The Storm That Changed Everything Between My Roommate and Me

The story of how I met Carmen begins with me having just turned eighteen and a backpack with enough for three weeks. That summer I hitchhiked out of the village where I’d grown up with my aunt, not really knowing where I was going, following the instincts of people who have nothing to lose. I ended up in a mid-sized inland city, found work cleaning offices in the mornings, and rented a room in a shared flat with two other girls.

Marta was twenty and one of those people you notice the second they walk into a room. Tall, very thin, with straight black hair that fell to her shoulders and hazel eyes that looked as if they were always about to say something interesting. Boys asked her out constantly and she said yes without much enthusiasm, or at least that’s how it seemed from the outside. Between classes and dates, we hardly saw her in the flat.

Carmen was another story. She was twenty-two, short, dark-haired, with curly hair that reached her shoulders. She wasn’t the kind of woman who jumped out at you in a photograph, but in person she had something hard to put into words: a way of laughing that was contagious without effort and a way of listening that made you feel what you said really mattered. From the start, we clicked well. We’d stay in the living room when Marta went out, with something to eat on the coffee table and the TV on, talking about work, money, the families each of us carried at a distance. Those were the kind of conversations that become easy because the other person doesn’t judge you.

***

The Thursday everything changed, it had been raining since dawn.

I got home a little after six in the evening, my arms sore and my hair damp from walking from the bus stop. The cleaning job wasn’t hard in principle, but it was hard in accumulation: four office floors, bathrooms included, and the supervisors always had some comment about something that hadn’t been left perfect. I learned to ignore them from day one. My aunt taught me that a job well done doesn’t need explanations.

Marta had gone out with someone before I got back. Carmen was in the living room in striped socks and an oversized T-shirt that must have belonged to some ex, looking for something in the remote-control drawer.

“I’m going to take a shower,” I said, setting my bag on the chair.

“There’s a snack whenever you want,” she answered without looking up.

I showered slowly, letting the hot water work over my back until the day’s exhaustion became something lighter. When I got out, I put on an old T-shirt and panties; at home I never bothered dressing up any more than that. Carmen had put on a horror movie on the TV, some old thing with exaggerated sound effects, and had prepared two cups of hot chocolate with toast on the coffee table.

I sat down with my legs folded to one side. Outside, the rain hadn’t stopped and the sky was still low and grey.

“What’s it about?” I asked, pointing at the screen.

“I don’t know, it just started. There’s an axe murderer, I think.”

“Classic.”

The movie started slowly, building atmosphere, the kind that makes you lower your guard before it scares you. We ate the toast and commented on the characters: the one who was clearly going to survive, the one who clearly wasn’t, the one making decisions nobody with two brain cells would make. Carmen had a theory for each one and explained them with complete seriousness, which made everything even funnier.

The storm grew stronger as the movie went on. First it was just heavy rain. Then wind. Then thunder, closer together each time, closer and closer. Lightning lit up the living room for fractions of a second and then everything went back to the glow of the screen. I’m not scared of storms, but Carmen had once told me they made her nervous, though she didn’t really make a big deal of it.

The movie reached the key moment: the heroine going down into the basement, the music rising note by note, her hand on the doorknob. We both tensed up without even realizing it. And just when the door started to open, a thunderclap so loud it made the living-room windows vibrate shook us both at once.

We both screamed.

The power went out.

Silence. Total darkness, apart from the little light coming in from the street.

“Laura,” Carmen said in a smaller voice than usual.

“I’m here,” I replied.

We found each other in the dark without really thinking about it. First a hand, then a shoulder, then a full embrace: her pressed against me, me wrapping one arm around her. I could feel her shoulders trembling, just a little, that kind of shake you try to hide and can’t quite manage. I ran my hand slowly through her hair.

“It’s nothing,” I said softly. “Either the fuses or the storm. The lights will come back on in a bit.”

She began to calm down. But she didn’t move away. And neither did I.

Some hugs start in one place and end up somewhere else without you being able to point to the exact moment they changed. This was one of those. Carmen’s body against mine was something I knew in the abstract—we’d slept on the same sofa other times watching movies—but in the dark it was different. More present. More concrete.

And then I noticed it.

Her nipples, hard as stones, pressing against my arm through the thin fabric of her T-shirt. Without a bra underneath, they were digging into her skin like two points begging for a mouth.

I stayed still. She lifted her head. In the little light coming in from the street, the eye looking at me was shining.

She didn’t say anything. Neither did I.

We moved closer slowly, as if neither of us wanted to be the first to decide completely. Her nose brushed mine for a moment before our lips met. The first kiss was brief, almost a question. Then another, longer one. Then with our mouths open and her tongue sliding into mine, searching for it, winding around it. I bit her lower lip and she let out a soft moan that went straight down between my legs. I was already wet. I could feel my panties sticking to my cunt with a dampness that had nothing to do with the shower.

This is really happening, I thought. And I have no interest in making it stop.

I lay back on the sofa and she climbed on top of me, with her knees on either side of mine and her sex pressed directly against my thigh. I felt the heat of her wet cunt through the fabric of her panties, leaving a warm stain on my leg. I kissed her harder and she started grinding against me without hiding it, moving her hips in a slow sway, rubbing her vulva against my bare thigh while biting my neck.

I lifted her T-shirt from the sides. She pulled it off in one gesture and I did the same with mine. The first skin-on-skin contact sent a shiver through me that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room. My tits are big, heavy, and when hers—smaller, firm, with nipples already raised and dark—brushed against mine, I sucked in a sharp breath. Her hands started squeezing them, weighing them in her palms, pinching my nipples between thumb and forefinger with a calm that made me more nervous than if she’d been in a hurry.

“What amazing tits you’ve got, fuck,” she murmured against my neck, and lowered her mouth to suck on them.

She took one nipple fully into her mouth, licked it, bit it softly, tugged on it with her teeth until a moan slipped out of me. She moved to the other one and repeated it, sucking hard, coating my skin with saliva. I dug my fingers into her back and arched my chest to get more of myself into her mouth. Every pull of her lips tugged at my clit too, as if there were a direct cable stitched under my skin.

Her hands went lower: ribs, waist, the waistband of my panties. She slid her fingers underneath and went down to touch me. When she found how soaked I was, she gave a small laugh against my breast.

“You’re dripping, Laura.”

“Shut up,” I said, and grabbed her wrist so she wouldn’t stop touching me.

She ran two fingers all the way through my slit, from bottom to top, parting the lips of my cunt, gathering up the thick fluid already running down to my ass crack. She brought her fingers to her mouth and sucked them slowly, looking at me, even though I could barely see her.

“Yeah?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. And I yanked my panties off in one motion.

She took off her pants and hers too. We were both naked then, except for the striped socks she was still wearing, which at that moment were completely irrelevant.

She climbed back on top of me and slipped one leg between my thighs, pressing my cunt against her knee. I did the same with her. We started rubbing like that, a messy scissor, the two wet, open cunts rubbing against each other’s hard flesh, leaving hot trails of slick down our thighs. She panted into my ear, I dug my nails into her ass, squeezing it, parting it, slipping one finger between her cheeks to brush her asshole.

“Oh, you bitch,” she gasped when I ran my fingertip there. “More.”

I sank my middle finger to the knuckle into her cunt, with my thumb pressing her clit, and she slammed down on me at once, mouth open against my shoulder. I put in another finger, and another, three fingers moving inside her with a wet, filthy sound that could be heard above the murmur of the rain. I fucked her like that for a while, with my hand, while she rode my thigh and came a little every time I hit bottom.

***

I don’t know who turned first, but an instant later we were in mirror position on the sofa: me with my face in front of her cunt, her in front of mine. Sixty-nine came to us as naturally as if we’d rehearsed it.

I moved in slowly. I spread her outer lips apart with my thumbs and looked at her for a second before going in. She was shining, swollen, with her clit exposed and a strand of thick slick hanging from her entrance. She smelled clean and sexy, sweet and salty at the same time. I started with the tip of my tongue, a soft line from bottom to top, from the entrance to the bud, and ended up sucking it whole into my mouth.

She threw herself on my cunt with the same hunger. Her hot tongue opened me up at once and started licking me in long strokes, up and down, devouring me whole. When she reached my clit she stayed there, sucking it, tapping it with the tip of her tongue, and I had to clench my teeth into her thigh so I wouldn’t scream.

We found a rhythm without needing to agree on it. She explored and I answered. I pressed and she reacted. I pushed my tongue into her cunt as far as I could, pulled it out dripping with her juices, went back up to her clit, then down again. I slid two fingers into her and kept licking while I fucked her with my hand. She wriggled over my face, squeezing my head between her thighs until I was nearly smothered, and I took the chance to push my tongue deeper, until I felt her whole belly trembling.

She gave everything back to me. When I sucked her clit, she sucked mine. When I put two fingers into her, she put two into me and curled them upward, searching for that spot inside, the one that tightens when it’s touched. She found it on the third try and started striking it with her index finger while licking me nonstop. I opened my legs as much as I could, heels planted on the sofa back, offering myself completely, and begged her with her cunt in my mouth not to stop.

I found her spot and stayed there. No hurry, but no stopping either. Small circles with my tongue, then direct pressure, sucking hard, then circles again, and my fingers going in and out without rest. Her hips started moving with a sway that grew more marked as time went on, driving into my mouth, fucking my face. I was close too: she’d learned fast, or maybe she just sensed it, and one hand on my hip that she used to pull me in when she wanted more, and the other burying her fingers in my cunt with an increasingly rough rhythm.

“I’m going to come,” she panted against my vulva. “Laura, I’m going to come, don’t stop.”

I didn’t stop. I sucked her clit harder, pinched it between my lips, slipped in a third finger. She came in a long spasm that shook her whole back, crushing my head between her thighs, soaking my chin with a warm spurt from inside her. The taste changed in my mouth, more intense, denser, and that was what made me explode too.

I came with my knees folding inward, pressing my face against her cunt, moaning into her with my mouth full while she kept sucking my clit to stretch my orgasm out until I couldn’t take any more and shoved her head away with both hands because I couldn’t stand one more lick. We stayed still for a moment, each of us with our face pressed to the other’s cunt, panting, soaked in sweat and slick, catching our breath in the dark.

***

After that, we laughed. Both of us, almost at the same time, for no particular reason. A laugh that was part relief, part release, and something else I couldn’t name.

“I wasn’t expecting this to happen tonight,” Carmen said, turning to lie next to me with her face smeared and a half-guilty smile.

“Neither was I,” I admitted, running my thumb along the corner of her mouth to wipe away some of my own slick.

We sat back up on the sofa, normal again, shoulder to shoulder, looking at the blank screen. The storm had eased into a quiet rain. And then, as if it had been waiting for that exact moment, the power came back on.

We looked at each other. In the full light of the living room, with our T-shirts on the floor, our panties hanging from one arm of the sofa and the cushions completely twisted and stained, we looked at each other and started laughing again.

“Marta gets back in an hour,” Carmen said, getting up.

“Plenty of time,” I replied, and grabbed her wrist to pull her on top of me again.

We fucked right there again, faster this time, aware of the clock. I slid my whole hand between her legs and fingered her with my thumb on her clit and two fingers inside while I bit her tits. She rode my leg again, rubbing her cunt against my thigh, and fingered me until she made me come a second time, covering my mouth with her other hand so I wouldn’t scream. She came a minute later, biting my shoulder to stifle her moan.

We cleaned up. We got dressed. We threw away the leftovers from the snack. We turned the cushions over to hide the stains. We put everything back where it belonged. Before parting ways to our separate rooms, Carmen stopped in the hallway and kissed me on the mouth. Just one, brief, with our lips pressed together for a second before she let go.

“Good night, Laura.”

“Good night.”

We didn’t talk about it directly in the months that followed. There was no need: everything stayed just as easy and natural between us, with the same closeness as before, as if that night had been a pause neither of us needed to explain. Though there were other nights, of course. Nights when Marta slept elsewhere and Carmen slipped into my bed without saying a word, and I opened her legs and ate her cunt until dawn. Marta moved out at the end of the term and Carmen got her own apartment not long after.

We kept seeing each other from time to time. We stayed friends.

But some nights, when rain hits the windows hard and thunder starts rolling, I think of her in that darkness, of how her voice sounded when she was looking for me, of the taste of her cunt in my mouth, and I’m glad that storm lasted as long as it did.