The Scalpel Returned Her to Her Lover’s Lips

The clock read four in the morning.

Adriana was already awake. She had been for far longer than it took the alarm to sound, ever since insomnia stopped being an exception and became a habit. She pulled on her sneakers, tied the laces as if fastening an anchor to the present, and stepped out into the empty street.

An exact hour of running. Only the beat of her soles against the asphalt, only the icy wind licking a skin that no longer felt the cold. Only her mind, chasing a silence that never came.

At five she returned. In the courtyard she practiced fencing without an opponent, lunging at the air, repeating every movement as if she could beat thought itself into submission. She never could. She never could.

At six she showered. White shirt, sober trousers, the ID badge hanging at her neck, her hair pulled back into a ponytail as tight as another military uniform. Adriana, the forensic pathologist. Adriana, the officer. Adriana, the woman who escaped pain by burying herself in work until she had no strength left even to cry.

The morgue’s cold was more bearable than the cold of her empty bed. That was why she preferred to be there.

She arrived at the building before any assistant. Not out of urgency, but because insomnia had dragged her to that door, and because she needed to remember who she was when no one was watching. She hung her military jacket on the coat rack, slipped into her lab coat, adjusted her gloves, and approached the first gurney without hesitation.

Two female bodies. Two young women. Unidentified, for now. The brutality, however, needed no file.

Body number one: multiple lacerations, old bruising. Body number two: clean incisions, a precise abdominal wound, almost surgical. Both women abandoned like trash.

Adriana closed her eyes for an instant. Not to pray. To steady the tremor inside her.

Patricia had left her a note on the worktable. It read: “I have a hearing at the courthouse. I’ll cover your field report this afternoon. P.S.: don’t lock yourself away so much. Even if the world hurts, there’s still light.”

Adriana let out the smallest smile, the kind that never reached the eyes. Patricia knew more than she said, and still she left her alone, because she understood that Adriana worked better alone. Because she didn’t know how to do it any other way.

She switched on the recorder.

—Beginning protocol. Time: seven thirty-four. Female victim. Approximately twenty-five years old…

The scalpel slid as if her hand weren’t trembling inside. One, two, three cuts. The body spoke. It always spoke. You only had to know how to listen.

When she moved to body number two, her hands were still steady, her face serene. But inside, an abyss was opening. It wasn’t the violence. It wasn’t the marks. It was memory.

Every incision tore through an old inner seam. And through that seam came back, as she always did, Renata.

***

Renata had the habit of biting her shoulder when she laughed. Adriana remembered it so vividly she could almost feel it there, over the gurney, while the recorder kept running. That last afternoon, before the final fight, they had trained together in the academy gym, two full hours of fencing until their uniforms were plastered to their backs. Later, in the locker room, Renata had cornered her against the cold tiles without a word.

—You owe me —she had said, in that low voice she only used for Adriana.

Adriana had felt the hot breath against her neck while Renata lowered the zipper of her jacket. Renata’s mouth traced her collarbone slowly, climbed to her jaw, and stopped just before the kiss, as she always stopped everything, so Adriana would be the one to close the missing millimeters.

Adriana closed them. She always closed them.

She kissed her with a hunger she denied herself anywhere else in her life, with tongue, with teeth, biting Renata’s lower lip until she drew a groan. Renata ripped off her T-shirt in one pull, unclasped her sports bra, and caught one nipple between her teeth, nibbling it, sucking it hungrily until it turned hard and red. Adriana stifled a gasp. Renata moved to the other breast and worked it the same way, with a broad tongue and then the tip, circling the areola while pinching the free nipple between two fingers.

—Shut up, they’ll hear us —Adriana whispered, and Renata laughed against her skin.

—Then don’t moan, forensics girl.

She yanked down Adriana’s trousers along with her underwear in one motion, all the way to the knees. Adriana was left braced against the tiles, half-dressed, her cunt already wet before Renata touched anything. Renata ran two fingers over her vulva, slow, parting her lips, feeling the moisture cling to her palm.

—You’re soaked. Spent the whole fencing class thinking about this, didn’t you?

—Shut up and do it.

Renata dropped to her knees. She lifted one of Adriana’s legs, hooked it over her shoulder, and without another preamble buried her tongue between her thighs. She licked her from bottom to top, from entrance to clit, long, hard, insistent. Adriana threw her head back against the tiles and bit the back of her hand so she wouldn’t scream. Renata sucked her clit, caught it between her lips, played with it using the tip of her tongue like someone sharpening a blade. At the same time she slid two fingers inside, curling them upward, searching for that inner spot that made Adriana’s thighs part without permission.

—Renata, fuck, like that, like that…

The other woman quickened her pace. She drove her fingers in and out with an obscene wet sound, licking her cunt while she fucked her with her hand, and Adriana felt her knees start to give way. She came against Renata’s mouth in a brutal lash, clamping her thigh around Renata’s face, trembling from head to toe, biting her lips until they bled so she wouldn’t shout the name burning on her tongue.

Renata rose kissing her stomach, her ribs, her sternum, chin shining, lips swollen. She found Adriana’s mouth and Adriana tasted herself on that tongue, salty and thick, and kissed her back with a new hunger.

—Your turn —Adriana panted, turning her against the wall.

She dragged Renata’s trousers down with impatience, shoved her hand between her legs, and found her just as wet. She drove three fingers inside at once, to the hilt, and Renata moaned with her mouth against the tile. Adriana fucked her that way, standing, the heel of her palm striking Renata’s clit with each thrust, biting her nape, her ear, her shoulder. She hissed into her ear all the filth she never allowed herself to say out loud.

—Look at you, how you clench. All mine. This cunt is mine, hear me? Mine.

Renata nodded, unable to speak, pressing her ass back against Adriana’s pelvis, moving herself over the fingers penetrating her. When Adriana added her thumb to the clit, rubbing it in quick circles, Renata came, soaking Adriana’s wrist, with a rough cry neither of them managed to stifle.

They stayed like that for a moment, panting, foreheads pressed to the tiles, bodies blazing. Renata turned her face.

—I love you —Renata told her against her mouth.

—After the fight —she answered, smiling. It was the usual promise. After the fight we’ll talk. After the fight you’ll say it again. After the fight you won’t leave me.

They left the locker room laughing, still tasting each other’s mouths, dressed in civilian clothes, sweaty, believing they could still be happy.

And then the black van. The five men getting out. The brutal certainty Adriana had learned since childhood, the one her father had burned into her: nothing you love is ever only yours.

This ambush was for me.

She remembered the first blow, the first struggle, the gun aimed at them, and Renata screaming.

—My love!

Then the shot. Not one. Two. Renata had thrown herself over her, pushing her, shielding her, becoming a shield. A target. An open body over hers.

Adriana had held her in her arms, had pressed both wounds with her bare hands, had felt the warm blood seeping between her fingers until it soaked her shirt. She tried. She tried with all her strength. It wasn’t enough.

And the worst part, the real worst part, wasn’t that. The worst part was that when her father arrived he didn’t hug her, didn’t let her cry, didn’t allow her to collapse. He forced her to compete that very afternoon. The national final. And she won it. As if a podium could cover over two wounds that weren’t hers.

Since then, every time she opened a body, the thought came back with the same old stab. It shouldn’t have been you. It had to be me.

***

—…transverse incision of approximately fourteen centimeters, partial absence of the left kidney —she continued dictating, with the neutral voice she had spent years perfecting.

She rested her gloved fingers on the metal edge of the gurney and the cold gave her something like reality back. The recorder kept running. Her left hand wasn’t trembling. Neither was her right.

But Helena was there too, lodged right in the fold of her chest, where she hadn’t wanted to touch herself for a week.

Helena had appeared three months earlier at a conference on forensic identification in victims of organized crime. She spoke to her in Spanish with a strange accent, mixed with some trace of another language, and had the habit of holding her gaze a second longer than social comfort allowed. They drank lukewarm whisky in the hotel bar until three in the morning. Neither of them could decide to go upstairs. Until Helena brushed the back of her hand over the table and asked, without smiling:

—Are you going to leave me sleeping alone again?

They went up.

Adriana didn’t let her turn on the light. She asked her to stay like that, dressed, against the wall, and lowered the zipper of her dress with the same slowness with which Renata had lowered a military jacket from her body ten years before. But this time she wasn’t trembling from fear. She was trembling because, for the first time in years, she was allowing herself to feel.

Helena had a warm body, freckled shoulders, small breasts, and nipples always a little darker than her pale skin suggested. Adriana pushed the dress up to her waist and sucked them while standing, one and then the other, first with a flat tongue, then with long suction, leaving them shiny with saliva. Helena dug her nails into Adriana’s shoulders and panted her name in the dark. Adriana gently bit each nipple, blew over them, sucked them again, until Helena started rocking her hips against the air, searching for friction where there was none.

—Please —Helena whispered—. Pull my panties down.

Adriana obeyed, kneeling slowly. She slid Helena’s black panties down to her ankles, made her step out of them, and stayed at the level of her cunt, breathing over it without touching. Helena had a shaved pubis, pinkish inner lips, already shining with arousal. Adriana parted her legs with her shoulders, hooked one calf over her back, and licked her cunt in one long sweep, tasting the clean, barely salty flavor.

—God, yes —Helena threw her head back against the wallpaper and buried her fingers in Adriana’s hair—. Don’t stop, forensics girl, don’t stop.

She didn’t stop. She worked Helena’s clit with the tip of her tongue, first softly, then fast, then sucking it between her lips like it was another nipple. She slid in two fingers and fucked her slowly, feeling the cunt tighten around her, feeling Helena start to tremble against her mouth. When she sensed Helena was close, she pulled her tongue away and blew over it.

—Adriana, you bitch —Helena panted, laughing and crying at the same time—, don’t do this to me.

Adriana smiled against her thigh and licked her again, now harder, moving her fingers in time with the rhythm of the other woman’s breathing. Helena came with a long spasm, pressing Adriana’s head against her pubis, wetting her chin, her throat, her cleavage. Adriana did not pull away. She kept going with her tongue, softer now, until she made her tremble a second time, shorter but deeper, and Helena had to push her away, oversensitive, half laughing in pain.

—Enough, enough, for God’s sake.

She lifted her. Took her to bed. Let herself be undressed at last, let herself be opened with her legs apart, let herself, for the first time in years, be touched without a stopwatch. Helena returned every kiss with her own mouth still wet with herself. She licked Adriana’s breasts, her belly, bit the inner thighs until she made her gasp, and ate her cunt slowly, meticulously, with the patience of someone who knows how to read a body as well as Adriana read bodies in the morgue. She sank her tongue into the entrance, sucked her clit with steady pressure, slipped three fingers inside her and found the inner spot, curling them upward. Adriana, who had spent years fucking quickly, in other people’s rooms, never allowing herself to moan, moaned aloud that night, without fear, and came with her back arched and both hands gripping her breasts, Helena’s name in her mouth instead of silence.

Afterward Helena settled on top of her, riding her thigh, and asked for another. Adriana dug her nails into her ass, squeezed it, spread it, ran a wet finger between her cheeks and brushed her anus without entering. Helena trembled, rubbed her wet cunt against Adriana’s firm thigh, and came again, riding her, biting her lips, forehead pressed to the other woman’s.

That night they slept skin to skin. Helena told her, before closing her eyes: “Don’t fall in love, forensics girl. It’s not wise.”

Adriana laughed and didn’t answer.

But a week had gone by since Helena left without explanation. A dry embrace at the morgue door, a promise of a call that never came, a flight to another country for a case that perhaps didn’t even exist. And once again her father’s old voice, lodged in her nape like a splinter. Love is a weakness. If you love, protect. If you fail, accept it.

Maybe it had been impulse. Maybe Helena had used her. Or maybe it had been her, Adriana, failing once more to protect.

—What if Helena becomes a ghost too? —she asked under her breath.

She swallowed. She couldn’t break. Not now.

She looked back at the body on the gurney. Transverse wound. Kidney missing. And then, without knowing why, she understood. Pain always left a hole. But it also left a map. One that, if she learned how to read it, could guide her back to herself.

She picked up the scalpel again.

I’m not stopping. Not for fear. Not for love. But I hope she comes back. Because for the first time since Renata, I let myself imagine an after.

And even though silence reigned in the room, somewhere deep inside Adriana there pulsed a certainty as fine as a thread of light in the dark: love, when it was real, always found a way to return.

Or so she wanted to believe.

Even if another part of her, quieter, older, more like her father’s voice, whispered the only question she didn’t dare answer.

What if what you had with Helena wasn’t as real as you let yourself believe?