The Night Camila Stopped Being Just My Friend

I had known Camila Hurtado since we were both fifteen. We had shared so many things that I could no longer remember when I’d stopped thinking of her as just any old friend. She has light eyes, dark hair down to the middle of her back, and a body that gets attention without her having to do a thing to earn it.

I always suspected there was something more in her than the easy closeness of years. When we went out dancing, her hands always ended up on my waist longer than necessary. When we slept together in her bed, she would kiss my shoulder as if it were a goodbye instead of a goodnight. I never said anything because I liked that closeness, and because imagining that it might be something else made me dizzy in a way I preferred not to face directly.

That night I showed up at her apartment with a bottle of aged tequila and two limes in my bag. Camila had just broken up with Marcos, a handsome, boring guy who had left her for a younger coworker. She had been texting me at three in the morning for two weeks, and I didn’t want her spending another night crying alone in her living room.

—You look good for someone with a broken heart —I said as soon as she opened the door.

—It’s because I knew you were coming —she answered, and kissed me on the cheek for a second that lasted way too long.

She lived on the first floor of an old building downtown: a living room, a small kitchen, and a bedroom where the bed took up almost all the space. That night she put on old music, the kind we used to listen to at seventeen when we’d get together to cry over boys we didn’t even remember anymore. We drank slowly at first. Then we stopped pouring shots and started drinking straight from the bottle.

By midnight she was leaning against me, barefoot, her legs crossed over mine. She spoke into my ear because she said she couldn’t hear me well, even though the music was low. Her hand moved up and down my thigh in a way anyone else would have called flirting, but between us it had always been like that. Or so I had told myself for years.

—You get tense when I touch you —she murmured.

—You’re really drunk, Camila.

—I don’t need to be drunk to want you, girl.

I laughed. I didn’t know what to do with that line, so I laughed. She didn’t laugh with me. She straightened a little, tucked her hair behind her ear, and came toward my mouth so calmly that I had time to stop her. I didn’t.

I wasn’t going to do it. That was the first lie I told myself that night.

The kiss was short. Barely a brush. But when she pulled away, her lips were still wet with tequila and her eyes never left mine. She leaned in again, and this time her mouth stayed on mine. I let it happen. Her lips were softer than I had imagined, and they tasted like lime. Her tongue slipped in slowly, searching for mine, and when it found it, she sucked on it like she’d been starving for that kiss for years.

—Stop —I whispered, without conviction.

—Do you really want me to stop?

—We’re friends.

—Exactly. Better me than anyone else.

She took me to the bedroom without letting go of my hand. The living room light stayed on and spilled in through the half-open door like a badly placed spotlight on a stage. I followed behind her, watching the way her T-shirt fell over her hips, thinking that nothing that was about to happen would ever be reversible.

***

She pushed me toward the bed with a softness that was almost a question, and climbed on top of me without ever really taking her eyes off mine. She smelled like perfume mixed with sweat. She started kissing my neck slowly, then lower, right where the collarbone dips in. I closed my eyes. My breathing was fast and my hands were still, as if I were still deciding what to do with them.

—Touch me, Renata —she said against my ear—. Don’t leave me alone in this. Put your hands on me, damn it, I’ve been waiting for this for years.

I slid my hands up her back until I found the line of her bra. I unclasped it in one motion and she pulled away just enough to take it off. Her tits were big and firm, with nipples darker than I had imagined in years of sneaking sideways glances at her, already hard, pointing at me. I didn’t know what to do with that information except close my mouth over one and suck. Camila let out a rough moan and pressed my nape against her chest.

—Like that, girl, bite it, don’t be afraid.

I obeyed. I bit her nipple with my teeth until a brief cry slipped out of her, then I moved to the other one, sucking it completely, soaking it, while she rubbed herself against me with her pelvis searching for my thigh. Through my pants I could feel how wet she already was.

She yanked my blouse off with an urgency that betrayed her. Then the bra. When her tongue closed over one of my nipples, I had to bite my lip to keep from letting out a moan too loud. She sucked them slowly, one and then the other, with her tongue flattened out, and when she had them hard and glossy with saliva she would take them between her teeth and tug until I arched. I had known Camila since adolescence and I had never imagined her mouth could do that.

—Beautiful —she said, her face between my tits—. You’re beautiful. And you’re soaked; I can smell it from here.

She went down my stomach with her mouth open, leaving a warm trail of saliva. She unbuttoned my pants without lifting her head, pulled them down to my ankles, and took my stockings with them. I was left in my panties, legs spread because I couldn’t keep them together, and she sat on the edge of the bed just to look at me. The fabric of my panties was dark from how wet I was, stuck to my cunt, outlining my lips.

—I had this in my head since we were nineteen —she confessed, running one finger over the fabric, pressing until I trembled—. Every time we slept together in my room, I’d go to the bathroom after you fell asleep. To touch myself thinking about you. To put my fingers in me imagining they were yours.

—You never told me.

—Would you have wanted me to?

I didn’t answer. I reached out and pulled her toward me.

***

Camila moved down my legs, kissing every inch. When she got to my feet, instead of continuing, she took them in her hands and kissed them with a devotion that made me understand something else about her. She licked the arch, the toes, the curve of my heel. She put my big toe in her mouth and sucked it all the way, looking at me, and I felt my cunt clench just from that. I watched her from far away, my hair disheveled, still not quite believing that this woman kneeling at the end of the bed was the same one I’d known since we were teenagers.

She came back up slowly. She took my panties off with her teeth in a gesture that made me laugh and tremble at the same time. When her tongue touched the inner part of my thigh, I gripped the sheets with both hands. She kept going up with her mouth open, biting the soft skin on the inside of my thigh, leaving red marks that would last for days, and when her breath brushed my cunt I felt a moan slip out before she even touched me.

—Look at me —she asked—. I want you to watch me eat you out.

I looked at her. And then it began.

Her tongue slammed against my cunt from top to bottom, flat, wide, dragging slowly from the entrance to the clit, and I screamed without being able to stop myself. She did it again, slower, tasting me, and again, until I was soaked in saliva mixed with my own wetness. Then she closed over my clit and sucked it like it was a little candy, lips tight, sliding her tongue in and out against the tip. Nothing she did was anything like what I had known before.

—Look closely —she repeated every time I closed my eyes—. Watch me lick your cunt, Renata.

Her fingers came after, slowly, not invading anything, just accompanying. First one, slippery, sinking all the way to the knuckles because I was so wet there was no resistance at all. Then two, curved upward, searching for that spot inside me that no man had ever found with that kind of precision. She moved them in a slow rhythm, pulling them out glossy to the fingertips and pushing them back in, while her mouth kept working my clit. I stopped thinking. I stopped worrying about whether the neighbors would hear us or whether I’d regret it at dawn. I just let it happen.

—Don’t stop —I begged when I felt her starting to pull away—. Please don’t stop, keep going, finger me like that.

—I’m not stopping, baby. Come in my mouth. I want to taste all of you.

She added a third finger. I felt the stretch, the brief burn, and then nothing but pleasure. Three fingers in and out while her tongue circled fast over my clit, and her other hand came up to squeeze one of my tits, twisting my nipple with two fingers. It was too much. The first orgasm hit me with a violence that left me speechless. I squeezed my legs around her head without meaning to, my hips jolted against her face, and I felt myself come against her mouth in long waves that wouldn’t end. She didn’t pull away. She kept sucking, slower now, swallowing everything, until I asked her to stop because I couldn’t take any more.

When she lifted her face, her mouth was shining, her chin soaked, and her eyes were still hungry. She licked her lips without breaking eye contact.

—You taste incredible —she said.

—Your turn —I answered, my voice rough.

I laid her on her back, pulled off her pants and panties in one yank. Her skin was paler than mine, with tiny marks on her hip from gym clothes and a shaved cunt except for a thin dark strip up top. She was already shining wet, her lips parted and her clit showing, swollen. I knelt between her legs and looked at her first. I wanted to remember everything. I wanted to be sure this was really happening, that it wasn’t some weird tequila dream.

—Do you know how? —she asked with a crooked smile.

—We’ll find out.

***

I went down on her the way she had gone down on me. I kissed her everywhere before reaching the center. I bit the inside of her thighs, licked the crease of her groin, blew on her cunt just to watch her writhe. When I tasted her for the first time, my tongue against her parted lips, savoring that salty-sweet mix, I knew I would never be the same again. She arched all the way up, brought one hand to her mouth to bite the back of it, and with the other she held my head where it was, pushing me against her cunt.

—Slower —she begged—. I want it to last. Don’t make me come yet.

I listened. I learned her body in those minutes. I learned that if I licked in wide circles around the clit without touching it, a tremor would slip from her hips and she’d beg in whispers. I learned that she liked it when I opened her lips wide with my fingers and ran my tongue flat right over the entrance, slippery, soaked. I learned that when I put two fingers inside her while I kept going with my mouth, her thighs shook without her being able to stop it and she drove her heels into my back. I learned to curl my fingers upward and move them like I was signaling to the ceiling from inside her, and that that motion made filthy words spill out of her that I had never heard from her before.

—Yeah, fuck me like that, Renata, shove your fingers all the way in.

I learned that she had one spot above her navel that made her laugh and another below her left breast that made her moan as if she were in pain. I sucked her clit between my lips, tugging gently, while I kept moving my fingers inside her, and I felt her cunt beginning to tighten around them. She was close. She asked me without words, arching her whole back, gripping my hair.

When she came, it started in silence. She clenched her jaw, closed her eyes, and held on, held on, until she couldn’t anymore. Then she gave a long, deep moan, a sound that came from her chest, and I felt everything inside her contract around my fingers, tightening them, soaking them. She stayed like that for a long moment, trembling, her thighs closing around my head, as if she needed to shut herself in so she wouldn’t lose herself completely. Then she pulled me up to her mouth and kissed me with the taste of both of us, sucking my lips, my tongue, licking my chin where her juices were still there.

—I’d been thinking about this for years —she said.

—Not as many as I had —I answered—. But now I’m never going to stop thinking about it.

We stayed tangled together until the sky started to lighten through the bedroom window. We barely talked. We touched each other a lot. The second time was slower, almost without words. She sat astride me, her soaked cunt pressed against mine, and started to move. Our clits brushed with every push, sliding against each other, and it was a slow, filthy friction that made me grip her ass with both hands to hold her tighter against me. I lifted my hips against hers, she dropped hers against mine, and we moved together until the rhythm stopped belonging to one of us or the other. She sucked my fingers while she rode me, two, three, soaking them in saliva, then took them behind her and put them in herself as she kept rubbing against me. We came almost at the same time, looking into each other’s eyes, mouths open against each other’s mouths without quite kissing. That was when I understood this hadn’t been a tequila accident.

I got dressed when the light was already coming in through the curtains. Camila stayed in bed, wrapped in the sheet, hair mussed, with a smile I hadn’t seen on her in months.

—So now what? —I asked from the doorway.

—Now we keep this between us —she said—. And the next time I invite you over for tequila, you’ll know why.

I went out onto the street with my bag over my shoulder and my lips still sensitive, her taste still in my mouth. I walked three blocks until I found a taxi, thinking that this night should have happened years ago. Thinking I was probably going to come back. And thinking, above all, that I no longer knew what face I was going to use to look at Camila the next time she told me we were only friends.