The Girls from the Game Who Healed Me After the Breakup

Two years ago, when I was still learning to sleep alone on the left side of the bed, I threw myself headfirst into a virtual-reality video game I’d downloaded almost on impulse. It was called Blue Lily, and it was the kind of open world where nobody asked your age or your real name. You just chose an avatar, put on the headset, and let yourself be carried away by a city of floating towers where anyone could cross your path and start talking to you.

I’d moved into a tiny apartment in the old part of Posadas, far from the memory of Camila, and I needed somewhere to escape to without having to get dressed or look at myself in the mirror. The headset was perfect for that. I’d turn on the console, lie on my back in bed with the lights off, and let the game world swallow me for hours.

That was where I met a couple more girls among the many who had passed fleetingly through my life since the breakup. All of them beautiful, although by then I already knew that the word “beautiful” inside the game meant a well-designed avatar and a soft voice over the microphone. What lay behind it didn’t always match the image, but I didn’t care anymore.

The first of this new batch appeared one Thursday night, when I was sitting in a virtual plaza watching pixels rain down. I was stressed, with no desire to write anything in the notebook where I kept a diary nobody was ever going to read, bored and, above all, horny. My pussy had been wet for a while, with that sticky dampness that forces you to change position every two minutes because your pajama pants rub against your clit and give you no relief. And I knew that combination of factors was a bad sign. The kind of bad sign that ends with your hand between your legs until dawn and your throat dry from moaning softly so you don’t wake the neighbors.

—Do you come here often? —she wrote to me privately.

Her avatar was a short-haired girl with lavender hair, wearing a tight black dress that emphasized her tits and ass, and knee-high boots. Her name was Talia, or so she told me. We both knew the name was as fake as the hair, but that was how the game worked.

—More often than I should —I replied.

—Alone?

—Always.

There was a pause of a few seconds. In the real world, I heard my own breathing inside the headset. I’d already been hot before connecting, my nipples hard against my T-shirt, and the conversation, still innocent, was already beginning to press against my chest and pump blood into my lower belly.

—Hot? —she wrote.

That word, by itself, was a code. It meant dirty chat, eighteen-plus role-play, a conversation that would end with both of us masturbating in silence in rooms we would never know, our fingers soaked with juices and our mouths open against the pillow. I’d received that proposal so many times inside the game that I already had an automatic response ready.

—Yes.

***

The private rooms in Blue Lily were small, enclosed cubes decorated like luxury hotel rooms: heavy curtains, a huge bed with white silk sheets, a lit fireplace that didn’t heat anything. Talia chose the room and sent me the link. When I appeared inside, she was already sitting on the edge of the bed, her legs crossed and wearing a smile her avatar replicated fairly well.

—You look more nervous than I am —she said, speaking to me by voice now. Hers was husky, with a hint of a northern accent I couldn’t place.

—I’m always nervous at first —I admitted.

—Want me to take the lead?

—Please.

I closed my eyes behind the headset. Alone in the apartment, with only the bedside lamp turned on, I slid my hand beneath the waistband of my pajama pants and found myself already soaked, my pussy lips swollen and slippery. I ran two fingers slowly along my slit, from bottom to top, and when I reached my clit I let out a sigh Talia must have heard through the microphone, because she gave a quiet laugh before beginning.

—Pull down your pants —she ordered—. I want to know you’re naked from the waist down while I tell you what I’m doing to you.

I obeyed without thinking. I lifted my hips off the bed, pulled my pajamas and panties down to my knees, and kicked them onto the floor. I was left with my legs spread, my pussy exposed, my right hand already back down there.

—I am —I said.

—Wet?

—Very.

—Good. Put one finger inside. Just one. Slowly.

I pushed my middle finger in to the knuckle and a short moan escaped me. Talia began describing, with a calmness that undid me, what her character was doing to me inside the room. How she knelt between my legs, how she held my wrists against the mattress so I couldn’t cover my face, how she slowly moved up the inside of my thighs with her tongue, barely biting the skin of my groin before even touching my pussy with her fingers.

—I lick you from bottom to top —she told me in my ear—. Your whole slit, with my tongue perfectly flat. Then I suck your clit slowly, pinching it between my lips and drawing on it. Can you feel it?

—Yes —I gasped.

—Touch it. With your fingertip. In circles. As if it were my tongue.

I let go of my left nipple, which I’d already been pinching with my free hand, and lowered that hand to my pussy too. With one hand I spread my lips, with the other I rubbed my clit in slow, tight circles while I kept listening to her.

—Now I slide two fingers inside you —she continued—. Curled forward, searching for your spot. I move them slowly, in and out, and I don’t stop sucking your clit.

I switched to two fingers, pushed them all the way in, and curled them as she instructed. The sound of my wet pussy came through the microphone, impossible to disguise, a moist squelch every time my fingers went in and out. Talia let out a “that’s it, yes” that made me squeeze my thighs around my own hand.

It was ridiculous how good it felt.

Ridiculous because, somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that anyone could be on the other side of the microphone. A woman my age, in her room, with her panties pulled down too. A student in a university dorm, biting her pillow so she wouldn’t wake her roommate. Someone newly separated like me. But the voice was unmistakably a woman’s, and the script she was writing in my ear had the exact cadence of someone who had fucked many others before me.

—Now I’m changing the scene —Talia said, and I could hear her breathing getting heavier—. I lift you onto the bed, face down. I raise your ass. Do you know what I’m going to do to you?

—Tell me.

—I slide my fingers up your ass from behind while I lick your pussy from underneath. My whole tongue inside. And I squeeze your buttocks until I leave marks.

I turned over in bed without taking off the headset, ending up on my knees with my face against the pillow, my ass raised and one hand beneath me between my legs. I put three fingers inside this time, palm up, and with my other hand I squeezed one cheek as hard as I could, imagining it was her.

—I want to hear you —she asked—. Loud. Don’t hold back.

—Wait —I murmured, biting my lip against the pillowcase.

—No, now. Don’t go quiet this time. I want to hear you come.

I didn’t keep quiet. I started fucking myself quickly with my fingers, without any rhythm, searching for my clit with the thumb of the same hand, and let out everything I had inside me. I moaned dirty, mouth open, saying “I’m coming, I’m coming, fuck” into the headset. I felt my orgasm rise from deep in my belly, squeeze my pussy around my fingers in spasms, and I was left trembling with my hip pressed against my hand until I couldn’t take any more.

And when I finished, panting against the pillow, my fingers still inside and my juices running down to my wrist, I heard that she had come with me too. She’d done it almost silently, except for a ragged breath, a short guttural moan, and a whispered “fuck” at the end, in that broken voice women have when they’ve just come against their own hand. Then she laughed softly.

—Good night, stranger —she said, and disconnected without waiting for an answer.

I took off the headset, stared at the apartment’s white ceiling with my pussy still throbbing and my fingers sticky, and thought I might be able to sleep for the first time in weeks.

***

After Talia came others. Renata, a Spaniard who played from her balcony and laughed every time a neighbor coughed nearby, and who made me come twice in a row by describing how she would have ridden my face with her pussy until she suffocated me. Mariel, who only spoke by typing and who built incredibly long scenes in which I was her student and she was the private tutor taking advantage of the situation: she would write me entire paragraphs about how she made me kneel beneath the desk, spread my legs with her knee, and push three fingers inside me while I had to keep reading aloud without making a mistake, and every error earned me a spanking. And a Uruguayan who called herself Lupe, who had discovered the game through a friend and confessed to me, four encounters later, that I had been the first woman she’d ever spoken to that way, and that the first time she came with me over the microphone she had been crying nervously while she touched herself.

They all had something in common: they appeared at a specific moment in my night, offered themselves without beating around the bush, asked me to spread my legs without asking anything else, and disappeared at dawn without demanding anything. And for me, relearning how to live with the empty space beside my pillow, that transience worked like medicine.

For my part, I was also aware that I was doing the same thing. To them I was a provincial voice, without a real name or face, an anonymous pussy moaning on the other end of the headset, promising a few hours and nothing more. The equation worked because we all signed the same contract without saying so: don’t ask, don’t look for each other, don’t mix things up. Come and disappear.

I almost never developed attachments to women I had a conversation or a single night with, either inside or outside the game. It was something curious about myself that I only learned once I was single: with formal partners or friends-with-benefits, I grew attached immediately, sometimes too much. With strangers, on the other hand, there was an invisible wall whose origin I couldn’t explain. Maybe it was a defense I’d built without realizing it when Camila left.

***

There was, however, one exception. One night, winter already well underway, a girl who called herself Aitana entered my private room. She wasn’t especially talkative. Her avatar was simple, without exaggerated clothes, with an almost childish haircut. She wrote me a single line.

—I saw your name on a list of mutual friends. Want to talk?

I accepted out of curiosity. Aitana didn’t want to go to a private room. She stayed with me in the fountain plaza, the two of us sitting on a stone bench that didn’t exist, staring at a sky that wasn’t a sky. And she began telling me things. That she was in Granada finishing a master’s degree. That she lived with a roommate she was irrationally jealous of. That she was looking for the same thing as everyone else in the game, but that night she didn’t feel like acting, or pulling down her panties, or faking orgasms for anyone.

—I just wanted to talk to someone —she said.

—Why me?

—Because your voice sounds tired. I’m tired too.

We talked until the headset began warning me that its battery was low. There was no sex, not that night. But when we said goodbye, she gave me a Telegram username with a “in case you ever want to tell me how things went.” And I, who had spent an entire year protecting myself from affection, saved it.

Aitana and I chatted for months. We started with little things: photos of coffee, screenshots from the game, voice messages while one of us cooked and the other waited for sleep. And when what we had began taking another shape, we did it physically too, across the distance separating my room in Posadas from her shared apartment in Granada. The first video call in which we both undressed lasted almost two hours: me with my legs spread against the back of the chair, showing her how I pushed my fingers inside while following her instructions; her with the vibrator pressed against her clit and a towel beneath her ass, coming three times without turning off the camera. But that’s another story, and, for a change, it wasn’t with a stranger anymore.

***

Looking back, the whole Blue Lily thing was a constant process of trial and error. Through that succession of anonymous girls, I learned that desire isn’t cured or buried: it’s redirected, translated, learned to be managed with fingers buried in your pussy and someone else’s voice in your ear. I learned that I could ask for what I wanted without apologizing, say “suck me” or “fuck me” without my throat tightening. That my voice, when it relaxed and turned dirty, had an effect on the other person I’d never dared to test in real life: it made them come on the other side of the microphone just by describing how I would spread their legs. And I learned, above all, that I didn’t need someone in my bed to feel accompanied, even if sometimes I preferred it.

The game shut down its servers a couple of years later. By then I hardly logged in anymore. Aitana and I had something that resembled a relationship, albeit a long-distance one, and my nights with the headset had been replaced by video calls that ended the same way, with both of us coming in front of the camera, but with a person whose breathing on the other side actually mattered to me.

Sometimes, when I’m alone and boredom hits me in a particular way, I open the game’s folder on my computer again. Not to log in; that’s no longer possible. Just to look at the screenshots I saved without thinking too much about it: a plaza with a fountain, a room with a fireplace, an avatar with lavender hair sitting on the edge of a bed with white sheets. Each of those girls left something with me and took something away, without any of them ever fully knowing what.

And every time I remember that period, I think the same thing: never underestimate what a stranger who demands nothing, a room that doesn’t exist, and a soft voice whispering “spread your legs” in your ear at three in the morning can do for a broken woman.