My Virtual Friend Kissed Me for the First Time in Seville

I had never imagined that an online word game would take me to the other side of the ocean. Much less that, at forty-two, I would end up discovering a part of myself that had been asleep all my life.

Elena lived in Seville. I lived in Rosario. We had crossed paths by accident on a crossword app that had become fashionable during quarantine, and one day, without thinking too much about it, I sent her a private message to congratulate her on a brilliant move. She replied with an emoji and a short comment. That night we talked until three in the morning.

A whole year went by. A year of daily messages, voice notes while I washed the dishes, unfiltered photos, confessions I had never told anyone. I told her what I didn’t tell my husband. She told me what she didn’t tell her daughters. We were friends in a sense that didn’t need physical presence to exist, and that was why it seemed indestructible to us.

The trip came up in a silly conversation. “If you came, I’d take you to eat a tortilla that would make you cry,” she wrote to me one night. I answered, “Go on, mark it on the calendar,” as a joke. Three weeks later I had bought the ticket.

When I got off the plane in Seville, she was waiting for me with a ridiculous handwritten sign and red eyes. We hugged like two people who had known each other all their lives, and at the same time like two strangers just discovering each other’s scent. There was something in that hug that lasted a second too long. We both noticed. We both pretended not to.

***

The first four days went by as they should have. We walked through the old quarter, ate too much, drank cold white wine on a terrace overlooking the river. Elena introduced me to her sister, her best friend, the woman upstairs. I told her work anecdotes; she talked about her teenage daughters, who were at their father’s house that week.

And yet there was something in the air neither of us named.

I noticed the way she looked at me when she thought I couldn’t see. She laughed too hard when I said something only mildly funny. When we crossed a street, she would take my elbow and leave her hand there two seconds longer than necessary. When we sat on the sofa to watch a series, her leg would end up pressed against mine, and neither of us would move.

It’s nothing, I told myself silently before sleeping. It’s the intensity of seeing her in person after so long. It’s the accumulated trust. That’s all.

I was lying, and I knew it.

Both of us had talked more than once, in late-night chats, about attraction between women. We both agreed it wasn’t our thing. I had once told her I thought it was beautiful, but not for me. She had told me that a classmate at university had tried to kiss her at a party and that she had pulled away without hesitation. “It just doesn’t come naturally to me,” she had written. “I respect it, but it doesn’t come naturally to me.”

That phrase came back to me on the fifth night, as we sat on her couch with the lights off and the mute television flickering in the background. We were playing the same word game as always, each with our phone, laughing softly when one of us beat the other. It was almost two in the morning.

I touched her hand.

It wasn’t planned. It was almost a reflex. I was typing a word and, without thinking, I let my fingers rest on the back of her left hand, as if I had wanted to brace myself there. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t pull her hand away. She kept typing with the other one, but something changed in her breathing. I heard it.

My heart started beating so hard I thought she’d hear it.

***

Fifteen minutes passed like that, or maybe half an hour, I couldn’t say. My hand on hers, both of us pretending to keep playing, both of us knowing we weren’t playing anything anymore. At some point she set her phone on the side table. I set mine down. We fell silent, side by side, with the TV’s blue light flickering over our faces.

“What are we doing?” she finally asked, almost in a whisper.

“I don’t know,” I answered. And it was true.

She turned a little toward me. I turned too. We were six inches apart, and I could feel her warm breath against my cheek. I lifted my hand and touched her jaw with my fingertips. Her skin was soft in a way I hadn’t imagined skin could be. I brushed my thumb along the curve of her cheekbone.

I leaned in.

The first kiss was almost a brush. Just my lips against hers, so brief it could have denied itself. She pulled back two inches, opened her eyes, looked at me as if she needed to confirm it was really happening. And came back.

The second kiss was different.

We began slowly, no tongue, just lips against lips, discovering. Her lips were softer than any lips I had ever kissed before. They tasted like the white wine we had had with dinner and something else, something sweet and uniquely hers that I couldn’t have named. We kissed like that for a long while, unhurried, as if the rest of the world had ceased to exist.

When she parted her lips, I understood. I slipped my tongue out just a little and traced her lower lip. I followed it all the way, slowly, feeling her shiver. And then I felt her tongue seek mine, timid at first, surer after that. We began kissing for real, mouths open and eyes closed, and I discovered that kissing a woman was something completely different from anything I had known.

***

The deeper the kiss got, the more aware I became of how wet I was. It was a dampness I hadn’t felt in years, an animal urgency that surprised me. Her hand was resting on my waist, uncertain, not daring to move up or down. I took her wrist and brought it to my chest, over the pajama top.

She let out a sigh she hadn’t been able to hold back.

The pajama fabric was fine cotton and everything showed through beneath it. I touched her chest with my open palm and felt the nipple harden against my hand. She kept kissing me, now hungrier, while I slid my hand down the side of her torso, along the curve of her waist, over her hip. I brushed her stomach with my fingers and found it warm, alive, vibrating.

“I’ve never done this,” she murmured between kisses.

“Neither have I,” I said.

“What if we don’t know how?”

“We’ll learn.”

I kissed her again with more determination and let my hand rise back up to her breasts. I stroked both of them, one and then the other, drawing slow circles over the fabric. Her breathing was ragged and her eyes were closed, and every so often she let out short little moans, almost sighs, that left me breathless.

I kissed her neck. I bit her earlobe. I ran my tongue along the line of her jaw to her chin and back to her mouth. Every time I heard her moan, I felt something tightening deep in my lower belly.

***

I don’t know when we stopped sitting up. I know that at some point she reclined back on the sofa and I settled on top of her, one leg between hers. I know I slipped my hand under the T-shirt of her pajamas and felt the bare skin of her stomach for the first time. I know she lifted her hips, almost without realizing it, seeking more contact.

We stayed like that a long time, kissing, touching each other over and under our clothes, without taking anything off. There was no hurry. There was something almost reverent in every gesture, as if we both knew that each discovery was a threshold we wouldn’t be able to go back through. I stroked her thigh, kissed the hollow at her collarbone, ran my fingers through her hair and messed it up completely.

She did the same to me. Shy at first, bolder after that. She touched my chest and breathed hard. She kissed my neck and made me let out a groan I hadn’t expected to hear from myself. At one point she looked me in the eyes, with a mixture of fear and hunger I had never seen in her before, and I knew we were thinking exactly the same thing.

***

It was almost five in the morning when we stopped. We didn’t stop because we wanted to stop. We stopped because we were both afraid of what came next, and because we both needed a moment to understand what had happened. We stayed curled up together on the sofa, saying nothing, listening to the distant rumble of a garbage truck in the street.

“Tomorrow,” she said after a while, her voice hoarse.

“Tomorrow,” I repeated.

And we each went to our own room, as if we could still pretend nothing had changed, knowing full well that everything had changed. I got into the bed in the guest room with my pajamas still smelling like her, and I touched myself until I fell asleep thinking about her lips.

I had four more days left in Seville.

And there was no longer any doubt how they were going to be.