The Video Game Friend I Crossed the Line With

About eight years ago, after turning it over and over in my mind, I ended a relationship that had marked me more deeply than I was willing to admit. It was a completely virtual domme-and-submissive dynamic that I had maintained for almost six months with a girl from Guadalajara whom I never actually got to meet in person. Her name was Mariela, and at first it was a beautiful experience: I learned about myself, about my limits, about how much I could take and how much I could ask for. BDSM opened a door I hadn’t even known existed, and even today I’m grateful to that first relationship for teaching me to talk about my desires without apologizing, to say out loud that I liked having my hair pulled while she fingered my pussy, without my face falling off from embarrassment.

The problem was that, as the months went by, what had been a shared game began to smell wrong. Mariela wanted more control than we had agreed on, and I was starting to feel trapped even through a screen. We argued over voice messages, she got offended if I went silent for a few hours, and she checked my last-seen status on every app. What was supposed to be a safe space had turned into a tiny, very noisy prison.

I decided to end it as maturely as I could. I wrote her a long message, without reproaches, explaining that I needed air and didn’t want us to end up fighting. She replied coldly, but respected my decision to leave. I closed the tab, turned off my phone, and stared at the ceiling of my room for a very long time.

Then came the mourning. Because yes, you grieve a virtual relationship too. I spent two or three months pretty numb, with no desire to look for anyone, devoting myself to work and to shows that made me laugh without asking anything in return. I thought it would take much longer before I became interested in another woman.

***

And then Renata appeared.

I met her in a virtual-reality video game similar to The Sims, where people build their houses, decorate their avatars, and get together in fake bars to talk about real things. I’d logged on to kill some time, with no intention beyond trying out the headset my brother had given me. I’d only been wandering around a pixelated plaza for twenty minutes when I saw an avatar leaning against a lamppost, smoking a virtual cigarette with a pose that couldn’t possibly have been accidental.

The avatar was a girl with short hair, broad shoulders, ripped jeans, and an open plaid shirt over a white T-shirt. The look made me smile. I walked over, sent her a greeting, and she answered with an emoji and an invitation to sit on the bench beside her.

We talked for almost two hours that first night. She told me her name was Renata, that she was twenty-six, lived in Rosario, and worked at an independent bookstore. She wasn’t much older than me. She had that direct way of writing, with dry humor and no unnecessary emojis, that made me suspect the person behind the avatar was worth getting to know.

By our third virtual meeting, we had exchanged numbers for an app similar to Messenger so we could keep talking outside the game. That was when something else began.

***

Renata sent me her first real photo a week later, without my asking. It was a mirror selfie in her bathroom at home, her hair wet and a towel wrapped around her torso. It wasn’t a particularly suggestive picture, but it made me catch my breath on the bus I was riding. The tops of her tits showed above the towel, big and squeezed against the fabric, and there was a drop of water running down her collarbone that made me want to lick her all the way to her navel.

Physically, she was different from every girl I’d been attracted to before. I’d always fallen for very thin women, almost ethereal, that model stereotype you swallow without realizing it. Renata was the opposite: curvy, with wide hips and strong arms, carrying herself like a women’s soccer player who trained three times a week—and it showed. She had a defined jaw, thick eyebrows, and a small piercing in her lower lip. She was what some people call a tomboy, and I’d never allowed myself to admit how much I liked that kind of woman until I had her picture on my screen and realized my panties were wet against the seat of the bus like some teenage girl’s.

I answered with a voice message.

—You have no idea what you just did to me—I said, laughing to disguise it.

She sent another voice message back.

—I can imagine. Send me one of you.

I did. Just an ordinary picture, in my room, with the yellow light of the bedside lamp and an oversized T-shirt that reached halfway down my legs. I wasn’t trying to seduce her, and even so, when she replied, “I don’t want to think about what I’m thinking,” I understood that the line was already thinner than either of us would admit.

***

The following weeks were a gentle downward slope. We went from talking every day to talking all day. We sent voice messages while one of us went grocery shopping and the other cooked. We told each other our weird dreams as soon as we woke up. We complained about work in a level of detail reserved for someone you’re building something with, even though neither of us wanted to give it a name.

One night, after a long day, she sent me a message that simply said, “Can we call?” It was the first time. Until then, everything had been through voice messages or texts. I said yes.

Her voice in real time was lower than I expected, and she laughed more often. We talked about nonsense for an hour until she asked me to turn off the light. I asked her why.

—Because I want to hear you better—she said, and I noticed the change in her tone.

I turned off the light. I lay there in silence, staring at the ceiling and waiting.

—Tell me what you’re wearing.

—An old T-shirt and nothing underneath—I said, and heard her breath catch on the other end.

—Put your hand down there. Slowly. Don’t touch your clit yet; I want you to get there little by little.

I obeyed. I slid my hand down my stomach, spread my legs against the mattress, and ran my fingers over my lips without squeezing them. I was already soaked. The wetness felt warm against my hand.

—I’m dripping, Renata.

—Tell me how. I want to hear it.

—I put one finger inside and it comes out stringy. It sticks to my finger and stretches all the way to my wrist.

—Put in two—she said, her voice rougher—. And fuck yourself all the way to the bottom. Imagine they’re mine.

I pushed in two fingers and arched my back against the sheet. On the other end I could hear her breathing more heavily, followed by the unmistakable sound of fabric shifting, of a hand slipping inside a pair of pants. Without my asking, she told me she’d pulled down her jeans, that her fingers were in her pussy, that she was so wet you could hear the squelching if she brought her phone close. And she brought it close. She made me listen to her fuck herself while thinking about me, and I nearly came right there just from hearing her.

—Touch your clit now—she ordered—. In circles. Don’t stop until you come. And I want to hear you when you do.

I obeyed. The fingers of one hand inside me, the other hand circling my clit, biting my lip so I wouldn’t scream too loudly because my mom was sleeping in the room next door. I came with my mouth open against the phone, trembling all over, my thighs squeezed around my hands, my orgasm dripping down my ass onto the sheet. I heard her come a minute later, moaning softly, saying my name as if she were chewing it.

I’d had phone sex before, but never like that, with someone who seemed to know exactly when to lower her voice and when to fall silent so my imagination could fill the gap. When I hung up, I was trembling, my heart in my throat, my fingers still sticky, not quite understanding what line we had just crossed.

The next day, she messaged me first.

—I don’t regret a thing.

Neither did I. And just like that, without signing any papers, we became friends with benefits.

***

For almost ten months, that was exactly what we were: two friends who slept together from a distance. We talked every day about serious things and stupid shit. We sent each other memes at three in the afternoon and nude pictures at two in the morning. We learned each other’s rhythms, our cycles, which nights we were too tired and which nights we needed something specific to keep from thinking about the next day.

Renata was generous in a way that made me dizzy. She asked me what I liked, wrote it down, and repeated it later. She read chapters from books she knew I hadn’t read aloud to me, just to hear me sigh when she reached a line that would get to me. Once she sent me a playlist arranged so specifically that I cried the first time I listened to the whole thing. Another time, early on a Wednesday morning, she sent me an almost five-minute video in which her face never appeared: only her tattooed hand spreading her pussy open with two fingers, her clit swollen and shining, and her voice in the background saying, “Look what you’ve done to me without ever touching me.” I watched it so many times that week I wore out the replay button.

The late-night calls became routine. We learned to fuck over the phone the way you learn to dance with someone else. She was bossy in bed, even from a distance: she told me how to touch myself, which hand to use, when to put my fingers inside, when to hold back. She ordered me to fetch the dildo I’d bought just for her, a thick, flesh-colored one I kept in the bedside-table drawer, and made me suck it first, slowly, as if it were her imaginary cock. She made me describe how my mouth filled with saliva, how strings dripped down my chin, how I opened my lips and shoved it down my throat until my eyes filled with tears.

—Now take it down. To your pussy. Slowly—I want you to feel every inch.

And I pushed it inside, gritting my teeth, the phone pressed to my ear, listening to her breathe on the other end as if she were beside the bed watching. Sometimes she made me ride it while she fucked herself with her hand, and we competed, without saying so, to see who would come first. I usually won, because her voice destroyed me. I came with the dildo pressed deep inside me, writhing, my tits bouncing and my orgasm soaking my thigh all the way to my knee.

Other nights, when she wanted to bring me down a notch, she made me stay still. On my back, legs spread, not touching myself, listening as she described what she’d do to me if she were there. How she’d spread my lips with her tongue, suck my clit until it was swollen and purple, how she’d put three fingers inside me and ask me to come on her face. She kept me on the edge for half an hour, trembling, my hands gripping the bed frame to keep from lowering them, until she gave me permission. And when she gave me permission, I came in two touches, shouting things at her I would never have said to anyone in person: bitch, fuck me, my love, do whatever you want with me.

I gave her back what I could. Mostly, I reflected her back to herself. Renata came into this story with her self-esteem in tatters. She had a complicated relationship with her body, with those curves that drove me crazy and that she had learned to hate sometime between adolescence and her twenties. She found it hard to take full-body pictures, preferring fragments: her neck, a collarbone, a knee. And I devoted myself, without theorizing about it too much, to naming everything I saw. To telling her why I wanted her naked, which parts hypnotized me, how her muscles stood out when she raised her arms to fix her hair. To telling her that my mouth watered at the thought of burying my face between her tits, biting her nipples until she screamed, fucking her ass with one hand while the other moved down to finger her all the way inside.

It wasn’t a strategy. It was the truth. But with time, I understand that sustaining that kind of truth is also a way of helping someone grow. And Renata grew. She started sending me full-body pictures, without filters, without apologies. One day she sent me a nude, standing in front of her wardrobe mirror with one leg forward, her tits hanging under their own weight and her pubic mound covered in dark hair. Beneath it she wrote, “Look what you did to my head. Now I like myself like this.” Another day she sent me a short video in which she spread her ass with both hands, her pussy already wet and dripping down to her asshole, and told me, “When we can see each other, I want you to start here.” One day she told me she’d started training twice a week again, not to lose weight, but because she liked feeling strong. Another day she sent me a bikini picture at a friend’s pool, wearing a smile I had never seen on her before.

—Thank you—she wrote that afternoon.

—Why?

—You know why.

And yes, I knew.

***

The end came the way these things do: without warning and with a great deal of tenderness.

One Thursday afternoon she wrote to tell me she needed to talk about something. I was at work and asked her to wait until that evening. When I got home, I opened the conversation with a knot already tying my stomach in knots.

She told me she had run into Lorena by chance, an ex-partner she’d lived with for three years who had left her in a terrible state. They’d crossed paths at a birthday party, talked for hours, and Lorena had apologized for things Renata thought she would spend her whole life waiting for in silence.

—We want to try again—she wrote.

I stared at the screen for a long time. I felt several things at once, none of them easy. Sadness, obviously. Something like anger too, but duller. And underneath it all, a strange kind of pride, because the Renata who was going back to Lorena wasn’t the same Renata who had sat down beside me on that bench in the pixelated plaza. This Renata knew what she wanted and, above all, knew what she deserved.

—Are you sure?—I asked her.

—Yes.

—Then go. Really.

We talked for a while longer. I told her that what we had had always been casual, without commitment, and that it was true. That she didn’t owe anyone an explanation for allowing herself to feel what she had felt with me, and that she didn’t owe one to me either. That I was going to step aside so her relationship would have room to breathe, and that I wouldn’t contact her privately again.

—Are we going to stay friends?—she asked.

—Someday, yes. Not now.

I closed the app, turned off the virtual-reality headset I hadn’t used in months, and poured myself a glass of wine. I sat on the bed and allowed myself to cry for a while—not too much, just enough to acknowledge that I loved her more than I had been willing to admit while I had her.

***

I heard almost nothing from Renata during the following months. Once I saw a picture of her in a story shared by a mutual friend: she was hugging Lorena, her head resting on her shoulder and wearing that same smile she’d sent me in the pool picture. I closed it quickly and kept walking.

As for me, I met a guy a few months later. We dated for almost three years, lived together for a while, and ended things well. But that’s another story, and I’ll tell it in another piece, because it deserves its own space rather than being an appendix to this one.

What I do want to leave here, because it’s what has stayed stuck to me all these years, is this: Renata was the first woman who taught me that desire doesn’t need papers or labels to be real. That you can want someone with your whole body and, at the same time, let her go when what she needs is somewhere else. That helping another woman learn to love herself doesn’t make you her savior or her owner; it simply makes you someone who passed through her life and left something good behind.

Sometimes, when I pass a curvy, tomboyish girl on the subway, with ripped jeans and a jaw that reminds me of hers, I smile inwardly and send a silent greeting to Renata, wherever she may be. And I go home certain that what we had, even though it happened through screens and avatars, was as real as anything else I’ve ever experienced.