The Video Game Friend With Whom I Crossed the Line

About eight years ago, after going back and forth over it for a long time, I ended a relationship that had marked me more than I was willing to admit. It was a dominatrix-and-submissive dynamic, completely virtual, that I had maintained for almost six months with a girl from Guadalajara whom I never actually met 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 تحمل and how much I could ask for. BDSM opened a door for me that I didn’t even know existed, and even now I’m still grateful to that first relationship for teaching me how to talk about what I wanted without apologizing, to say out loud that I liked having my hair pulled while fingers were shoved into my cunt, without dying of shame.

The problem was that, as the months went by, what had been a shared game started to smell off. Mariela wanted more control than we had agreed on, and I started to feel trapped even through a screen. We argued over voice messages, she got offended by a few hours of silence from me, she checked my last seen on every app. What was supposed to be a safe space had become a tiny, very noisy prison.

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

Then came the mourning. Because yes, a virtual relationship also gets grieved. I spent two or three months pretty flat, with no desire to look for anyone, devoted to work and to shows that would make me laugh without asking anything in return. I thought it would take much longer before I’d be interested in another woman again.

***

And then Renata appeared.

I met her in a virtual reality game similar to The Sims, where people build their house, decorate their avatar, and gather in fake bars to talk about real things. I’d gone in to kill boredom, with no intention beyond trying out the headset my brother had given me. I’d been wandering around a pixelated square for barely twenty minutes when I saw an avatar leaning against a lamppost, smoking a virtual cigarette in a pose that could not 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 up, said hello, 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, which made me suspect the person behind the avatar was worth it.

By the third virtual meet-up we had already exchanged numbers on an app like Messenger so we could keep talking outside the game. That’s where something else began.

***

Renata sent me the first real photo of herself a week later, without me asking. It was a bathroom mirror selfie from her place, with her hair wet and a towel wrapped around her torso. It wasn’t a pretentious photo, but it made me catch my breath on the bus I was riding. The swell of her breasts showed above the towel, full, pressed against the fabric, and a droplet of water ran down her collarbone, making me want to lick it all the way to her navel.

Physically she was different from all the girls I’d liked before. I had 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, with that women’s-soccer-player attitude, trained three times a week, and it showed. She had a sharp jawline, thick eyebrows, a small piercing in her lower lip. She was what some people call a tomboy, and I had never allowed myself to admit how much I liked that kind of woman until I had her photo on my screen and realized my panties were soaked in my seat like some horny kid.

I answered with a voice message.

—You have no idea what you just did to me —I told her, laughing to cover it up.

She sent me another voice note.

—I can imagine a little. Send me one of you.

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

***

The following weeks were a gentle slope. We went from talking every day to talking all day. We sent each other voice notes while one of us was at the supermarket and the other was cooking. We told each other our weird dreams the moment we woke up. We complained about work with a level of detail you only give to someone with whom you’re building something, even if neither of you wants to name it.

One night, after a long day, she wrote me a message that simply said, “Can we call?” It was the first time. Up until then, everything had been through voice notes or text. I said yes.

Her voice live was deeper than I expected, and she laughed more often. We talked nonsense for an hour until she asked me to turn off the light. I asked why.

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

I turned off the light. I stayed silent, staring at the ceiling, waiting.

—Tell me what you’re wearing.

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

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

I did as she said. I slid my hand down my stomach, spread my legs against the mattress, and ran my fingers over my lips without pressing. I was already soaked. The wet patch felt warm against my hand.

—I’m dripping, Renata.

—Tell me how. I want to hear it.

—I put one finger in and it comes out in strings. It sticks to my finger, stretches all the way to my wrist.

—Put two in —she said, her voice rougher—. And shove them in all the way. Imagine they’re mine.

I slid two fingers inside and arched my back against the sheets. On the other end I heard her breathing harder, and then the unmistakable sound of fabric shifting, of a hand slipping into a pair of pants. She told me without me asking that she’d pulled her jeans down, that she had her fingers in her cunt, that she was so wet she could hear the splashing if she brought the phone close. And she brought it close. She made me listen to her while she fucked herself thinking of me, and I almost 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 did as she said. Fingers of one hand inside me, the other hand circling my clit, biting my lip so I wouldn’t scream too loud because my mother slept in the next room. I came with my mouth open against the phone, shaking all over, my thighs clamped around my hands and a spurt of cum running down my ass to the sheet. I heard her come a minute later, moaning softly, saying my name like she was chewing it.

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

The next day, she texted first.

—I regret nothing.

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

***

For almost ten months we were exactly that: two friends who slept together at a distance. We talked every day about serious things and bullshit. We sent each other memes at three in the afternoon and nude photos at two in the morning. We learned each other’s rhythms, our cycles, which nights we were too tired and which nights needed something concrete so we wouldn’t think about the next day.

Renata was generous in a way that made me dizzy. She asked me what I liked, wrote it down, repeated it later. She read chapters aloud to me from books she knew I hadn’t read, just to hear me sigh when she reached a line that would hit me. ერთხელ she sent me a playlist with such a specific order that I cried the first time I listened all the way through. Another time, on a Wednesday at dawn, she sent me a nearly five-minute video in which her face never appeared: only her tattooed hand spreading her cunt open with two fingers, her clit swollen and shiny, and her voice in the background saying, “Look what you did to me without ever touching me.” I watched it so many times that week the replay button wore out.

Our nighttime 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 at a distance: she told me how to touch myself, with which hand, when to finger myself, when to hold back. She sent me after the vibrator I had bought just for her, a thick flesh-colored dildo I kept in the drawer of my nightstand, 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 took it down my throat until my eyes filled with tears.

—Now take it down. To your cunt. Slowly, I want you to feel every centimeter.

And I pushed it inside, gritting my teeth, with 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 finger-fucked herself, and without saying it we competed to see who would come first. Most of the time I beat her, because her voice wrecked me. I’d come clenching the dildo against the back wall, contorting myself, my tits bouncing and a gush soaking my thigh all the way to my knee.

Other nights, when she wanted to slow me down, she made me stay still. On my back, legs open, not touching myself, listening to her describe what she would do to me if she were there. How she would part my lips with her tongue, how she would suck my clit until it was swollen and purple, how she would 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 bedframe so I wouldn’t lower them, until she gave me permission. And when she gave me permission, I came in two touches, yelling things I would never have said to anyone in person: slut, fuck me, my love, do whatever you want with me.

I gave her back what I could. Mostly I gave her a mirror. Renata came to this story with her self-esteem in strips. She had a complicated relationship with her body, with those curves that drove me insane and that she had learned to hate sometime between adolescence and her twenties. She struggled to take full photos, preferred little pieces: her neck, a collarbone, a knee. And I devoted myself, without overthinking it too much, to naming everything I saw for her. 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 my mouth watered thinking about burying my face between her tits, biting her nipples until I made her scream, fucking her ass with one hand while the other went down to finger her to the hilt.

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

—Thank you —she wrote that afternoon.

—For what?

—You know for what.

And yes, I knew.

***

The end came the way these things come: without warning and with a lot of gentleness.

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

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

—They 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 beneath all that, a strange kind of pride, because the Renata who was going back to Lorena wasn’t the same Renata who had sat with me on the bench in the pixelated square. This Renata knew what she wanted and, above all, knew what she deserved.

—Are you sure? —I asked her.

—Yes.

—Then go. Seriously.

We talked a little longer. I told her that what we had always been was casual, no commitment, and that it was true. That she didn’t owe anyone explanations for having allowed herself to feel what she felt with me, and that she didn’t owe them to me either. That I was going to step aside so her relationship would have room to breathe, and that I wouldn’t seek her out privately anymore.

—Will we still be friends? —she asked.

—Some day, 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 let myself cry for a while, not too much, just enough to acknowledge that I had loved her more than I had been willing to admit while I still had her.

***

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

I, for my part, met a guy a few months later. We dated for almost three years, lived together for a while, ended things well. But that’s another story, and I’m going to tell it in another account, because it deserves its own space and not to be an appendix to this one.

What I do want to leave here, because it’s what has stuck to me all these years, is this: Renata was the first woman with whom I understood 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 some curvy tomboy girl on the subway, in ripped jeans and with a jaw that reminds me of hers, I smile to myself and send Renata a silent hello, wherever she may be. And I go home with the certainty that what we had, even though it passed through screens and avatars, was as real as anything else I’ve ever lived through.