She Kissed Me When I Was Still Burning for Another Woman

The world was still asleep, but I was already on my feet. Four in the morning had become my hour, not because of military discipline, but because there was no room left in my body for sleep.

For fifteen days I had heard nothing from Daniela. Not a message. Not a call. Not a sign to confirm that that morning in her apartment had existed outside my memory.

Sometimes the urge to go to the hospital and wait for her by the door climbed up my chest like live embers. And sometimes, just in time, I snuffed it out. If she had wanted to keep seeing me, she would have given me her number. That was what I kept telling myself. Maybe it had only been a game: taking the champion to bed, opening her legs, making her come three times against the mattress, and nothing more.

I went out for a run for exactly one hour. The cold air slapped my face as if it wanted to wake me up completely, as if it wanted to tear me out of my chest. That dawn it rained without stopping, and every drop seemed to fall deeper inside than outside. While I ran, the memory of the taste of her cunt on my tongue rose to my mouth without permission: I had spent almost a full hour between her thighs that night, licking her clit until she dug her heels into my back and begged me, with a broken voice, not to stop.

I came back, showered, put on my uniform. Under the stream of hot water I ran my fingers between my legs almost without thinking, and realized I had spent fifteen days getting myself wet in the shower, pinching my clit with the pad of my thumb while I saw her in my head, tongue out, moaning “more” in my ear. I finished quickly, biting my lip, braced against the tiles, and the orgasm hit me with fury, as if even the climax were angry with her.

By six I was ready for another day at the Public Prosecutor’s Office. There Camila wasn’t the vulnerable one. There she was the forensic expert. The soldier. The woman who looked death in the eye without blinking.

And death gave no reprieve.

That morning three new reports came in. A university student who never came home after class; her classmates reported her because they had a group project and she never missed without warning. A waitress from a nearby town, last seen alone at the bus stop. And a young woman from the canton who rented a room in the historic center: she went out to buy tortillas in broad daylight and the street swallowed her whole.

The pattern was no longer a pattern. It was a method. What years ago had looked like trial and error was now a cold, surgical, efficient machine. And I needed to understand it.

I plunged into the previous autopsies, looking for coincidences in the cuts, marks, hidden messages. How do they choose their victims? What signature are they leaving? How many more are still alive, waiting? The questions held me together better than coffee.

I didn’t realize it was midmorning until Mariana Cordero walked in, the prosecutor in charge of the case.

“Good morning, Major Herrera,” she said without formality, with that blend of respect and something else that always lingered in her gaze. “Do you have five minutes for a coffee?”

“Good morning, Prosecutor. I can’t. Thank you,” I replied without looking up.

“No one turns down coffee. And you need it.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not, Camila. You’ve got dark circles under your eyes and you keep forgetting lunch. Five minutes. Don’t make me order you to do it,” she said, and smiled in a way that softened the stiffness in the air.

She was right. I wasn’t resting. Not because I couldn’t, but because I didn’t know how. Lately bruises appeared that I didn’t remember getting, scratches on my arms without explanation, a slight tremor in my fingers that made me grip the scalpel harder than necessary.

I sighed and gave in. Sometimes all I needed was to stop thinking and walk.

***

The café was three blocks from the Prosecutor’s Office. Mariana ordered two cappuccinos. She knew exactly how I took mine, without asking. We sat on the terrace, where the air was warm, the kind that remains after it has rained at dawn and the sun still hasn’t warmed things up completely.

“How long has it been since you slept?” she asked bluntly.

“I’m focused. It doesn’t affect me.”

“You can tell that to anyone. Not me. I know you too well for you to hide behind words.”

I looked away, pretending to be interested in traffic. And then everything inside me fell apart.

I saw her.

Daniela was seated a few meters away, surrounded by coworkers in hospital uniforms. She was wearing the white cotton blouse that morning I had unbuttoned button by button, my teeth on her neck while I squeezed her tits over her bra and she whispered, “Fuck me already, I can’t take it anymore.” I remembered her under the warm light of her window, her skin still damp, laughing against my mouth when I bit her collarbone. I remembered her straddling my face, moving her cunt slowly against my tongue, gripping the headboard, her nipples hard and her cheeks flushed, looking down at me while I licked every last fold. I remembered her holding my head in both hands as if she were afraid I’d leave, with two of my fingers still buried to the hilt in her soaked cunt.

And now she was there, next to a man in a white coat, touching his arm with a familiarity that tore the air out of my lungs. She smiled. She smiled at him the way she had never smiled at me.

Our eyes met, and the world stopped. It wasn’t a reunion. It was an emotional ambush.

I froze. My stomach clenched shut. My heart tightened like a fist. Rage turned into a dull pain that rose to my eyes in the form of tears that were not going to fall. Not there. Never there.

“Are you okay?” Mariana asked softly.

I didn’t answer. I just tightened my fist under the table, feeling my nail dig into my palm.

Mariana followed the line of my gaze. She didn’t understand everything, but she understood enough. She stood, took my hand firmly, and led me out of the terrace before I had time to argue.

“She doesn’t deserve even to see you like this,” she whispered.

She put an arm around my waist as we walked. Not like a lover. Not like a friend. Like someone who has waited a long time to touch without breaking.

***

Daniela came out after us as soon as she saw us walk away across the terrace. I learned that later, when Renata, my best friend, told me she had arrived late to the meeting and found her at the door. Renata had held her by the forearm with that calm strength she had for stopping people without hurting them.

“You can’t follow her. Not now,” she had said.

“I just… I need to talk to her,” Daniela murmured, her voice breaking.

“You know perfectly well what you did to her, right?” Renata replied, though she didn’t actually know anything concrete. She only knew that one day I had called her and told her I had spent an extraordinary night with a woman who was waiting outside the apartment, and that after that the whole subject had become a minefield between us.

“No… well, yes. I don’t know how to explain it. Please, give me her number. I’m begging you!”

Renata looked at her. She believed her. It showed in her eyes. But she wasn’t going to hand over what wasn’t hers to give.

“If she didn’t give it to you, she had her reasons. I’m not going to step over that. But if you really want to talk to her, don’t give up. The chance will come.”

So Daniela wouldn’t completely collapse, she left her own number and asked for Daniela’s. If the time came, I would decide. Not her.

***

Back at the Prosecutor’s Office I hurried to the forensic room and buried myself in the files. I went over the same documents again and again without really reading them, hoping the letters would distract me from the tremor under my skin.

Mariana came in a while later, wearing a gentler expression than usual.

“I didn’t ask you before because it wasn’t the time, but… what happened, Camila?”

“Nothing worth talking about.”

She sat beside me. She didn’t insist. She just put her hand over mine.

“I’m here. Not because you owe me an explanation. But because I care about you.”

I closed my eyes. You deserve someone capable of loving you without open wounds. And I simply couldn’t. Not yet.

Mariana stood when she understood the silence.

“When you’re ready, I’ll be here. Sometimes talking is enough.”

***

Several days passed. I functioned like a machine: autopsies in the morning, files in the afternoon, miles before dawn. Mariana stayed close, without intruding. Renata noticed everything. She knew something was still stuck inside me, but she also knew it wasn’t time to ask.

One morning, Mariana managed to convince me to go back to the café.

“Just coffee. No drama,” she promised.

I agreed. Maybe because I needed to breathe. Maybe because her serene way of holding my chaos was starting to soften me.

But fate gave no reprieve. When I walked in, Daniela was there. Alone. Seated at the table where it had all begun, as if she had been waiting there for mornings on end.

When she saw me, she stood and came straight to me.

“Camila, please… can we talk?”

I didn’t answer her. My eyes traveled over her like someone seeing a dream again and feeling it hurt. I remembered her smell of clean skin, remembered her fingers tangled in my hair while I buried my tongue between her legs until she arched her back and pressed my head against her cunt so I wouldn’t stop licking her. I remembered how I had bent her over against the bathroom tile before the sun had finished rising, how I had opened her with two fingers while biting her ass cheek, how she had come screaming my name with her cheek pressed to the cold wall and her ass trembling against my face. I barely blinked. My heart skipped a beat and put itself back together.

Before I could say anything, Mariana wrapped her arms around my waist from behind. A subtle gesture, but clear: you’re not alone.

Daniela froze, not knowing whether to step forward or back. And then the scene shifted all at once.

A man appeared from the side, white coat, easy smile.

“Hey, darling. I wasn’t expecting to see you so early, and especially not on your day off,” he said, and kissed her cheek.

I felt a sharp stab behind my ribs. The doctor, not noticing the fire he had just lit, looked at Mariana and extended his hand.

“I didn’t know you were friends with Prosecutor Mariana Cordero. Nice to meet you. I’m Dr. Adrián Solano.”

Mariana didn’t move. But her eyebrow lifted with suspicion.

She wasn’t Mariana Cordero to the general public. For the press, for outside files, for the courthouse corridors, she was Inés Beltrán. Her real name was only known by a very small circle. How did he know it?

I saw a chill run down her back, though she hid it perfectly. She kept her posture.

“You’re mistaken, Doctor. We don’t know each other. We just happened to run into one another here. But it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

She didn’t shake his hand. Instead, she took me by the arm.

“My love, shall we go? The coffees must be ready by now.”

In my head his “darling” to Daniela was still echoing. I ignored everything else, including the jolt that crossed her face at hearing Mariana’s “my love.”

We left without looking back.

***

Mariana didn’t drive to the Prosecutor’s Office. She drove home. On the phone she asked Renata to join us. She didn’t explain anything to me on the way, and I, still clouded by the image of Daniela beside that man, followed her without arguing.

Her house was the kind of calm I didn’t deserve: light wood, plants in every corner, light coming in diagonally through the windows. She offered me water. I sat on the sofa. She sat beside me, too close and at the exact right distance at the same time.

“I don’t want to intrude, Camila. But I care about you more than I should, and I’m not going to deny it. There are people who would die to be with you, to love you without conditions. I’m one of them.”

And then she kissed me. A slow kiss, with just enough tongue, asking for nothing and asking for everything at once. Her hand slid up my thigh over my uniform pants, paused at my hip, and then moved back down without hurry. I didn’t stop her. I didn’t kiss her back either, not at first. But my jaw loosened, as if my body knew something my mind hadn’t processed yet. She smelled of jasmine and fresh coffee.

When I realized it, I was already kissing her back. I bit her lower lip, sucked on it, and she let out a low moan that tightened me between the legs. She slipped a hand inside my shirt, stroked my stomach with her fingertips, went up to my bra, and pinched my nipple between thumb and forefinger with a calculated slowness that made me close my eyes and part my thighs without meaning to.

“Tell me to stop and I’ll stop,” she murmured against my mouth.

I didn’t say anything. I held her nape and kissed her harder. Her hand went down, unbuttoned my pants, lowered the zipper. When her fingers slid inside the elastic of my panties and found my cunt already wet, a rough laugh of satisfaction escaped her.

“You’re soaked, Camila.”

She started rubbing my clit in slow circles with the tip of her middle finger, unhurried. I breathed in short gasps against her neck. Her other hand freed one breast from my bra and she bent down to suck on it, closed her lips around the nipple, bit it lightly, left it shining with saliva. When she pushed two fingers inside me, I squeezed my thighs around her hand almost in anger, because I didn’t want to like her body and I was liking it too much.

“Like that,” she whispered, curling her fingers, touching that exact spot inside—“Let me take care of you this time.”

She moved her wrist slowly, in and out, while her thumb kept working my clit. I dug my nails into her shoulder over the blouse. The orgasm built fast, dirty, almost against my will, clenching my stomach and legs, and when I blew apart I did it in silence, biting her neck, with her hand wet between my thighs and her mouth still on my nipple. For an instant, I closed my eyes and let it happen, as if it were possible to believe in a whole woman, without another woman’s shadow laid over her.

The doorbell rang. Renata had arrived, and I silently thanked the interruption. I pulled my zipper up with clumsy fingers, straightened my bra, ran a hand through my hair. Mariana licked her fingers with provocative calm before getting up to open the door, and I had to take two deep breaths before becoming Major Herrera again.

***

When Renata stepped through the door, the energy in the room changed. Mariana recovered her professional tone. I recovered my military posture.

“What happened?” Renata asked when she saw my face.

“It may be nothing,” Mariana began. “But a few hours ago we met Dr. Adrián Solano.” She paused to look at me. Just hearing the name had broken me a little again. “When he introduced himself, he called me Mariana Cordero.”

Renata tensed. I straightened up. Until that moment I hadn’t fully processed what had happened, but there, in the room, everything clicked into place all at once.

“Did you know him?” Renata asked, trying to sound neutral.

“Negative. It was the first time. And you, Camila, had you spoken with him?”

“No. I’d seen him before, but I’d never spoken to him. And I haven’t mentioned your name to anyone either.” I stressed the “anyone,” and Mariana understood I meant Daniela.

“Then there’s no way he could have known it by chance.”

“That’s why I called you both here. He shouldn’t have known. That means someone inside the investigation is leaking information.”

“That name… Adrián Solano…” Renata murmured. “I’ve read it before. I don’t know where, but I’ve seen it.”

Renata pulled out her tablet and started opening medical files, victim records, autopsy reports. Mariana and I did the same from our computers. For more than an hour we went through digital files and badly scanned photographs.

“Here,” Renata said suddenly. “One of the last identified victims has a medical report signed with initials: A. S.”

“Could it be him?” Mariana asked.

I leaned closer to the screen. My gaze sharpened. I asked them to search for more files, not recent ones, older ones. And I found him.

“Here. This girl, one of the ones found in the pit, was his patient. Adrián Solano is listed as her treating physician before her disappearance.” I pressed my lips together in anger. “This changes everything.”

I stood. Something lit behind my eyes, that spark that always came when a case returned me to my own ground. I had become the soldier again. The strategist. The woman who wasn’t afraid to go all the way down.

And for the first time in days, my heart stopped hurting.

Only to start burning.

Because in that room we had just found not only a name. We had just found the next link in the chain of fear. And the worst part was that that link was sleeping on the other side of Daniela’s bed.