The FWB I Met on an App

I had just turned eighteen, and I owned a phone that had become my silent accomplice. It had been three months since I’d broken up with Andrés, my high school boyfriend, and at night my bed felt heavier than the exhaustion of the day. I was in my first semester at university and, between exams and the routine of my home, I discovered a messaging app that wasn’t WhatsApp or Instagram.

It was called Lumen and promised anonymous conversations with people who shared your interests. I wasn’t looking for a partner. I just wanted to talk to someone who didn’t know me, someone I could tell the things I didn’t dare say to my friends. And that was where, in one of those themed channels, Mariana appeared.

Her profile picture was little more than a shadow against a window. Shoulder-length black hair, brown eyes that were more suggested than seen, and a smile that seemed to hold a secret. Her bio said something simple: “woman, thirty-three, looking for company without labels.” I wrote to her without thinking too much, more out of curiosity than intent.

—Hi —I typed—. I saw your profile. Want to talk for a bit?

The answer took nine minutes. I know because I counted every one of them.

—Hi. What made you write to me?

I told her the truth: that I didn’t want to talk to random strangers, that her description had seemed different to me. That first night we talked until three in the morning. She lived in another city, more than six hundred kilometers from mine, separated for a year and a half, no children. She worked at an architecture studio and, according to her, weekends made her especially lonely.

I didn’t mention that I was practically still a teenager. I told her I was studying, that I lived with my mother, that I liked Cortázar’s books and movies from the nineties. She replied with voice notes. Her voice was deep, measured, with that cadence of someone who weighs every word. That voice stayed inside me long before anything else did.

***

For the first few weeks we talked every day. About trivial things, important things, things I had never told anyone. I confessed that I had kissed a female classmate at a party and since then had been wondering whether I liked women more than men. She told me those questions weren’t answered by thinking about them, but by living them.

—I found out late —she wrote one night—. At twenty-eight. I’d been married to a man for seven years, and one day, at a conference, I met a colleague who made me realize I had never felt anything like that before. It took me two years to separate. Don’t spend two years figuring out what you like.

I repeated that sentence to myself many times.

One Thursday dawn, after an exam had gone horribly, I sent her a voice note crying. I wasn’t expecting an immediate answer, but she called me through the app five minutes later. We talked for almost an hour. And just when I was about to hang up, she said, almost in a whisper:

—Can I ask you something strange?

—What?

—Will you let me see you? Just your face. I want to know who I’m talking to.

I hesitated for three seconds. Then I turned on the camera.

She did the same. The screen filled with her face: pale skin under a bedside lamp, hair still wet from the shower, a gray T-shirt that was too big, revealing a collarbone. She wasn’t conventionally beautiful. She was something stranger and more exact. She was the kind of face you don’t forget.

—You’re gorgeous —she said, without smiling.

I didn’t know how to answer.

***

From that night on, video calls became part of our ritual. We started by talking with the camera on, showing ourselves like two friends pouring a glass of wine before bed. But the air between us slowly changed, the way light changes at sunset without you noticing the exact moment.

One night, while talking about intimate things, she asked what I did when I was alone and couldn’t sleep. I laughed nervously and told her I had my methods. She held my gaze through the camera through a long silence, then said:

—Show me.

It wasn’t an order. It was a calm invitation, spoken in the same voice she’d used to recommend books and movies to me. But that night, that voice carried a different weight.

I turned off the overhead light. Left only the table lamp on, the one that tints everything orange. I settled back against the pillow with my phone propped on a stack of books. And while she watched me without saying anything, I slid my hand under the sheet and began rubbing slowly over my pajamas, feeling the heat gather between my thighs.

—I don’t want to see the sheet —she said—. I want to see you.

I pulled the sheet down to my waist. Then I moved it away completely.

Mariana did the same, without my asking. She took off the gray T-shirt with a simple motion and settled against the headboard of her bed. Her breasts were full, the dark nipples hardening under the screen’s light, the skin a little paler where the sun didn’t reach. Her thighs were firm and white, and between them the wet shadow of her cunt barely showed when she opened her legs with a naturalness that left my mouth dry. She didn’t show herself like a model posing: she showed herself like a woman who knew she was desired and had no problem making it clear.

That first time was clumsy. My hands were trembling and I dropped the phone every five minutes. She laughed with a deep, unmocking laugh and kept telling me what to do. Not with graphic words, but with brief phrases: “slower,” “close your eyes,” “think of me there.” I slid two fingers through my warm wetness, feeling the smooth skin of my swollen lips, and bit my mouth when I began pressing my clit in clumsy circles. She watched me, her breathing growing more broken, one hand sliding over her stomach until it sank between her own legs.

—That’s it —she said, her voice lower now—. Don’t rush. I want to see you open for me.

When I pulled my fingers away and brought them to my mouth, tasting my own salty, hot flavor, she moaned slowly, as if the sound came from the bottom of her chest. Then she started touching herself harder, rubbing her cunt with the palm of her hand, first over the top, then parting her lips with two fingers to slide them in and out again, wet, shining, losing her composure in front of me. I kept watching her, bringing my fingers to myself and back again insistently, until my body began to tremble in that way that announces the end.

—Don’t hold back —she whispered—. I want to hear you come.

And I came with a moan that embarrassed me instantly, my legs tight and my back arched, while I kept rubbing myself until I emptied completely. She came after seeing me do it, head thrown back, fingers buried in her cunt and mouth open without making a sound. Only her ragged breathing and the wet shine between her thighs told me she had broken too.

Afterward, she fell asleep with the camera still on. I watched her sleep for almost an hour, too afraid to hang up.

***

What we had during the months that followed didn’t have an exact name. We weren’t girlfriends. We weren’t dating. We didn’t even know each other in person. But we were something. Friends with benefits, she said whenever it was her turn to put a name to what we were doing. I liked to think of us more as long-distance lovers, though I never told her that.

We met through the app two or three nights a week. Almost always she was the one to start. She’d send me a message at midnight: “awake?”, and I’d put down whatever book or notebook or pretense of reading I was using and rush to turn off the light in my room. The routine was almost identical: an hour talking about anything, another hour letting the silence fill the screen, and then the voice asking for what I already knew it was going to ask for.

Sometimes she dressed for me. She’d show up in a short robe that opened on its own the moment she moved, or in a black lace set she said she’d bought thinking of that night. On her, lingerie wasn’t a pose. It was a message. “I put this on for you.” Then she’d slowly pull the fabric aside, letting me see her full tits, her smooth stomach, the dark line that ran down to her shaved cunt. I’d sit there motionless watching her as she shamelessly touched herself, slipping in two fingers and pulling them out dripping, showing me how the wetness gleamed on her hand.

—Aren’t you ever going to put something on for me? —she asked once, half joking.

The next day I went to the mall and bought myself a white slip with a low neckline. That night I showed it to her without saying a word. Mariana stayed silent for ten seconds, looking at me, before murmuring:

—You know exactly how to undo me.

And I didn’t know. I was learning, night after night, to do it without meaning to.

***

There were things I learned from her that I will never forget. I learned, for example, that a woman’s pleasure is not a destination: it’s a journey. I learned there are slow ways of touching yourself no boy my age had ever suspected. I learned to look at my own thighs the way she looked at hers, with that mix of admiration and calculation, knowing where to press, where to ease off, where to let the pressure build until it became unbearable. I learned to slide my fingers into myself more decisively, to open myself with my other hand, to press the pad of my thumb against my clit until I felt that fine, desperate throb that forced me to moan.

I learned that sweat on another woman’s breasts, seen through a screen, can be as exact as touch. That a moan recorded by a cheap microphone can be just as powerful as one heard in your ear. That the brush of lingerie slipping over someone else’s hip can leave you breathless even if you aren’t touching her. That watching her open her legs, her cunt wet and her lips swollen, made me feel a hunger that was almost cruel, and that she felt the same when she watched me bring my fingers to my mouth after touching myself.

I learned, above all, that some women only reach climax when they truly feel accompanied. Mariana told me that one dawn, with a frankness that left me defenseless.

—With my ex-husband I never finished. With you I always do. It’s not your technique, love. It’s because you look at me.

Then she asked me to lift my legs and rest my feet against the wall. I obeyed, feeling how my body opened better on the screen. She took off her robe, leaned back, and started touching herself with her whole hand, rubbing her cunt with long, almost desperate movements, while telling me to keep looking at her, not to look away, that she wanted to come with me. I slid two fingers inside myself and my thumb outside, pressing hard until my pelvis started to vibrate; on the other side of the screen, Mariana let out a low, rough cry, her tits rising and falling with the rhythm of her breathing.

—That’s it, baby —she gasped—. That’s how I like it. Don’t stop.

We both came again almost at the same time, our bodies tense, legs open, faces flushed, the screen fogged by the steam from the shower she’d taken earlier and by our own breath. Afterward we stayed still, exhausted, looking at each other as if we had just done something forbidden and perfect.

I still keep that line with me, the way one keeps certain postcards found between the pages of an old book.

***

The last time we spoke was on a Tuesday in March, almost a year after our first video call. She was moving to a town near the mountains for a project at the studio and told me she needed to put a pause on everything she was doing, including our routine. It wasn’t an abrupt goodbye. It was a long conversation, with her tears and my silences.

—Don’t fall in love with me —she asked me at the end, almost as if she were asking permission to believe it herself.

—It’s too late for that request —I answered.

She turned off the camera before hanging up. I stayed in bed, still wearing the white slip, thinking about how strange life is when it gives shape to the most important things through a screen.

Today, four years later, I still have the app installed. I almost never open it. But every so often I go in, look at the last time her profile was online, and wonder if in some mountain town she’s thinking the same thing I am. If she still sleeps with the camera on. If she still settles against the headboard of the bed and takes a deep breath before doing it.

I learned how to take myself to that place she taught me. But it isn’t the same. It’s never the same.

And, if I’m being honest, I don’t think I want it to be.