, because I had two afternoons a week to spare, and because, honestly, that first night I barely looked at her.

The lessons started the following Wednesday.

Renata came to my house after six, with her backpack hanging from one shoulder and freshly washed hair. She learned fast, that much I noticed right away. I noticed other things too: that she sat too close when I explained a theorem in the notebook, that she kept watching me while I wrote, that she took forever to leave even when class had ended half an hour earlier. At first I chalked it up to her age. To that thing twenty-one-year-old girls have, needing someone to listen to them without interrupting.

On the fourth lesson she kissed me.

We were sitting at the dining table; she had asked me a question about implicit derivatives and, when I turned to answer, her mouth was already inches from mine. I didn’t pull away. I should have pulled away. I kissed her back slowly, as if I could still convince myself it was a mistake, and two minutes later we were on the sofa with her tongue in my mouth and mine in hers, and five minutes later I had already unclasped her bra and was sucking her tits like they were the last thing I was ever going to taste in my life. Renata had small nipples, very pink, and they hardened the moment I touched them with the tip of my tongue. I nibbled one while pinching the other between my fingers, and she arched her back against the sofa and told me, her voice already rough, not to stop.

I yanked her jeans down. Renata was wearing a little white pair of panties, the crotch dark with moisture. I ran a finger over the fabric and felt the bulge of her swollen clit beneath the cotton. I pulled her panties to the side and drove my tongue into her cunt without preamble, tasting her all the way, seeking out her clit with the tip and sucking on it until she started to tremble. She grabbed my head with both hands and pressed it against her sex, rocking her hips against my mouth, fucking my face with a desperation I had never seen in a girl her age. She came in less than three minutes, screaming into the cushions, her thighs squeezing my ears and her legs shaking on their own.

Ten minutes in we were in my bed, she on her back with her legs open and me between her thighs, licking her wet cunt and sliding two fingers in to the knuckle. Twenty minutes later, after making her come twice more with my tongue and getting the favor returned with a skill that surprised me—she parted my lips with her thumbs and sucked my clit slowly, alternating long laps of her tongue with short pulls until I came in her mouth, moaning like a bitch—I already knew it was going to happen again.

***

“Do you like it?” she asked me that first night, when I was running a hand down her back.

“I like what’s impossible about it,” I told her.

“And what does that mean?”

“That your mother is the partner of my best friend. That you’re the age of my niece. That this can’t go anywhere.”

“I don’t need it to go anywhere.”

She said it with a certainty I hadn’t heard before and that, for some reason, finally convinced me. We agreed on the obvious: that Lucía could never find out, that Patricia could never find out, that this existed only within the walls of my apartment and nowhere else. Renata started staying over two or three times a month with excuses that became harder and harder to sustain. I told her to relax, that each of us saw to her own side of things, and that neither of us owed the other any explanations.

Three months passed like that. Nights stretched until four in the morning, with her riding my face until my chin was soaked and my jaw cramped, or with the two of us scissorsing across the sheets, cunt to cunt, rubbing against each other until we came together. Breakfasts in silence because neither of us wanted to break whatever it was we had. I never asked her for anything and she never promised me anything. It was almost perfect.

***

One afternoon, when class ended, Renata told me she had some errands to run downtown and would be back after midnight. I gave her a spare set of keys and told her to come in quietly. I didn’t think twice about it. I went downstairs to water the balcony plants and, just as I was putting the watering can back inside, the phone rang.

It was Lucía.

“Helena, I need to ask you something weird, but I’m going to ask it anyway.”

“Go ahead.”

“Did Renata tell you anything… weird? Something to do with me.”

I stood still by the window, the watering can still dripping onto my foot.

“No, nothing. She just brings me the exercises and leaves. What happened?”

There was a long silence on the other end. Then I heard Lucía take a deep breath, as if gathering courage.

“Helena, I can’t text you this. I’m telling you because I’m dying and I need to tell someone. I’ve been with Renata for almost three years. Since before I moved in with Patricia. It started as a stupid thing and I could never cut it off. The worst part is that for the last couple of weeks she’s been avoiding me, she doesn’t answer me, and I need to know if she told you anything. Anything. Anything at all.”

I pressed the phone harder against my ear than necessary. I thought about Renata that same morning, naked in my kitchen, eating an apple with her tits out and a dried stain of my cum still on the inside of her thigh. I thought about what it would be like to tell Lucía what I knew. I thought about what it would be like not to tell her.

“Lucía, I swear with me Renata doesn’t talk about her private life. I have no idea.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

I lied to her with a calm that scared me. I also told her that maybe it was time she asked herself whether it was sustainable to cheat on Patricia with her own daughter. Lucía told me Renata was irresistible, that she had been after her for months, that she couldn’t resist her. She said it almost proudly. I gave her the only reasonable answer I could think of: to back off, to let time pass, that the priority was Patricia. When I hung up, I poured myself a glass of red wine and drank it standing up, staring at the sky.

That night Renata didn’t come back. Nor the next. She went forty-eight hours without a word and I didn’t text her once. We had agreed on that: not to ask.

***

She showed up on Saturday with two bags and a face puffy from lack of sleep.

“I know you know,” she said as soon as I let her in.

“Know what?”

“About Lucía. She told me. That she had called you, that she had asked you.”

I closed the door slowly and pointed to the sofa. Renata didn’t sit. She walked to the window, tucked her hair behind her ear, and started talking as if she’d rehearsed the speech in the elevator.

“It happened three years ago. I was eighteen and Lucía was alone at home one afternoon. My mom was traveling. I’m not going to give you details. The thing is I never thought it was that important to Lucía. For me it was… something for Wednesday afternoons. A couple of months ago I stopped liking it and started avoiding her. Yesterday she went crazy. She told my mom everything.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“My mom kicked her out. She went to her brother’s place. But yesterday she followed me down the street from the faculty to the bus stop. If she doesn’t stop, I’m going to file a report.”

I stared at her. I wanted to hold her and I wanted to throw her out at the same time.

“Renata, we need to cut it off too. I can’t have a woman outside my house waiting to see whether my student comes in.”

“I know. I came to leave you the keys.”

She took the keychain out of her jeans pocket and set it on the dining table. We looked at each other for a second and the twenty-five years between us suddenly felt like a century. We said goodbye with a kiss on the cheek and a long hug, like two old lovers recognizing each other after a long time.

***

Seven months went by without me hearing anything from her.

One night, while having dinner with Marina, a colleague from the faculty I had recently started seeing, I saw Renata come into the restaurant with Patricia and a skinny guy with a barely-there beard. Patricia recognized me first. Renata looked up, froze for half a second, and then smiled with the kind of ease you only learn through practice.

“Helena! So good to see you. Look, let me introduce you to my mom and Bruno, my boyfriend.”

I greeted the three of them with the most professional smile I could manage and sat back down with Marina. I explained, without going into details, that Renata had been a former student. Marina accepted the explanation without asking more. That night, in my bed, Marina fell asleep on my shoulder and I stayed staring at the ceiling for two hours thinking about Renata’s cunt, about how it tightened around my fingers when she was about to come, about the wet sound she made when I fucked her with my tongue.

The next day I got a message.

“I was really happy to see you. I was curious about how you were doing.”

It took me a week to answer. I told her I was happy too, that I was getting to know someone, that I saw she was doing well. Her reply came three minutes later. A conversation took shape between us over the following weeks: reflections on the past, anecdotes from the present, future plans neither of us intended to keep. A constant presence in the pocket of my pants. We both knew our partners didn’t know.

When Marina went to Lisbon for a week for a conference, I sent Renata the flyer for a talk I was giving in the auditorium on the history of the number zero. Renata replied right away that she would be delighted to go.

***

I glanced at her the whole time I spoke. She was sitting in the fourth row, wearing a beige sweater and her hair tied up, taking notes I was sure would be useless to her. When the applause and formal greetings were over, I went straight to her.

“Did you like it?”

“I loved it. And I came because you invited me, don’t be modest.”

“Want to grab something at the café?”

“Yes, of course.”

We walked down the faculty corridor and, just before entering the café, she grabbed my hand. She didn’t say anything. She just took my hand and turned on her heel. We went back to the parking lot, got into the car, and I drove to my place without either of us opening our mouths. In the elevator she laughed and said she thought it was going to rain that night. It was the most banal thing she could have said. Meanwhile, my panties were already soaked and I felt my clit beating against the seam of my pants.

When we got in, Andrés, the gardener, was still finishing trimming the jasmine on the balcony. I told him he could leave, that I’d finish the rest on Monday. As soon as I shut the door behind him, I turned and kissed her. It was a long, deep kiss, without urgency and without doubt, a kiss that said seven months without seeing you and I still haven’t had enough. I pushed my tongue down her throat and she sucked on it like she was blowing my cock. Renata kissed me back with the same calm, with that same certainty of someone who already knows the road home, and slid her hand under my skirt, straight between my legs, and pulled my panties aside with two fingers.

“You’re dripping,” she whispered against my mouth.

“I’ve been like this for seven months.”

She drove her fingers all the way in, right there against the living room wall, and moved them slowly, searching for the spot only she knew. I clung to her shoulders and bit her neck so I wouldn’t scream. She made me come standing up in under two minutes, with the spurt of my orgasm running down my thighs and staining her wrist.

We undressed in the living room, dropping our clothes where they fell. Renata was naked first, and I devoured her with my eyes before touching her: breasts a little fuller than seven months ago, flat stomach, brown nipples already hard, shaved cunt shining. I knelt on the rug and spread her legs right there, standing against the couch, and buried my face between her thighs. I sucked her clit with seven months of delayed hunger, shoved my tongue into her hole and pulled it out dripping with her juices, bit her lips and licked her perineum all the way to her ass. Renata grabbed my hair with both hands and started fucking my mouth, moving her pelvis against my face, moaning broken words—“like that, like that, don’t stop, keep going”—until she came with a long spasm, squeezing my head between her thighs, and I swallowed everything she gave me.

We collapsed onto the bed half naked and reached for each other between the legs almost at the same time. I knew her rhythm and she knew mine. I slid three fingers inside her and rubbed her clit with my thumb while she drove two into me and scraped that spot with the bent pads of her fingers. We both came without separating our mouths, our fingers sunk into each other, wet to the knuckles, splashing between each other’s thighs with a pornographic sound that filled the room. After that I brought my hand up to her breasts, stroked her nipples with the tip of my thumb damp with my saliva, pinched them hard until they turned red, and heard her whimper softly into the pillow, biting her lip so she wouldn’t make too much noise.

“I missed you,” she told me when I ran my tongue along her neck.

“Me too. I shouldn’t have missed you so much.”

“Fuck me like before,” she whispered in my ear. “Fuck me hard.”

I stretched over to the drawer in the bedside table and took out the harness. The dildo was thick, black, with a base that rested against my pubis and pressed my clit with every thrust. Renata saw it, bit her lip, and turned over in bed without being asked, on all fours, ass up and face against the pillow. I ran a hand down her back, grabbed one ass cheek, and spread it. I spat on her cunt and ran the tip of the dildo along her lips, getting it nice and wet, then pushed it in slowly, all the way to the hilt. Renata let out a long, muffled moan and shoved her hips back, asking for more.

I started fucking her hard, gripping her hips, driving the silicone cock into her to the base. Her ass slammed against my pelvis with a hard, wet sound, and I felt the dildo moving inside her while the base rubbed my clit with every thrust at the same time. Renata begged for harder, deeper, and I gave it to her, fucking her faster and faster, grabbing her hair with one hand and yanking it back.

“Like that, like that, harder, fuck me, don’t stop,” she panted into the pillow.

Then she climbed on top of me, took my wrists, and laid them on the pillow. She sat on the dildo facing away from me, legs open, and started riding me, lifting and dropping her hips with an intensity I hadn’t seen in her before. I watched her ass opening and closing around the cock, her juices running down her thighs and dripping onto my pubis. I brought my hand around to the front and rubbed her clit with two fingers while she kept moving. She came screaming, her cunt clenching around the dildo, and the spasm squeezed the base against my clit too and made me climax without being able to hold back, arching my back beneath her, moaning her name against her shoulder blade.

We had two more orgasms before going still, panting, her still on top of me, sweat between our skins cooling slowly, the dildo still inside her, shining with both of us.

After that we got into the shower. Renata turned around, bracing both hands against the tiles, and spread her legs as if she were offering me an exercise to correct. I soaped her back with the sponge, went down to her ass and spread it with both hands, admiring her pink asshole and cunt already swollen from so much use. I ran the sponge along her slit and she pushed her ass back, asking for more. I dropped the sponge and went down to where I knew she was waiting for me. I slid two fingers into her cunt slowly, felt her biting the back of her hand so she wouldn’t scream, and moved them inside her while with the thumb of my other hand I stroked her asshole, pressing it just a little. Renata writhed, squeezed her eyes shut, and asked for more. I eased my thumb into her ass too, carefully, and started fucking her with both hands at once, feeling her inner walls clench and both openings pulse against each other through the wall between them. When she came, her knees buckled and I had to hold her by the waist, my fingers still inside her, while she trembled against the tiles and water poured over us. We came out both red, wrapped in towels, and put cream on our bodies laughing like two girls who had skipped school.

***

We went back to bed. We fell asleep with our legs braided together and our hair still damp, and slept until the morning light slipped through the blinds. When I woke up, Renata was looking at me and, before I could say anything, she slipped under the sheet, spread my legs, and woke me fully with her tongue between my thighs. She made me come like that, still half asleep, with the first light of day filtering through the window and her mouth pressed to my cunt, sucking me slowly, unhurriedly, as if she had all the time in the world. When she came out from under the sheet her face was shining and she had a smile I recognized from seven months ago.

“We need to talk,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

“I know.”

We got dressed slowly and sat in the kitchen with a coffee each. We talked about what we both already knew. That we were both in relationships. That we didn’t want to hurt anyone. That we also weren’t going to stop seeing each other. That this time we were going to be careful for real, not like before. That we also weren’t going to promise anything we couldn’t keep.

“You know what I like most about you?” she asked me before leaving, in the doorway.

“What?”

“That you never asked me for anything. That you always knew I had my own things and you had yours. That gives me room to come back. Lucía didn’t give me room.”

I gave her a long kiss on the mouth, right there at the apartment door, with the hallway light shining straight at us. When she left, I stood for a while against the frame, watching the elevator buttons light up one after another. I knew Marina was coming back from Lisbon the next day. I knew Renata was going back to Bruno. I also knew that next time I wasn’t going to wait seven months.