My reader from Cali wanted more than words

I met Mariana because of my own stories. I was writing erotic tales on a small site, almost as therapy, and one afternoon a different email appeared among the usual ones. It wasn’t the typical message from a man asking for photos or from someone correcting a spelling mistake. It was long, careful, written by a woman who said she had read everything I’d ever written.

She lived in Cali, was Colombian, and was thirty-nine when we started. A lesbian, a writer herself, an obsessive reader of everything I published. She told me straight out in the second or third email: she was a devoted admirer and, if the chance ever came up, she’d love to fuck me until I was left speechless.

What was curious is that it didn’t make me uncomfortable. Quite the opposite. The attraction was mutual even before she admitted it. Her texts had something that soaked my panties without effort, and the truth is I’ve never needed much to get turned on.

—I’d like that too —I replied one night, with a glass of wine beside the keyboard—. Having you close, opening your legs, licking your cunt until you scream my name.

I wrote it exactly like that, without thinking too much. And from that point on, everything changed tone.

***

Our correspondence became daily. At first we talked about literature, life, the relationships we’d had. But Mariana knew exactly what she was doing. She kept turning up the heat little by little, slipping innuendo between innocent sentences, until some random message came with a photo of her in a bikini on some Pacific beach.

The first time, I stared at the screen longer than I’d admit. Fair skin, broad shoulders, a smile that didn’t ask permission. I replied with something clumsy, something that gave too much away, and she noticed.

—Did you like it? —she asked.

—Too much —I wrote.

That was her signal. A few days later there were no more bikinis. Photos arrived that left nothing to the imagination, explicit close-ups of her cunt completely spread open with her fingers, showing me every pink, glossy fold as if she were standing in front of me. The outer lips parted, the inside wet and dripping, the swollen clit peeking out between the flesh. She did it to turn me on and she succeeded without a fight, because Mariana had a beautiful pussy in a way any woman would be able to appreciate.

Then came the videos. Short, homemade, filmed with the phone propped up on some piece of furniture. Her masturbating slowly, biting her lip, whispering that she was doing it thinking of me. I watched them in the bathroom, with the sink tap running to cover the sound, while Lorena slept in the bedroom and I had my hand inside my pajama pants, rubbing my clit in the same rhythm as she did.

I learned her rhythm by heart. The way she rested two fingers on her clit and moved them in slow circles before sliding three fingers deep into her cunt, to the knuckles, with a wet sound coming from the phone that left me trembling. The exact seconds when her breath caught. The tremble in her thigh when she was close. How she spread her vulva open with the other hand so I could see everything, how her juices ran all the way to her ass and she smeared them there too with her stained fingers. Watching her come, alone, on a screen, her stomach contracting and a rough moan going through me, while I bit my free hand to keep quiet and drove two fingers into myself until I could feel my own cunt pulsing, was a sweet torture I repeated night after night.

—Did you watch it? —she’d text afterward, always.

—Every second —I’d answer.

—And what did you do while you were watching?

—I came twice. Once with my fingers, and once by licking them afterward after I pulled them out.

I told her everything. Every time. And every confession brought us one step closer to something geography stubbornly refused to let happen.

***

Lorena is my partner. We’ve been together for years and a long time ago we decided honesty was worth more than jealousy. So I told her everything. Not with guilt, but like someone sharing something that was burning inside her.

—I’m dying to fuck her —I confessed one night in bed—. To take all of her, to suck her tits until they’re red, to make her come in my mouth.

Lorena laughed, brushed a lock of hair away from my face and kissed my forehead, then kissed me on the mouth, pushing her tongue all the way in, and slid her hand under my T-shirt until she pinched one nipple between two fingers.

—I know. It shows every time you open your email. Your cunt gets hard just thinking about her, right?

I answered by opening her legs and burying my face between her thighs, sucking her clit hungrily until she came in my mouth while she tugged my hair. There was no reproach. She understood me, accepted it, supported me without hesitation. That freedom was exactly what made everything so easy to want and so impossible to achieve.

Because there was one big obstacle, the biggest of them all. Her in Colombia, us on the other side of the Atlantic. An entire ocean between desire and possibility.

***

Over time Mariana opened up beyond the physical. She told me that at that moment she didn’t have a steady partner. The last one had lasted seven months and had ended because of her, she said, because her needs weren’t the other woman’s.

—I’m too much for almost everyone —she wrote me once, without drama, like someone stating a fact—. I need to fuck every day, and sometimes several times. If I don’t come two or three times a day, I’m in a bad mood.

She described herself as a versatile lover, able to adapt to any circumstance. She could be obedient and submissive or possessive and dominant depending on the moment, without it costing her anything to switch registers. One day she’d spread her legs and ask to be eaten out for an hour straight; the next she’d tie her lover to the bed, spit on her tits, and fuck her with a harness until she begged. When she was alone, she confessed, the lack of sex made her unbearable. She was so active, her cunt got wet so easily, that she ended up looking for encounters in gay bars almost every day. Five, six times a week. So many that sometimes she struggled to perform at work the next day, with trembling legs and a cunt irritated from overuse.

—And doesn’t it get tiring? —I asked, more curious than scandalized.

—It would be more tiring to pretend I don’t need it. I’d rather show up at the office with my panties smelling like another woman than sleep alone.

She also told me she was open to women of any age, but that mature women drove her crazy, older than her, because of the experience they carried in their hands and on their tongues. Her only hard limits were hygiene and pain: she couldn’t stand dirt, or extreme sex, or anything that involved pain or scat. Everything else she liked.

She loved toys, double penetration with two dildos at once —one in the cunt and one in the ass—, anal sex that, according to her, made her completely crazy and had her squirting in streams. And fucking in the water, feeling her cunt swell under the surface while another tongue worked her over. She said she was loud and filthy in bed, that she let every dirty word loose when she got off —"fuck me harder, bitch, deeper, all the way in, open my ass"—, and from the way she wrote it I believed every word.

***

Little by little I built her portrait in my head, piece by piece, like someone studying a body they still can’t touch. Fair skin. Big round tits, pink areolas of average size, thick hard nipples, the kind that go stiff from the lightest touch and beg to be bitten. She shaved her cunt and ass completely. A prominent, fleshy vulva, with thick outer lips protruding between her legs, and a discreet clit, hidden among the folds, waiting for a patient tongue to uncover it.

I knew everything about a body that was seven thousand miles away and I was starting to obsess over it like I hadn’t since adolescence. Sometimes I’d get into bed with Lorena and, while she fucked me with her fingers, I’d close my eyes and imagine it was Mariana on top of me, sucking my tits, grinding her cunt against mine until she came.

One night she confessed her fantasy to me. The one she’d saved for last, the one that really mattered to her.

—I want to spend an entire weekend in an isolated country house, with a pool —she wrote—. Naked the whole time, with another woman, with no one seeing us or bothering us. Fuck wherever we feel like, at any hour, without hiding anything. Eating a cunt while I have breakfast, having mine eaten in the pool, getting into bed at five in the afternoon and not coming out until the next day, with the smell of sex stuck to the sheets.

I read that message three times. And I imagined myself in that house, in that pool, with her. The fantasy got under my skin and never left.

***

The problem was still the same. The distance. No matter how much we desired each other, everything stayed on a screen, and I knew virtual sex doesn’t solve anything, it only opens the hunger without feeding you.

Even so, I made her a proposal.

—What if we meet by camera? —I said—. Lorena and me. You watch us. And if you want, you join in your own way.

It wasn’t the first time we’d opened the door to someone from outside, though every experience had been different. Mariana accepted delightedly, almost before I finished the sentence.

We had several encounters like that. The camera on, Lorena and me naked in bed, her on the other side directing us with that rough, shameless voice she had, with her legs open in front of her own camera and three fingers moving inside her cunt while she gave us orders. She told us what to do, where to put our hands, when to stop.

—Spread her legs —she ordered me—. Wide open, so I can see her cunt. Now spit on it and rub it slowly.

Lorena would play along with a smile, and I’d obey. I’d spit on her swollen clit and move two fingers in circles, feeling her belly tighten. Then Mariana would tell me to put my mouth down there and eat her until she was moaning on the other side of the screen too, with the phone resting against her thigh and her own hand working her cunt at the same pace my tongue was working Lorena’s.

—Put your tongue inside —she’d ask—. Deep. Make her feel like it’s me licking her. Now two fingers, curved upward, hit that little spot that drives her crazy.

And for a moment I really felt it. I closed my eyes and Lorena’s cunt turned into hers, the one I’d seen opening in so many videos, and I drove my fingers in up to the knuckle while she writhed beneath me. When Lorena came in my mouth screaming, Mariana came on the other side in her own, and I stayed between the two of them, with the taste of cunt on my tongue and one hand lost between my legs finishing the job. That was the magic and the trap of the game: for a few minutes the ocean grew small, and then it opened up again, wider than ever.

Because the time difference worked against us again and again. She finished her workday when we were already asleep; we had our cunts burning at hours when she was rushing off to work. And long-distance sex, no matter how intense it is, gets tiring in the end. It ends up tasting like not enough, as I’d always suspected. Coming over and over with your own fingers, knowing there’s a real tongue waiting on the other side of the sea, is a kind of frustration no orgasm can put out.

***

We stopped those encounters and Mariana got upset. She took it as a rejection.

—You’re already bored of me —she wrote me one night—. Go on with your life and forget all about this.

It took me a while to make her understand that wasn’t it. I explained that both she and we lived in the real world, each of us with our routines, our problems, our family circumstances that are as real as life itself. That fiction can be delicious at times, but staying locked inside it eventually does harm.

—I didn’t get bored of you —I told her—. I got bored of coming alone. I got bored of not being able to open your legs for real and bury my tongue in your cunt until you pull my hair.

That sentence disarmed her. She agreed with me and, although we stopped seeing each other by camera, we stayed in touch. Less often, yes, but without hard feelings. Sometimes a stray message, a photo of her tits fresh out of the shower, a good morning that brightened my whole day and left my panties soaked before coffee.

***

Before the silence got too long, I made her a promise. A real one, not one of those things people say to patch over a bad moment.

—I’m going to do everything I can —I wrote— so that in the not too distant future, if you still want it, we can travel to Colombia. Lorena and me. And make that fantasy of yours come true. The house, the pool, the whole weekend. And I swear you won’t be walking straight the following Monday.

She took a while to answer. When she did, it was just one line.

—I still want it. And I’ll be waiting for you with my cunt open.

And reading that, I knew I was going to make it happen.

Now every time I pass a travel agency I stop for a second longer than necessary. I calculate, add it up, save. I think about an isolated house at the end of a dirt road, about the warm water of a pool under the tropical sun, about Mariana naked waiting for me as she promised, with her legs open on a lounger and her fingers already teasing her cunt. I imagine her on all fours at the edge of the water, with Lorena eating her ass from behind while I offer my cunt to her mouth; I imagine the messy bed, three bodies tangled together, the thick smell of sex in the air, her coming with screams while one woman’s tongue is between her legs and the other woman’s fingers are in her ass. There’s still time left. But for the first time the distance no longer feels like a wall, but like a countdown.

We’ll see how it unfolds as time passes. But this time I know the ending won’t stay on a screen.