The Girl Who Stole the Notes Ended Up in My Bed

When the professor handed out the notes that were supposed to be photocopied, Camila took them for herself, as she always did. She’d take them to her apartment, study them all night, and only return them to the copy room the next day. That stinginess annoyed me with a force I didn’t fully understand myself. I left the faculty with a mix of rage and sadness that followed me all the way to my room.

I live in a room where I share the bathroom with six other tenants. At ten at night it’s not a bathroom anymore, it’s something else. I miss my hometown, the smell of the sea, my mother. But I can’t go back to a house where no one knows I’m a lesbian, and where knowing would change everything. I’m Black and that’s already cost me enough elsewhere; the other thing I carry alone, here, in this solitude I at least chose for myself.

There are two days left until they pay me at the restaurant where I scrub floors and wash dishes in the mornings. In the pantry: half a kilo of rice, a packet of crackers, two little bags of coffee. I have an exam on Thursday, a pile of dirty clothes, and my spirits in the gutter. I bathe with a bucket because the boiler fails, I wash my clothes by hand, and I go to bed with wet hair while I think about everything I still have to study.

The next day the administration calls me. Someone turned in a folder I didn’t even know I’d lost. Inside is a note written on blue paper: “You should be more careful. Some lapses are paid for dearly.” No signature. But I’d recognize that handwriting anywhere.

I promise myself I won’t thank her. I promise myself I’ll ignore her for the rest of the semester in the most ostentatious way possible.

That afternoon, in the library, I turn to the second sheet in the folder. Taped to it is a five-hundred-peso bill. I stare at it for a moment without touching it. It’s exactly what I spend on food in a week. I think about looking for Camila, but the classrooms are already empty and the library is closing. I go back to my room, study until dawn with a little battery lamp, and don’t eat dinner.

***

Three days later they tell me Camila isn’t coming to class. That she won’t come tomorrow either. That she’s going to miss Art History for the third time. A girl in the group explains how to get to her building and adds, almost in a whisper, that if Camila’s mother finds out she failed again, she’ll send her back to Barcelona.

I don’t know exactly why I went. Maybe because I still have her five hundred pesos in my pocket and that weighs on me more than it should. Maybe out of curiosity. Maybe because I knew that panic they described on her face all too well.

The building is in an expensive part of the city. The security guard looks at me as if I’ve come to ask for something. I go up to the fourth floor. I knock on the door.

Camila opens it in a cotton nightgown. Her eyes are swollen, her cheeks pale, and she has that look of someone who’s been sleeping with pills for two days. The apartment smells shut up and like cold coffee. There are cardboard sheets scattered on the floor, notes underlined in three colors, and a cup knocked over on an open notebook.

—Come in —she says—. Don’t look at the mess.

I set the bill on the little table before sitting down.

—I came to give this back to you. Thanks for the folder, but I don’t need your charity.

Camila sits on the sofa with her knees against her chest and her arms wrapped around them. She tries to smile but her lip trembles. When I stand up to leave, I see her hide her face in her arms. And then she cries, first silently, then without being able to stop.

—I’ve been studying for four days —she says between sobs— and I can’t get anything to stick. The exam is tomorrow and I’m not going to be able to do it.

I recognized that panic. Two years earlier, when I’d just arrived in the city, I’d also sat on the floor of my room convinced everything was lost.

—Do you want me to help you? —I asked, though I hadn’t planned to say it.

She nodded.

I spread a cardboard sheet on the floor and asked her to explain the Carolingian period to me as if I knew nothing. She stumbled at first. She tripped over her words several times. But as I nodded, she found the thread and let it out: genealogies, battles, the relationship between the Church and political power in medieval Europe. I asked her questions. I made her draw timelines, repeat in her own words what she’d just read aloud to me.

At midnight we made coffee. By one, we were no longer drinking coffee so we could stay up all night. By two, Camila set her alarm for five and simply said: let’s sleep.

We fell asleep in her bed, dressed, without commenting on it.

***

The exam started at eight. We went back over the notes at five-thirty with clear heads. By a quarter past six Camila no longer needed me to ask her anything. She spoke on her own, orderly, confident.

Camila scored seventy-six points. I scored seventy-eight. We walked out into the faculty courtyard under a noon sun that made us squint. There were pigeons among the trees and I felt an outsize happiness, the kind that only comes from things that cost something.

—What time do you get off from the restaurant today? —Camila asked me.

—How do you know I work in a restaurant?

—I saw you once. You were wearing an apron and you didn’t see me. —She blushed a little—. Would you go out to dinner on Friday? To celebrate.

I thought about making up an excuse. I thought about my habit of pulling away when someone starts to matter to me. Instead I said yes.

***

On Friday she picked me up in a silver Honda. When she stopped in front of my boarding house, I wondered what she saw: the peeling facade, the laundry strung up in the alley, the boys playing on the sidewalk. I gritted my teeth and got in.

I’d showered, I’d put on my best: a blue skirt, a blouse with geometric prints, black sandals. I pinned my hair up with two big clips. Camila waited without saying anything about the neighborhood, without looking too much.

The movie was Tarantino: too much blood for my taste. Dinner was at a restaurant with live music near the boulevard. Camila ordered white wine and seafood. She talked about her mother in Barcelona, about how she’d come to study here against her will, about her terror of failure. I talked little and lied a bit about a partial scholarship. The wine was good and the night was warm.

—Don’t take offense if I say yours seems hard to me —Camila said, and she meant it, without condescension.

I wasn’t offended.

When we left it was almost midnight. Camila put music on in the car: exactly the kind I like. I didn’t say so. I let myself go, and when I realized it, we were in the parking garage of her building.

—A toast? —she asked—. I don’t want this night to end yet.

I agreed. My defenses switched on their internal warning lights, but I ignored them.

***

The bourbon was good, too good for someone who almost never drinks. Camila talked and I drank more than I should have. At some point there was a blackout. Camila lit a candle. When the power came back, I looked at her differently.

—Are you afraid of the dark? —I asked.

—A little, yes —she admitted, blushing.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

—You’re mean —she said with a smile that had nothing innocent about it—. I wish I had even half your confidence.

—My confidence is fake. A scarecrow. —I looked her in the eyes—. To keep away the people who might matter to me.

There was a silence. Camila didn’t break it right away. When she did, her voice was lower.

—And am I in that group?

I didn’t answer. I got up to call a taxi. Camila put a hand on my arm, just barely.

—Don’t go yet.

I looked at her. She looked at me. The air conditioner hummed in the background. The bourbon was doing its job.

—I’m afraid —I said. It was the truth.

—Me too —she said.

I kissed her first. Or she kissed me. It doesn’t matter who started. What matters is that her tongue came into my mouth with a hunger that had nothing to do with the contained girl on the sofa. I bit her lower lip and she gave a little moan, and that moan went straight down between my legs, soaking my panties all at once.

I walked her backward to the bedroom without breaking my mouth from hers. I yanked the dress over her head and she was left in her underwear, white against the dimness, her small tits and already-hard nipples showing through the lace. I pulled off my blouse and skirt in one tug. When the towel—no, the blouse—hit the floor and I had her almost naked in my arms, I recognized something I had never felt so clearly: that another woman’s body could be exactly what mine was missing.

Her hands were cold and they raised goose bumps on my skin. Her fingers traced lines over my ribs, my shoulders, the curve of my waist, went down to my ass and squeezed it with both hands, pressing me against her. She unclasped my bra from behind with a tenderness that completely undid me. My tits fell heavy against her chest and she let out a sigh when she felt my dark nipples brushing her pink ones. In the bedroom mirror, the contrast of my dark skin with hers, blindingly white in the lamp light, was reflected: two bodies searching for each other blind.

—Look at yourself —I murmured against her neck—. Look at how I make you.

She looked at herself in the mirror, biting her lip, and it seemed to me she blushed even more. I shoved her onto the bed. I ripped off her panties in one pull —they hung on one ankle before falling to the floor— and stood there a second looking at her: legs spread, shaved cunt shining, the inner lips swollen and parted from how wet she already was. My mouth watered.

—Open wider —I told her. And she did.

I threw myself face-down between her legs and licked her cunt from bottom to top in one long stroke, pressing my tongue flat against her lips. Camila arched her back and let out a moan that came from deep in her throat, sharp, startled. She was salty and thick and I swallowed her like I was truly hungry. I opened her cunt with two fingers, leaving her clit exposed, swollen and pink, and sucked it slowly, first with my lips, then circling it with the tip of my tongue.

—Oh, fuck —she panted—. Fuck, don’t stop.

I didn’t stop. I pushed my tongue inside as far as I could, fucking her with my mouth, and she grabbed my hair with both hands and pressed me to her cunt. I could feel her thighs trembling on either side of my face, the wetness dripping down onto my chin. I slipped in one finger while I kept sucking her clit, then two, and I felt her close around my fingers, hot, tight. I fucked her with my hand while I licked her clit, first slowly, then faster, following the rhythm of her hips, which were already moving on their own.

—I’m coming —she said, in a voice I’d never heard from her—. I’m coming, I’m comin—

I felt her orgasm in my hand and in my mouth at the same time: her cunt squeezing my fingers in waves and her clit throbbing against my tongue. Camila arched all the way, her ass lifting off the mattress, and screamed without any shame. Then she collapsed, trembling, her legs still open and her chest rising and falling as if she’d run.

I kissed the inside of her thigh. I went up slowly along her stomach, between her tits, and filled her nipples with saliva from my own mouth still wet with her. Camila laughed a tired laugh and hugged me.

—Never —she said—. No one’s ever done that to me like that.

—There’s more —I told her in her ear.

Then she turned me over, with a strength I hadn’t expected from such a slender body, and she was on top. She spread my legs with her knee and settled between them. She looked at me for a second, serious, and then went down to my tits. She sucked one nipple while pinching the other and I buried my head in the pillow because the pleasure was washing over me. My cunt was so swollen it hurt. Her fingers slid down my belly, lingered in the hair of my pussy, and finally—finally—touched me where I was screaming for her to touch me.

—You’re soaked —she whispered—. All for me.

—Shut up and put your fingers in me.

She laughed softly and obeyed. She shoved two fingers into me at once and I screamed into the pillow. She started moving them inside me, first slowly, searching, until she found the spot that made my eyes fly open. She curled her fingers there and kept going, in and out, while with her thumb she drew circles on my clit. I couldn’t stop moaning. I grabbed a tit and squeezed it hard and she moaned too.

—Faster —I begged.

She sped up. The bed started banging against the wall. I could hear the wet slap of her fingers inside me, obscene and filthy, and it made me even hotter. Camila bent down and sucked a nipple while she kept fucking me with her hand, and that was the detail that finally tipped me over the edge. Something rose in my belly, a wild tingling that spread to the tips of my toes, and I exploded in a long, hoarse moan while all my skin turned hypersensitive and my cunt throbbed around her fingers like a fist opening and closing. I came so hard I soaked her hand up to the wrist.

I curled up on my side with my knees against my chest and she hugged me from behind without saying anything, her still-wet fingers resting on my hip. The silence was exactly what I needed. I could feel her breathing on the back of my neck and her pussy against my ass, and I noticed she was wet again too, pressing herself slowly against me.

After that I gave her back everything she had given me, and more. I put her on her back, spread her legs, and hooked one of my legs over hers, crossing us scissor-like until our cunts were pressed together, cunt to cunt, swollen and hot. I started moving slowly, rubbing against her, and Camila opened her mouth without a sound coming out. Our clits brushed with every thrust and it was a sensation I’d never felt before, slippery and electric at the same time. I looked her in the eyes while I fucked her like that, and she couldn’t hold my gaze, her eyes rolling back.

—Look at me —I ordered—. Look at me when you come.

She made an effort and looked at me. I quickened the back and forth. I heard her moan, felt her arch, how she pressed my legs with hers and kept repeating now, now in a very low voice until she let out a broken sigh and went still, her eyes fixed on mine and her mouth trembling. I came on her a second later, unable to hold back, biting her shoulder so I wouldn’t scream. Then she laughed. She said it tickled. I hugged her because I was cold.

***

We fucked two more times that night. Once with her on her knees against the headboard and me behind her, licking her cunt from behind with my tongue pushed in as far as it would go, until she came screaming into the pillow. Once at dawn, slower, mouth to mouth and hand to hand, two of my fingers inside her and two of hers inside me, moving together, coming almost at the same time with our foreheads pressed together. We fell asleep with the first light of dawn, sticky, smelling of sex and bourbon.

I woke up before she did. Light came in through the half-lowered blind. Camila was sleeping on her back with her mouth slightly open and she looked completely different from the girl who had irritated me weeks earlier: different from the one who hoarded the notes, different from the one who cried in panic on the sofa. She looked simply like someone sleeping well for the first time in days. She had red marks on her neck that I’d left there. I looked at them with something like pride.

I got up to take a shower. When I came out, she’d already made coffee.

—Are you okay? —she asked, not quite looking at me.

—Yeah —I said—. And you?

She blushed to the tips of her ears.

***

We passed every subject that semester. The week of the last exam, we locked ourselves in a downtown hotel for two days. I lost count of how many times she made me come, how many times I made her come. We fucked, slept for an hour, woke up and fucked again. I ate her cunt in the shower with hot water pouring over us. She stuck her fingers under the table while we ordered breakfast by phone. What I didn’t forget was the second night: we went out onto the balcony completely naked, the warm city air wrapping around us, and below, everything slept while we didn’t. I pressed her against the railing, with her back to me, and shoved three fingers into her from behind while with my other hand I squeezed one tit. She came biting her fist so the neighbors wouldn’t hear her, her legs trembling and her ass pressed against my pubis.

I didn’t move in with her. I’d read too much about that habit lesbians have of going to live together a month after meeting. Camila said she understood. Maybe that was true.

In December she went to Barcelona for the holidays. My defenses went up in a flash, as always. I didn’t open my email for three weeks. One night I got drunk on cheap beer and almost showed up late to work.

***

It was Friday night, almost the end of the year. I was cleaning the restaurant tables when one of the cashiers signaled me with his phone in his hand.

—If you don’t open your email I’m going to flood it with messages —Camila’s voice said—. I love you.

—I…

—I know you’re scared. Wednesday we talk. At six in the afternoon.

—Wednesday?

—Did you hear me?

—Yes.

She hung up. I walked several blocks with tears falling down my face, unable to stop them. A woman asked me what was wrong. I looked at her and kept walking.

Eternity, when it’s sweet, still passes slowly. But it passes.

***

Now I’m at the airport with this notebook in my hands, rereading all of this for what feels like the hundredth time. The Barcelona flight landed twenty minutes ago. On the arrivals board the status changed to “baggage.” Out come two men in suits, a family with children, an elderly couple.

And then Camila appears, in a red cotton skirt and a white T-shirt, dragging two huge suitcases. She sees me and raises her hand. She smiles.

I feel that if I don’t hug her in the next ten seconds something in me will break. So I walk toward her. And I hug her. And I don’t break.