The First Time I Tasted Another Woman’s Lips

That summer we finished the first year of university with our heads completely scrambled: exams, moves, breakups, the usual. Carla suggested Cancún and, without thinking too much about it, the five of us pooled whatever was left in our accounts and booked an apartment two streets from the beach. It was Carla, Sofía, Lucía, Daniela, and me. I was the last one to join the plan, because until a month earlier I’d been seeing a guy from Engineering who told me he “needed to think about it” and in the end thought better of it.

We landed on a Saturday afternoon in thick, sticky heat that got under my clothes before I even left the airport. The apartment was small, with two bedrooms, a big sofa in the living room, and a kitchen that opened onto a narrow balcony overlooking an inner courtyard. We divvied up the beds while shouting over one another, and before we’d even unpacked our suitcases we were already in bikinis deciding which bar we were going to that night.

The first night, though, wasn’t my night. Carla hooked up with an Argentine who got her on the dance floor after three songs. Sofía disappeared with a French guy who barely spoke Spanish. Lucía, Daniela, and I stayed at the bar, ordering expensive gin and tonics and pretending to have fun. Around four in the morning, the three of us walked back to the apartment, laughing without much feeling at the ones who’d had better luck.

Lucía fell asleep before taking off her makeup. I heard her flop onto the bed with a dull thud and then nothing. Daniela and I stayed in the living room, barefoot, with the lights off except for the little lamp in the corner. I threw myself onto the sofa. She sat on the floor, leaning against the armrest, her back straight and her knees drawn up to her chest.

“Are you sleepy?” she asked without looking at me.

“Not at all. You?”

“Neither am I.”

We were silent for a while. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence; it was one of those silences that happen because there’s something to say and no one wants to be the first to say it. Daniela toyed with the hem of her dress. I stared at the ceiling.

“Valeria,” she said at last.

“What?”

“I have to tell you something and I don’t want you to get weird about it.”

My stomach tightened. I thought of a thousand things at once: that she wanted to go home early, that something serious was wrong, that she’d hooked up with my ex. The last thing I thought was what actually happened.

She stood up from the floor, sat down beside me on the sofa, looked at me straight on, and before I could understand what she was doing, she put a hand on my cheek and kissed me. It wasn’t a quick kiss. It was a slow, deliberate kiss, with her mouth a little open, as if she’d been practicing it for months.

I didn’t pull away. That was the part I couldn’t explain afterward.

“Sorry,” she murmured when she pulled back.

“No,” I said without thinking. “Don’t apologize.”

“It’s just that I’ve been thinking about doing it the whole trip. And before the trip too. For a long time, Valeria.”

I didn’t know what to say. I had never looked at a woman like that. I hadn’t looked at Daniela like that either, though now that I thought about it, there had been things I hadn’t wanted to see: how she always sat close to me, how she grabbed my arm when she laughed, how in class she’d look up before I did when we walked into a lecture hall.

“I’m a bit lost,” I admitted.

“Do you want me to stop?”

I thought about it. I really thought about it, not just out of politeness. And the answer that rose up from somewhere words couldn’t reach was no.

“Don’t stop.”

***

She kissed me again, and this time I kissed her back with a clumsiness I didn’t recognize in myself. She slipped her tongue into my mouth without asking, and I took it, searched for it with mine, sucked on it a little without realizing. Her lips were softer than any guy I’d ever been with, and she smelled sweet, like vanilla mixed with the sweat of the night. She lowered my dress straps slowly, first one, then the other, and I was left sitting on the sofa with my tits out and a breath that wouldn’t obey me. My nipples had gone hard all at once, so hard they even hurt.

“You’re beautiful,” she said, and she said it like she’d been waiting years to say it. “Fuck, Valeria, you have amazing tits.”

She brought her mouth to my chest and started slowly, with her tongue, drawing circles around my nipple before closing her lips over it and sucking it fully into her mouth. She nipped it gently. Then not so gently. She moved to the other one and licked it with the tip of her tongue, up and down, while her fingers pinched the one she’d just left wet. I threw my head back against the sofa and let out a moan I didn’t know where it came from. This isn’t happening to me, I thought, and at the same time: I don’t want her to stop.

She straightened up for a second to pull off her T-shirt. She had a simple black bra, and beneath it small, firm breasts I’d seen a thousand times when we changed clothes in the shared flat room, never once paying attention. Now I did. I slid the bra straps down with both hands, fumbled to unhook it, and pulled her toward me. Her nipples were darker than mine, small, and as hard as mine were.

I kissed too, by imitation, by instinct, by curiosity. I ran my tongue over her neck, over her collarbone, and downward. She let me. She held the back of my neck with one hand and let out a short sigh when I reached her nipple and took it fully into my mouth.

“Like that,” she whispered. “Suck them like that, slowly. No rush.”

It was strange to have all the time in the world. With guys there had always been haste, urgency, some kind of race to get to the end. With Daniela there was no end. There was only the room, the sofa, the silence of the apartment, and the heat clinging to our skin.

We slid off the sofa until we were both on the rug. She finished taking off my dress. I pulled down the shorts she was wearing. We stayed in our underwear, and after a while, without underwear. When she yanked my panties off, I realized how wet they were: the fabric peeled away from my cunt with a damp tug that made me press my thighs together in embarrassment. Daniela noticed and smiled.

“You’re soaking,” she said. “Fuck, you have no idea how much that turns me on.”

She was wet too. I saw it between her legs when she spread them to lie down: her cunt was glossy, with almost no hair, her lips open and pink. I had never seen another woman like that before, so close, so exposed. My mouth watered without meaning to. The little lamp cast soft shadows on the floor. Daniela kissed my stomach, my hip, the inside of my thigh, and when she moved up a little more I closed my eyes.

“If you want me to stop,” she murmured, “say so.”

“I don’t want you to stop.”

***

What came next was something new, a different sensation. It wasn’t like when a guy tried without really knowing where to touch. Daniela knew exactly. I imagine she knew because she knew her own body. She spread my legs all the way, settled herself between them, and began with a flat tongue, tracing me all over, bottom to top, slowly, without attacking the center. I felt her lick my whole cunt with her entire tongue, sucking each lip one by one, sliding the tip inside for a second and pulling back out. She went up and down like that several times until I arched my hips and only then did she stop exactly where she was supposed to stop, on the clit, circling it with the tip of her tongue without quite touching it.

“Please,” I blurted.

“Please what?” she asked, lifting her gaze, her mouth shiny with me. “Tell me.”

“Suck it.”

“What?”

“The clit. Suck my clit, Dani, please.”

She smiled and sucked it. She took it fully into her mouth and started playing with it with the tip of her tongue, up and down, in circles, giving me little tugs with her lips. I clenched my fists against the rug. My breathing didn’t feel like mine anymore. I didn’t recognize the short moans escaping me without permission. I wanted to say something and couldn’t. I grabbed her hair, not to push, just to keep her close, to know she wasn’t going anywhere.

“Dani,” I said for the first time, and my own voice sounded strange to me.

She kept going. She slid a finger inside me, then two, and curled them upward, touching a spot I didn’t even know existed. She moved them inside me calmly, in and out, while still licking my clit without stopping. I could hear her sucking me, wet sounds that embarrassed me and turned me on even more.

“You’re so tight,” she murmured against my cunt, without stopping the movement of her fingers. “You’re getting my whole hand wet.”

“Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop,” I begged in a whisper.

She slid in a third finger. She opened me a little more. I felt her reach deeper, touching that inner place with the pads of her fingers, and she closed her lips over my clit again, sucking hard, without rhythm, as if she wanted to rip it out of me. I arched all over, felt my body going out in a current that started somewhere very deep and rose upward. I clenched my teeth to keep from making noise and waking Lucía. I didn’t fully manage it. I let out a long cry when I came, and I came in her mouth, my thighs trembling against her ears and my cunt clamping down on her fingers in spasms I couldn’t control. She didn’t take them out. She left them inside while I finished coming, moving them just a little, stretching my orgasm until I begged her to stop because I couldn’t take any more.

When I came back down to the floor, I realized my eyes were full of tears and I didn’t know why.

***

Daniela slowly pulled her fingers out of me, brought them to her mouth, and sucked each one clean, watching me. Then she climbed up my body again and lay down beside me on the rug. She kissed my temple, my cheekbone, the corner of my mouth, and finally my lips. She kissed me with her mouth still wet from me, and I tasted myself on her tongue, a strange flavor, salty, dense, that instead of disgusting me made me want more. I was still breathing like I’d run miles.

“Are you okay?” she asked softly.

“I’m…” I didn’t know how to finish.

“Do you want to stop?”

“No. I want to give you back what you did to me.”

She smiled. It was a smile I’d never seen before, a Daniela smile that wasn’t for everyone.

“You don’t have to give anything back.”

“I want to. I want to eat your pussy, Dani. I’ve never done it and I want to do it with you.”

A short moan escaped her just from hearing me say it. She spread her legs right there on the rug and looked at me, waiting.

I sat up. I ran my hand through her hair, over her neck, over her chest. Her skin was hot, almost damp. I was embarrassed not knowing what to do, but I was curious too. I leaned in and sucked her nipples the way she had sucked mine, one first and then the other, nibbling gently until I heard her gasp for air. I went down her stomach slowly, paying attention to how her muscles tensed when I ran my tongue over her. I licked her navel, her hip, the pelvis bone.

When I reached between her legs I stopped for a second. I had her right in front of my face, open, shining, with a smell that wasn’t like mine but was still woman, sweet and acidic at the same time. She propped herself up on her elbows to look at me.

“You don’t have to…”

“I want to know what it’s like,” I said, and ran my whole tongue over her cunt from bottom to top, just as she had done to me.

She sank back onto the rug and let out a long, restrained moan. The taste wasn’t unpleasant; it was strong, different, and I liked it more than I expected. I imitated her without fully imitating her, because my tongue moved to my own rhythm, not Daniela’s. I licked the lips from the inside, one and then the other. I slid the tip of my tongue into the entrance and moved it there for a while. I tried sucking her clit into my mouth the way she had sucked mine. I changed. I tried something else. She started breathing faster and grabbed my hair, the same way I had grabbed hers. That’s when I knew I was doing it right.

“There,” she whispered. “Right there. Don’t move. Put it inside me, Valeria. Put it inside me.”

I slid a finger into her. She was hot and tight, and she swallowed it whole. I slid in another. I curled them upward the way she had with me, searching for that place I didn’t even know how to name, and from the way her thighs tensed I knew I’d found it. I started moving them, in and out, while I kept sucking her clit with my tongue, without changing the angle, without changing the rhythm, just as she had asked me to.

“Like that, like that, like that,” she kept repeating in a thread of voice. “Don’t stop, Valeria, fuck, don’t stop.”

I felt her trembling. Her cunt tightened around my fingers, twice, three times, and she bit the back of her hand so she wouldn’t scream. She came in silence, her whole body arched and her thighs closing around my face. I felt a pulse on my tongue, then another, then another, and a new wetness came from inside her and washed over my chin. I didn’t take my fingers out until she herself pushed them away with a trembling hand.

When she relaxed, I collapsed beside her. My face was soaked. I wiped it with the back of my wrist and laughed without meaning to. She turned and licked a drop that had stayed at the corner of my mouth, and we kissed again, long and dirty, the two of us mixed together. After that we both stared at the ceiling for a long while, not speaking, catching our breath.

***

“So now what?” I asked.

Daniela turned her face toward me. She smiled again with that new smile.

“Now nothing. Whatever you want it to be.”

“I don’t want you to think I’m someone who knows what she wants,” I told her. “Because I don’t.”

“I know. I’m not asking you for anything.”

“Did you like it?” I asked stupidly, as if it weren’t obvious.

“Way more than I expected. And I can assure you I expected a lot.”

We both laughed, softly, so as not to wake Lucía. I leaned against her shoulder for a while, and then I looked at the living room clock. It was almost six. Through the window the blue light before dawn was already coming in, that light Cancún has, with its strange, almost purple tone.

“We should get some sleep,” I said.

“We should.”

We gathered the clothes from the floor without speaking. She helped me put my dress back on. I handed her her T-shirt. When we were heading toward the bedrooms, she took my hand for a moment.

“Valeria.”

“What?”

“Tomorrow you don’t have to say anything in front of the others. And it doesn’t have to happen again if you don’t want it to.”

I thought about it. I looked at her for a couple of seconds.

“It might happen again,” I said. “I don’t know yet.”

“That’s enough for me.”

She let go of my hand, went into her room, and closed the door. I went into mine. Lucía was asleep with her mouth open, oblivious to everything. I lay down beside her with my heart still hammering against my chest and my cunt still throbbing between my legs.

I didn’t sleep. All the next morning I had the feeling that something inside me had opened and I didn’t know whether I wanted it to close again. The others got up at eleven with hangovers and plans. Daniela served me coffee without looking at me, as if nothing had happened. But when she handed it to me, her fingers brushed mine for a second longer than necessary.

I smiled at my cup. There were eleven nights left in Cancún.