The Morning She Defended Me to Her Sister

The nine o’clock sun was filtering through the blinds when I felt her lips on my back. It wasn’t a wake-up kiss or a casual caress: they were Camila’s lips, with everything that implied, slow and precise, following the curve of my spine from my shoulders downward. I don’t know how long she’d been like that. I had gone from asleep to not asleep without noticing the exact moment.

I turned to look at her. She had her black hair loose over her shoulders and that focused expression in her eyes she got when she was truly enjoying something. I wrapped my arms around her and we kissed for a long time, unhurried. Her hands found my breasts at once, squeezing them firmly, brushing my nipples with her thumbs, as if she knew exactly where to go, and my body responded before I could even think.

She kissed my neck. My collarbones. She trailed down my sternum with that patience of hers that drove me insane in the best possible way. When she reached my nipples I arched without meaning to, and she stayed there, licking, sucking, lightly nipping, enjoying my reaction, knowing exactly the effect she had on me. Between my legs I was already getting wet, feeling how arousal opened my body, how my breathing caught every time her tongue brushed my skin.

I grabbed her hair and guided her downward. She offered no resistance whatsoever.

She settled between my legs and I opened myself for her. She held my thighs with both hands and buried her face in my sex with a confidence that undid me instantly. First she licked me slowly, tasting, running the tip of her tongue along the lips of my cunt, and then she started eating me like she was really hungry. I felt her tongue moving deep inside, alternating pressure and pause, rising to find my clit, then dropping back down, opening me with her mouth and her tongue as if she wanted to learn every fold from the inside. I moaned without being able to help it, clung to the pillow, opened and closed my fists in the sheets, and every time she sucked my clit a little harder I writhed all over. When she slipped two fingers into my cunt while continuing to lick me, I began to run out of air. I could feel the heat of her mouth, the back-and-forth of her fingers pushing in and pulling out, the brutal tingling at the center of my body, and when I came it was with a cry I had to muffle by burying myself in the pillow, trembling from head to toe while she kept holding me as if she didn’t intend to let go until she’d emptied me out.

I held her afterward, still out of breath. She rested her cheek on my stomach and stayed silent, breathing slowly, her lips still wet.

—I love you —I told her. It was the only thing I could think of.

—Me too, Val —she replied without moving.

I stroked her hair. The apartment was silent. It was a perfect Sunday, with no plan and no obligation, with no one waiting for us anywhere.

Then the doorbell rang.

***

We looked at each other. Camila frowned.

—I’m not expecting anyone —she said.

It rang again. Insistent.

We got up in a hurry, searching for the clothes scattered on the floor. She went out first in a robe; I put on the first things I found: a pair of pants and the T-shirt I’d left on the chair the night before. I heard voices from the hallway. When I came out of the bedroom, there was a woman standing in the doorway of the living room.

She had Camila’s dark eyes and the same way of crossing her arms over her chest. She was older, maybe five or six years older. She looked at me with the expression of someone processing information she hadn’t expected to run into.

—Good morning —I said.

—Good morning —she replied.

Camila stood beside me. She slipped an arm over my shoulder, drew me against her with a naturalness that surprised me, and said:

—This is Valeria, my girlfriend.

I felt something warm spread through my chest. I rested my hand on her waist.

—And this is Lucía —Camila added—, my older sister.

Lucía looked at the two of us without saying anything. It wasn’t hostile, but it wasn’t warm either. It was the silence of someone who has a lot to say and is choosing her words carefully.

***

—Cami —Lucía began—, Mom is worried. Everyone at home...

—Everyone at home what? —Camila cut in. It wasn’t a question. It was a warning.

—It’s not that they don’t support you —Lucía said, slowly—. It’s just that it was very sudden. Nobody knew anything and then all of a sudden...

—All of a sudden I have a life —Camila said—. Is that the problem?

Lucía didn’t answer.

Camila took a deep breath. When she spoke again, she used that calm I was starting to recognize: the one she used when something mattered too much for her to lose control.

—Lucía, you know better than anyone how my previous relationships were. You know what I went through. —She paused briefly—. I’m not going to sacrifice this relationship out of fear of what the family says or what the neighbors think. Valeria and I are together. That’s not going to change. So either they accept it or they don’t, but I’m not asking anyone for permission.

I squeezed her hand at her waist. She didn’t look at me, but I felt her tighten the arm around me, as if I were the point of support.

Lucía nodded slowly. Something in her expression changed, slightly, as if she had reached some internal conclusion she wasn’t ready to verbalize yet.

—Okay —she said.

—If there’s nothing else, it was nice seeing you —Camila said.

The door closed. The echo in the hallway lasted a second and then everything fell silent.

***

I turned to Camila. Her jaw was tight and her eyes were shining.

I put my hands on her face, on either side.

—Hey —I said softly—. You were amazing.

—I was terrified —she admitted.

—It didn’t show at all.

She let herself be held. I kept her like that for a good while, feeling her breathe, until the tension slowly left her body. When she pulled back to look at me, her eyes were wet but she wasn’t crying.

—What did Lucía mean about your previous relationships? —I asked—. You’ve never told me much.

Camila looked at me for a moment. Then she looked ahead, toward the window.

—Do you really want to know?

—Only if you want to tell me.

She nodded. She took my hand and led me to the sofa.

***

—I had two relationships before being with you —she began—. The first was when I was nineteen, it didn’t last long, we ended it without drama. The second was different.

I waited in silence.

—At first it seemed perfect. He was attentive, funny, he made me feel special. I was twenty-three and I didn’t know how to tell the difference between someone who loves you and someone who needs you for something. —She paused—. A few months in, the comments started. Small at first. That I dressed badly, that my friends were a bad influence, that if I really loved him I would do this or that. The comments turned into demands. The demands turned into something else.

Tears were running down my face. I didn’t realize until I felt them on my chin.

—You don’t have to keep going if you don’t want to —I told her.

—I’m over it now. —She squeezed my hand—. One day he asked me to do something I didn’t want to do. When I said no, he slapped me. —She said it without any special drama, with the flat voice of someone who has told that part of the story many times in her head until it lost its poison—. It wasn’t the last time. But it was the first I remember clearly because I was in shock, thinking maybe it had been a mistake, that it wouldn’t happen again. It always happens again.

I stood up and sat beside her, close against her, slipping an arm over her shoulders.

—How did you get out? —I asked.

—His own friends reported him. I managed to escape. —Pause—. I don’t know what became of him after that and I don’t want to know.

We stayed like that for a moment. I didn’t say anything because there were no words for that.

—That’s why Lucía mentioned my previous relationships —Camila said at last—. She knows what I went through. I guess deep down that’s why she came: to check that I was okay. That this was different.

—And are you okay?

She pulled back to look at me. She gave a small but genuine smile.

—With you I’m better than okay. For the first time in a long time I feel safe. I owe that to you, Val.

I wiped away her tears with my thumb. She did the same with mine.

—Listen —I said—. If anything we do together ever makes you uncomfortable, you tell me. No explanation. You just tell me and I stop.

—I know. —She kissed my forehead—. With you there’s nothing that brings me anything bad. On the contrary.

We kissed slowly. One of those unhurried kisses that don’t lead anywhere specific and at the same time lead everywhere.

—Should we have breakfast? —I suggested, because if we kept going like this I was going to end up crying again and I didn’t want that.

—Yes —she said—. But first...

She looked at me with that smile I already knew by heart.

***

We undressed slowly this time, without the chaos from before. It was different: no urgency, no doorbell lurking, nothing waiting for us. Just us and the long Sunday ahead.

Camila went to the bedroom and came back with the harness in her hand. We’d bought it together a few months earlier, one Saturday afternoon when we laughed a lot in the store and even more when we got home. It had two pieces: an external dildo, life-sized, and a smaller internal insert for the person wearing it. She helped me put it on, adjusting the straps carefully, unhurried, checking with her fingers that nothing bothered me before she gave me a kiss at the corner of my mouth.

When it was on properly, I looked at her.

—Do you still want to? —I asked.

—More than before —she replied.

I knelt in front of her. I spread her legs and kissed her where she needed it most. She was so aroused: her cunt was swollen, wet, open for me, and when I buried my tongue between her lips a long moan slipped out of her that made me smile against her skin. First I licked her slowly, gathering her wetness, tracing slow circles over her clit, and then I started eating her hard, insistent, alternating suction and pressure, sliding two fingers inside her while I kept licking above. I felt her thighs tense on either side of my face, felt her push my head with both hands, felt her asking for more without words. I could hear her breathing harder, hear the little sounds she made when she was getting close, and when I had her right on the edge, I lifted my face.

—Please —she said. A broken whisper, wet.

I stood up. I pressed the tip of the dildo to the entrance of her sex and stopped for a second, looking her in the eyes.

—Ready?

—Yes. Slowly.

I went in slowly. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth without making a sound, that reaction of hers I adored because it meant she was really feeling it. The internal insert pressed against me with every movement: what it gave her, it was giving me too, though in a different way, like a constant pulse in my stomach. I pushed until I felt her full, until her body yielded around it and settled to the thickness of the dildo, and then I started moving. Slow at first, following the rhythm of her breathing, measuring the depth of each thrust, speeding up when her hips began answering mine without me asking. The room smelled of both of us, of hot skin and sex freshly opened. Outside, Sunday kept on going, indifferent and oblivious to everything.

—Like that —she said—. Like that, Val, don’t stop.

I didn’t stop.

I took her right to the edge with increasingly precise movements, changing the angle of entry to brush the exact spot inside her cunt that made her tremble. She grabbed my waist, squeezing hard, and I lowered one hand to rub her clit with my wet fingers while I kept thrusting. The combination undid her completely. She let out a deep moan, dug her nails into my back, and came with a shudder that ran through her body from top to bottom, clenching around me in a way that almost made me lose the rhythm. It wasn’t a clean or pretty ending: it was wild, urgent, with her breath in pieces and my hips still moving by pure reflex until both of us went still, sweaty, trembling, with our hearts pounding against our ribs.

We lay on our backs in bed, staring at the ceiling. The harness was still on. I grabbed it with one hand and moved it slightly, out of curiosity.

—It feels weird —I admitted.

—Weird bad or weird interesting?

—Weird interesting.

She laughed. A clean, easy laugh, with nothing dark behind it.

—Can I ask you something? —I said.

—Anything you want.

—Have you ever wanted to try... from behind?

There was a brief pause.

—Once —she said—. It was a long time ago, with someone who didn’t know what he was doing and didn’t really care whether I was having a good time. It was a horrible experience. So no, I’ve never really tried it properly.

—If you ever want to try it with me, we will —I said—. No rush, whenever you want, however you want. And if you don’t want to, that’s fine too.

She took my hand between the sheets and interlaced her fingers with mine.

—With you I’m up for anything —she said—. That’s completely new for me.

—Good —I said—. Let it stay new.

I sat up to go to the bathroom and clean the harness. Before leaving, I turned back in the doorway.

—Do you know what time it is?

—No idea —she said—. Does it matter?

—No. I just wanted to know if this was breakfast or lunch.

She laughed again.

—Come back जल्दी —she said—. I miss you already.

Before I left, we kissed.