The Afternoon Elena Discovered She Liked Women

I’ve always known what I am. A lesbian, unapologetic and straight to the point, the kind who doesn’t waste time pretending to be interested where there’s no interest to be found. My name is Marta, I’m twenty-seven, and I’ve lived in Salamanca since I finished vocational training. I’m not one of those who go chasing after any woman who happens to walk by; that’s not how I am. I have a pretty good nose for knowing where it’s worth investing my time, and I learned early on that patience is the only strategy that really works.

Elena was the exception to all my rules.

We met in a clothing distribution warehouse where the two of us started that same autumn, fresh out of twenty. The work was monotonous: sorting garments, labeling boxes, moving loads from one place to another in shifts that seemed to stretch on forever. Breaks were few and far between, and the atmosphere was noisy, with bad radio music and the constant hum of the conveyor belts. The only thing that made that place bearable was shift change, when we crossed paths in the changing rooms.

Elena had a way of moving that was almost obscene without meaning to be. She undressed without the slightest trace of modesty, with that natural confidence people have when they’ve never had reason to be ashamed of their bodies. And she had no reason: her figure was perfect in a way that wasn’t artifice or effort, but pure, well-distributed genetics. Wide hips, a marked waist, tits that defied gravity even without a bra, with big dark nipples that showed through the fabric whenever it got cold. I watched her from the corner of my eye with the discretion practice gives you, and I promised myself I wouldn’t become obsessed with her. My mouth watered imagining what it would be like to suck those tits, what the sweat trapped between those thighs would taste like, what she would sound like moaning if I put my tongue between her legs.

I became obsessed.

Sometimes I’d offer to help her with her work smocks, the ones buttoned up the back with tiny buttons. I had plenty of excuses to get close: the zipper that jammed, the button that wouldn’t close properly. My fingers brushed her skin without my being able to stop it, and the shiver that ran through me was hard to hide. I started becoming more insistent, with that particular energy of someone who doesn’t want the other person to forget they exist. I think Elena noticed long before I thought she did.

The pulling away was gradual but unmistakable. Small detours, conversations that ended before they had begun, a different bench in the cafeteria, glances that slid away just as they were about to meet. I understood the message without needing anyone to translate it for me. I took it as best I could, which was not with any special elegance.

Because I had fallen in love with her. Something that had never been in my plans and that was no use to me admitting out loud either.

When she announced she was getting married, I felt something like relief, though with a dark undertow that took me months to shake off. If she disappeared from my field of vision, maybe I could move on. And that’s what happened: she said goodbye to the warehouse, married some guy I never knew more than by name—Rodrigo—and vanished from my life as if she had never really been in it at all.

Other women came after. None was Elena, but that wasn’t what I was looking for then anyway. I was looking for pussies to lick and mouths to return the favor, without too much complication. I got it, more or less, for several years. I fucked a lot, I came well, I learned new tricks in every bed I climbed into.

***

I saw her five years later in the riverside park by the Tormes, on a gray late-September afternoon.

She was walking with a little girl by the hand, a four-year-old with braids and a backpack with rabbit ears. I would have turned around and gone on my way, but it was Elena who called my name before I could avoid her.

She had cut her hair. It was short at the nape, with natural waves framing her face. She was thinner than before, with dark circles she made no attempt to hide. She was still beautiful, but with that slightly worn beauty of someone who’s slept badly for far too long.

We sat on a bench while the girl ran after the pigeons. Elena told me her life without my having to ask too many questions. The marriage had gone well at first, until the pregnancy complicated everything. The labor was long and difficult. The months of postpartum abstinence weighed more heavily than either of them had anticipated, and Rodrigo had made his own decisions about that, without telling her. When Elena found out, there was nothing left to save.

“I feel very alone,” she said, at a moment when her daughter was too far away to hear. “I don’t know if it’s me, or if I chose badly, or both at the same time.”

“It’s not you,” I told her.

She looked at me for a second with an expression that wasn’t quite gratitude. It was something more complicated than that.

I listened to her, asked the questions I should, gave her my phone number when she asked me for it. And when we said goodbye, I went home with the quiet certainty that that afternoon was not the end of anything.

***

Elena wrote to me three weeks later, at eleven at night.

“Are you still in the same flat?”

I answered yes.

“Can I come by tomorrow afternoon?”

“Of course,” I wrote. And I left my phone on the bedside table without thinking any further about it.

She arrived at six with a bottle of red wine and the excuse that she wanted to catch up. We both knew it wasn’t just that. I knew it the moment she crossed the threshold and looked at me in that way, as if she were weighing something she’d been deciding in silence for a long time.

We opened the wine. We talked about her work, the girl, unimportant things. At some point, in the middle of a sentence I no longer remember, the silence between us became too dense to fill with words.

“Marta,” she said.

“I know,” I answered.

Nothing more was needed.

***

She got up from the sofa and came toward me. Her hands found me before her mouth did: first my arms, then my shoulders, the edge of my jaw. When I kissed the hollow of her neck, she let out her breath in a rush, as if she’d been holding it in for too long. I grabbed the nape of her neck and shoved my tongue into her mouth without asking permission, and she took it with a low moan that went straight to my cunt. I felt my panties go wet all at once, with that brutal, immediate reaction of a body that has spent years waiting for exactly this.

I took her to the bedroom without rushing. Hurry is a waste when something has taken years to arrive.

We undressed slowly, without urgency. I unhooked her bra and her tits fell heavy against my chest; I pulled down her panties and felt the dampness already soaking the cotton. Elena’s body was different from the one I remembered from the changing rooms, softer in some places, fuller in others. It had the marks time and motherhood leave behind. Fine stretch marks on her hips, breasts a little lower, a belly with the soft curve left by months of pregnancy. I thought she was more beautiful this way, with all that history written on her skin without anyone having asked permission.

I laid her on the bed and looked at her for a moment before going on. She was a little tense, with her shoulders slightly drawn in, but her eyes weren’t asking me to stop. They were saying exactly the opposite. Her legs were slightly apart, and I could see the shine between her thighs, the dark trimmed hair, the lips already a little swollen. My mouth watered.

I started with her neck, went down her collarbone, reached her tits. I licked one nipple all the way around, circling it with the tip of my tongue, then took it into my mouth and sucked hard, pulling with my lips until it hardened like stone. I moved to the other one and repeated it, this time nibbling, marking her skin with my teeth just hard enough. I stayed on each nipple as long as I felt like it, in no hurry at all, until I heard the first involuntary sound come from her throat. Small, contained, almost surprised by itself. It was exactly what I had been waiting for.

“Fuck,” she whispered. “Fuck, Marta.”

Her skin responded to every movement with a precision that surprised me. It had been a long time since anyone had truly paid attention to her, and the body remembered immediately, like someone returning to a language they thought they’d forgotten. I slid a hand over her belly and down to her cunt, barely brushing over it, and she lifted her hips looking for contact without being able to stop herself.

“Not yet,” I said in her ear. “Hold on.”

She groaned in frustration, with a guttural sound that made me laugh against her skin.

I went lower. I kissed her stomach, the curve of her hips, the inside of her left thigh and then the right. I bit the inner thigh, near the groin, leaving a red mark that would last for days. Elena opened her legs without my having to ask, with a gesture that was anything but calculated. I paused for a second looking at her open cunt, glistening, with pink lips and the clit already peeking between the folds. She smelled like hot woman, like pure desire, and that smell turned me on more than I had been in years.

I licked her slowly at first, one long flat stroke from entrance to clit, without pressing, learning from her body’s response what she liked and what made her lose the thread. Elena let out a choked cry she hadn’t expected. I repeated the movement, and again, each time a little slower, a little deeper. Her clit was very sensitive; as soon as I found it with the tip of my tongue and started drawing small circles around it, she buried her fingers in my hair and squeezed without realizing it. That involuntary force no one controls anymore when they’re at that point.

“God,” she murmured. “God, don’t stop, don’t stop.”

I didn’t answer. I kept going.

I shoved my whole tongue inside her cunt, fucking her with it, feeling how she clenched around me. She tasted salty, something sweet and thick at the same time, with that taste only a woman who’s gone a long time without a proper orgasm has. I sucked her inner lips, one and then the other, and went back to her clit, this time sucking it with my whole mouth, tugging at it with my lips. Elena started panting faster, her hips moving against my face with no control at all.

I brought two fingers up and slid them inside her slowly, all the way to the base. She was so wet they went in without resistance, and I felt her cunt tightening around them as if it didn’t want to let them go. I started moving them upward, looking for that rough spot on the front wall, while my tongue kept pounding her clit.

I took her to the edge twice, and both times I stopped just before she got there. I slowed down, pulled my fingers out, blew gently over her swollen clit until I felt her starting to come down. Elena moaned in frustration, almost whimpering, her hands clenched in the sheets.

“Please,” she said, her voice broken. “Please, Marta, let me come, please.”

Not out of cruelty, but because I wanted that when it happened, it would really happen, with the full weight of it behind it. What turns me on most isn’t the orgasm itself: it’s the exact second before, when the other person’s body can no longer pretend it’s in control of anything.

The third time I didn’t stop.

I slid in three fingers, fucked her hard, curling them upward with each thrust, while I sucked her clit without giving her any respite. Elena arched her whole back, lifted her ass off the bed, and let out a sound that kept growing until it became long and urgent, until her hips pulsed against my mouth in short, repeated jolts. I felt her whole cunt clenching around my fingers, squeezing in waves, and a gush of hot fluid soaked my chin. I held her by the thighs so she wouldn’t pull away and kept going until her legs trembled uncontrollably and she asked me to stop with a voice that didn’t sound like hers.

“Enough, enough, I can’t anymore, stop, stop.”

I sat up and looked at her. Her eyes were closed, her chest heaving, her tits rising and falling, a flush spreading from her neck down to her nipples. The insides of her thighs were shiny with saliva and her own wetness. It took her a few seconds to come back.

“Where did you learn that?” she asked at last, her voice hoarse.

I laughed without answering and licked the remains of her cunt from my lips, letting her taste herself. She kissed me hungrily, sucking my tongue, with no disgust at all.

***

Then it was my turn.

Elena explored me with a mix of curiosity and determination I hadn’t expected from someone doing this for the first time. She had no experience, but she had a real desire to learn, and that matters more than technique when it’s paired with genuine attention. She kissed my breasts as if she’d never kissed any before, with the concentration of someone discovering a whole body from scratch. She nibbled my nipples until they hardened painfully, and kept going lower, leaving a wet trail down my belly.

She asked me what I liked. She paid attention to what I showed her. She corrected herself without needing me to repeat anything. I taught her how to part the lips with two fingers before using her tongue, how to find the clit without pressing too hard at first, how to vary the rhythm when she noticed I was getting close.

“Lick it like this,” I told her, guiding her mouth. “Soft. Now faster. Yes, like that, fuck, like that.”

When she finally lowered her head fully between my legs, she did it with a confidence that caught me off guard. She licked my cunt all the way through, from bottom to top, and paused on the clit with a hot, eager tongue. She slid in one finger, then another, with more clumsiness than technique but absolute devotion. I grabbed her hair and set the rhythm, pushing my hips against her face without shame.

“Deeper,” I gasped. “Put them deeper. And don’t stop sucking. Don’t stop.”

I didn’t take long. I’d been waiting too long for that exact moment to pretend indifference. I came with a force I hadn’t felt in years, squeezing her head between my thighs, soaking her chin and lips with the thick gush that came out of me in spurts. She didn’t pull away. She stayed there, swallowing, licking, until the contractions eased and I let go of her hair.

Afterward we lay facing each other on the bed, with the afternoon light coming in through the window in long oblique bands. Elena’s mouth was still shining with me, and I wiped it with my thumb without being able to stop looking at her. For a while neither of us spoke.

“I want to learn more,” Elena said at last.

“You’re already learning.”

“It’s not enough. You know things I don’t know yet, and I want to know them.”

“For what?”

“To do the same to you. The same thing you did to me. I want to make you scream like you made me scream.”

She said it with a simplicity that had nothing pretentious about it. Then she added, more slowly:

“With Rodrigo it was never like that. He never went down on me, you know? He never ate my cunt. He fucked me and that was it, and whether I came or not didn’t matter to him. Your tongue is something different. I didn’t know this existed like this.”

“Now you do,” I said.

“Now I do,” she repeated.

***

That was eight months ago.

We see each other two or three times a week, when her mother looks after the girl. Elena has learned faster than I expected, and she has that kind of sensory intelligence you can’t really teach: either it’s there or it isn’t. In her, it’s in abundance. Now she eats my cunt like she’s been doing it for years, and she’s learned to use her fingers in a way that sometimes leaves me trembling for minutes. We’ve tried toys, harnesses, positions that the first time she was too embarrassed even to name. Nothing embarrasses her anymore. She gets on all fours and tells me to shove whatever I want into her, with a filthy mouth I would never have imagined in the shy Elena from the warehouse.

One afternoon, while we were resting unhurriedly, with the sheets sticky and the smell of sex still hanging in the room, she asked me if I thought she was a lesbian.

I told her she didn’t have to put a label on it, that those things don’t work like switches.

“Then what am I?” she asked.

“A woman who knows what she likes,” I answered.

She was silent for a moment, staring at the ceiling.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what I am.”

I don’t know what this will become over time. We’ve both learned not to make overly ambitious plans. But what I do know, with a certainty that leaves me no doubt at all, is that Elena’s tongue inside my cunt is currently my favorite thing in the world. Every time I feel it, it’s as if I’m discovering something new in a language I thought I knew well.

She arrived late, by way of a five-year detour and a failed marriage in between. But she arrived.

And sometimes that’s all that matters.