The girl on the app taught me something I didn’t expect

Today, almost any young girl has a dating app downloaded. This is my case with one in particular, and I still use it to this day. It was the one that made me change the way I understood desire and, above all, the way I understood myself.

I was twenty-one and spent too much time in the university library. While my classmates talked about casual hook-ups, guys they’d met in bars, and weekend stories, I nodded along like I knew what they were talking about, but inside I didn’t understand a thing. I was the nerd of the group, the one who arrived early and left after everyone else. Several guys in my program threw hints my way, but I dodged them with sarcastic remarks my friends loved. They had already been through no-strings-attached adventures, parties that ended in unfamiliar rooms, and plans made just to get off. I had never opened up to anyone. Until one of them, Camila, decided to teach me how to use the app.

Camila studied photography, and when I got to her apartment she already had a small improvised set ready in her room: a white wall, a lamp with a shade, and a collection of blouses and dresses hanging off the back of a chair. I had seen her set up more serious productions for school, but this time she seemed to be enjoying herself more than usual.

—We’re going to make you a real profile —she told me as soon as I walked in—. Fake name. The age stays real, because the apps compare.

—And what’s the point of a profile if I’m going to lie after that? —I asked.

—You’re not lying. You choose which part of yourself you show. It’s different.

I sat on the edge of her bed while she looked at me with the trained eye of someone used to measuring light by instinct. It felt as if she were evaluating angles and shadows, not me.

—On these apps almost nobody is looking for anything serious —she explained—. It’s meet-ups or cybersex, don’t kid yourself. If you’re not offended by it, you can have a lot of fun.

—Are you sure anyone’s going to like me? I don’t have photos like yours. Mine are from school or the field hockey pitch.

—Trust me. They’ll see you differently here. Did you bring what I asked for?

I’d brought her a couple of thin blouses, a short dress, and the pretty underwear I almost never wore. She looked through it, made a face, and opened one of her own drawers.

—Girl, your underwear looks like your grandmother’s. I’ll lend you mine, I washed it this morning.

There was never any prudery between us. I took off my sports clothes with the ease of someone changing in a shared locker room and tried on a black lace set, very thin at the sides, which felt more like a suggestion than a garment. Camila helped me with the clasp, adjusted a sheer white blouse that opened over my chest, and told me to kneel on the bed.

—Chin up. Look at the lamp, not at me. Perfect.

She took dozens of photos. From behind, on my knees, standing in an almost see-through dress and sheer stockings she adjusted herself. Some made me laugh. Others left me silent, staring at myself on the camera screen as if I were someone else. My waist was more defined, my hips wider than I thought, and there was a back there I had never paid attention to. The girl in the photos was not the nerd from university. She was someone I didn’t know and, at that moment, found intriguing.

—Done —Camila said after an hour—. I’ll upload the best ones, write your bio, and show you how to use the app. Should we open it together?

—I’m already regretting this.

—Too late. You already have three matches.

None of them convinced me. I left her place with my phone in my backpack, not even wanting to look at it, and showered as soon as I got back to my apartment. I came out with a towel wrapped around my chest and flopped onto the bed. The phone was vibrating nonstop. Thirty minutes had passed and I already had dozens of messages. Most of them were from men less than two kilometers away, direct messages, explicit offers, unsolicited photos.

And women too. Quite a few. I thought, with an innocence that now makes me smile, that a new friend wasn’t a bad thing. One of them wrote first.

—Hi, you’re gorgeous. How old are you?

—Hi Lucía, thanks. Twenty-one. And you?

—Twenty-six. You’re beautiful. I’m bisexual. You live really close to me, weird I’ve never run into you.

—Aww. I’m straight, but you’re really pretty. I love your skin and your tattoos.

—You cannot be this gorgeous and straight. I’d go to your place to see if you still are after that. That way I can show you my tattoos up close.

—Haha, yes, I am. But you look very attractive, huh. Come to my apartment and prove it. I’m kidding.

—I’m coming. Send me the address. Better yet, should I call you on video first so we can see each other?

I agreed thinking of conversation, laughter, meeting someone new. I adjusted the towel over my chest and propped the phone against a pillow. When I answered, she was already in her room, wearing a black blouse with a deep neckline and her hair piled into a makeshift bun. The light from her lamp lit up one side of her neck.

—You look even prettier in person than in the photos —she said—. I love that you don’t use filters.

—You too. Nice neckline.

—Lower the camera a little. I want to see you better.

I lowered the phone almost without thinking. The towel slipped and exposed the inside of my thighs.

—Oh, sorry, it slipped.

—Mmm. What a delicious mistake. Take off the towel, I want to show you something.

I shouldn’t be doing this, I thought, while doing it anyway.

***

What happened in the following minutes surprised me more because of how quickly it happened than because of what it was. I let the towel fall and drop onto the bed. She angled the camera downward and appeared naked from the waist down, sitting on the edge of her chair. There was nothing performative in the image, only a calm that completely undid me.

—I was like this from the beginning —she said, laughing—. I meant for you to see me. Do you like what you see?

I didn’t know what to answer. What I felt wasn’t rejection. It was curiosity mixed with something that was very much like desire, and that I had never felt for a woman before.

—Do you want me to come over? —she asked—. I’ll do whatever you want and make you feel good. No strings.

—Where do you live?

—In the building across the street. I swear it.

—Come.

When the buzzer rang, I still couldn’t quite believe I had agreed. I opened the door with the towel around me again, my fingers cold, my pulse hammering in my temples. Lucía smiled at me from the hallway in a floral dress, her hair loose over her shoulders. She smelled of citrus perfume and something warm underneath it.

—Welcome —I said, trying not to let my voice shake.

—This is so nice. Do you live alone?

—Yes.

—Even better.

She closed the door behind her and moved forward without asking permission. I leaned against the hallway wall and let her come closer. She didn’t kiss me at first. She looked at me for a moment, as if measuring whether I was going to back out. Then she put her hand on my cheek, brushed a strand of hair aside, and lowered her mouth to my neck.

—If at any point you want me to stop, you tell me and I stop. Okay?

I nodded. It was the first time anyone had asked me something like that before touching me.

Her mouth was unlike anything I knew. Soft, patient, without the urgency I had imagined in the guys at university. She trailed down my collarbone and untied the towel with one motion. I was left naked against the wall and she knelt in front of me, never once taking her eyes off mine.

—I want to taste you —she said, and she didn’t wait for an answer.

I closed my eyes. The sensation caught me off guard, not because of its intensity but because of its precision: she knew exactly where to run her tongue and how long to linger on each spot. My legs began to tremble after a few minutes. I braced my hands on her shoulders so I wouldn’t fall. I heard her laugh, a low, satisfied laugh, without taking her mouth away from where it was.

—Come on, to the bed.

I walked over without thinking. I let myself fall back while she unbuttoned her dress and dropped it onto the chair. She had a tattoo on her hip that I hadn’t seen in the video call, an olive branch that climbed up to her ribs. I stroked the leaves with one finger, almost on instinct.

—Had you ever been with a woman before?

—No.

—Even better.

She went back down my body, this time without rushing. She kissed my navel, my hips, the inside of my thighs. I gripped the sheets because I didn’t know what to do with my hands. When she returned to my cunt, I was already ready to come, and she noticed. She lifted her head for a second.

—Don’t hold back. Tell me when you come.

—Now. Now. Now.

I came with a sound I didn’t recognize. Something between a laugh and a sigh, my thighs closing around her face, my hands tightening in her hair. She didn’t move until my body had completely loosened. Then she came up to kiss me and let me taste my own flavor in her mouth, without warning.

—Well —she said, resting her forehead against mine—. This is only the beginning.

And it began. She made me turn over, left me face down, and traced my back with her lips, millimeter by millimeter, until she found again the place where my hips answered on their own. That night I came three more times, twice with her mouth and once with two of her fingers, and I’m still amazed by how naturally my body decided it had known how to do all this from before.

***

Lucía came almost every day during the following three months. Sometimes after class, sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes just to have coffee and stay late watching series. During that time I started using the app with men too, and I discovered that my head adjusted without any effort: desire was desire, and the person on the other side mattered less than the connection in the moment. Some nights Lucía showed up after a guy had already left, and she found that hilarious. Other times it was the other way around. We never talked about exclusivity. There was no need.

After that summer we became friends, and something changed, without a fight, without a scene. She met someone, moved to the other side of the city, and had a baby two years ago. We still talk often. From time to time she writes to ask if I feel like seeing her, and I tell her it’s better not to, because I like her partner and I don’t want to get involved in that. Though the last time she suggested a threesome with him, and I still haven’t answered.

What else that first night left me with was something more practical. I learned to have encounters without guilt, to bring people to my apartment when I feel like it, to delete the app when I get tired and download it again when I’m bored. My record was five different people in one month, counting two threesomes. The word that probably applies to me is nymphomaniac, but it makes me laugh. I prefer to think I simply understood something in time, and that I owe it to a girl who wrote to me one afternoon while I was in a towel, bored and still convinced I knew who I was.