What Happened in the Hospital Hallway That Night

My mother had been hospitalized in Ward B for six weeks when I began to understand that place was not just a site of illness. It was also a strange, almost suspended territory, where the hours stretched out and the hallways smelled of disinfectant and the machines’ lousy coffee.

My shift started at nine at night. I worked all day at an insurance agency and could only look after her once the visitors had gone and the nurses came by every three hours with their medication cart. Room 312 had two beds, but the other one had been empty for days. My mother slept almost all the time, sedated by morphine, and I sat in a green plastic armchair with a book I never quite finished.

Mariana started coming in the second week.

We had been friends since high school. I met her when we were fourteen, in a literature class, and we had never been apart since. We had shared birthdays, moves, two trips to the coast, boyfriends who came and went. Years earlier she had stopped having boyfriends. She announced it one afternoon at the corner bar, without drama: she liked women, and that was that. I nodded, asked for another beer, and we carried on.

But there was something in the way she looked at me that didn’t end with her declaration. I had always noticed it. The way she went still when I walked into a place, as if the air changed density. The way she brushed my hair back from my forehead when we spoke close together, with any excuse. The nervous smile that sometimes slipped out of her, the one she bit back right away so no one would notice.

I never paid it any mind. I was married to Andrés, and life was that: a house with a thirty-year mortgage, two cars, vacations split between his parents’ and mine. Mariana was my best friend and nothing more. The rest was an idea I wouldn’t even let near my head.

Until that winter.

Andrés and I had gone six months without touching each other when my mother was admitted. We had talked about separating, without actually doing it, twice. The third time was the last: he rented an apartment downtown and I stayed in the house with the dog and a mattress that was far too big. A week later, my mother crashed and never left the hospital again.

Mariana knew everything almost without my telling her. That was her talent: reading my face. She started texting me every night on chat, just when she should have been sleeping to get up for work at seven in the morning. We talked until two, three, sometimes four. About my mother, Andrés, nonsense. When I fell asleep with the phone in my hand, she kept texting and I saw it when I woke up.

One night she showed up in the third-floor waiting room with two coffees in cardboard cups.

“You didn’t have to come,” I told her.

“I know,” she said, handing me one of the cups.

She sat beside me on the hallway bench. She was wearing an oversized gray sweater and her hair was tied back in a loose ponytail. She smelled like her usual shampoo, that green-apple scent I’d known since I was fifteen.

She started coming three times a week. Then four. Sometimes she stayed until two in the morning and went straight to work without going home. I told her she was crazy, to take care of herself. She shrugged and asked about my mother, about me, about how I’d slept.

The night everything changed was a Thursday.

My mother had been worse for two days. They had increased the morphine and she slept in a heavy, damp sleep that didn’t break even when they took her blood pressure. I had cried for a while in the bathroom, and Mariana noticed the second she walked into the room.

“Let’s stretch our legs,” she said.

We went out into the hallway. Floor 3 had an old wing, under renovation for months, with half the rooms sealed off with yellow tape. The light there was different. Only three bulbs worked, spaced far apart, and between one and the next there were stretches of shadow where you could barely see the floor. We walked without speaking to the far end, where there was a sealed window and a dead vending machine.

We stayed there, leaning against the wall. I breathed deeply, trying not to cry again. She looked up at the ceiling.

And then the bulb above us buzzed twice, flickered, and went out.

“Shit,” I muttered.

I didn’t have time to say anything else. Mariana turned toward me, took my face in both hands, and kissed me.

I thought I was going to pull away. I thought it for a whole second, while my mind wondered what I was doing and why I wasn’t moving. But I didn’t pull away. I kissed her back with a hunger I didn’t know I had inside me. I felt her trembling, and that finished melting me. Her hands slid from my face to my neck and then to my waist, and she pulled me against her as if she’d wanted to do it for years and had only just dared that night.

Her mouth tasted like coffee and something sweet I couldn’t identify. Her lips were softer than I had imagined. Her tongue slipped into my mouth without asking, found mine, and tangled with it slowly, with a confidence that made me clench my thighs. I felt my underwear getting wet in a matter of seconds, as if my cunt had been waiting years for exactly that mouth and hadn’t known it until then.

I had never imagined her, I told myself. And I knew at once it was a lie.

We heard footsteps at the other end of the hall. A nurse, probably, on her rounds.

“Come on,” Mariana whispered.

She took my hand and pulled me into the gap between two closed rooms, a recess barely half a meter wide that the hospital used to store cleaning carts. We barely fit, pressed against each other, our legs tangled and our backs against the cold wall.

The footsteps passed by. They moved away. Silence returned, broken only by the distant hum of the air machine.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

I didn’t answer. I kissed her again, slower now, determined. And I told her the only thing I was certain of.

“Don’t stop. Fuck me right here. I need it.”

Mariana gave a low gasp, as if that word had hit her in the gut. She slid one knee between my legs and pressed there, against my pussy, until I felt her whole hard thigh pushing into me over my pants. I started moving against her without even realizing it, grinding like a bitch in heat, and she let me, biting my lower lip.

“Look how worked up you already are,” she whispered. “Slut.”

No one had ever spoken to me like that. Andrés would never have said anything like it, and I would never have allowed him to. But in Mariana’s mouth that word went straight through me and tightened my nipples beneath my sweater.

Her hands slid under my clothes. She worked both of them up my back to my bra clasp and unfastened it with a motion my husband had never managed to learn in eight years. She pulled it out through one sleeve, without even taking off my sweater, and let it fall to the floor. Then she dragged the collar of my top down with her teeth and kissed my collarbone, my shoulder, the curve of my breast. Her fingers pinched my nipples at the same time, one in each hand, and she twisted them slowly until a whimper escaped me.

“Cover your mouth,” she said softly. “Or they’ll catch us and I’ve barely started with you.”

I clapped a hand over my lips. Just in time. When her mouth found my nipple and bit down, the sound that escaped me would have filled the whole hallway if I hadn’t trapped it against my palm. She sucked hard, tugging it upward, then moved to the other one and did the same. My nipples were so swollen they hurt against the wool of my sweater. I felt a thread of saliva running down my side.

“Hard as rocks,” she murmured against my skin. “You love having your tits bitten, don’t you?”

I nodded with my eyes shut. I put a hand on the back of her neck and pushed her to keep going.

***

I had gone months without feeling anything like it. Maybe years. It was a strange mix of panic — because anyone could turn the corner — and hunger. An urgency I didn’t recognize. I, who had always been the careful one, the one who thought everything through twice, was in a hospital hallway with my best friend’s hand sliding up my leg and I didn’t want her to stop.

Mariana came back to my mouth, kissed me deeply, and slipped two fingers between my lips for me to suck them. I licked them slowly, looking into her eyes in the dim light, and she let out another gasp. When she pulled them out, shiny with my saliva, she crouched and knelt in front of me on the dirty hallway floor.

“Can I?” she asked.

I nodded. And then I realized in the darkness she couldn’t see me, so I repeated it in a low voice.

“Yes. Eat me out. Lick my cunt, please.”

She lowered my pants carefully, all the way to my ankles. The underwear came off after, a little more slowly, as if she wanted to memorize the moment. I felt her hot breath against my pussy before I felt anything else. She smelled me. I heard her inhale sharply, as if I were something she had been searching for for years.

“You’re soaked,” she whispered. “It’s running down the inside of your thigh, babe.”

She ran two fingers through my slit from bottom to top, very slowly, collecting what came out of me. Then she brought them to her mouth. I heard her suck them with a low moan that nearly made me come right there.

“Open up,” she said. “Open your legs as wide as you can.”

I spread my feet as far as the lowered pants allowed and braced both hands against the wall, my body tense, my eyes closed. When her tongue touched me for the first time, I bit the heel of my own hand to keep from screaming. She licked me from bottom to top, all of me, with a broad flat tongue, and finished by pressing my clit with her lips and sucking it.

She was slow. Slow, attentive, patient, as if every movement were an experiment. She opened my lips with two fingers and worked my clit with the tip of her tongue, in small circles, while her other hand squeezed my ass and pressed me closer to her mouth. Every so often she pulled back for a second and whispered against my thigh.

“Like this? Are you comfortable? Do you like the way I eat you?”

“Yes, fuck yes, don’t stop,” I answered through my teeth. “Put it in. Put it inside me.”

I felt her tongue lower and slip into my cunt, going in and out, fucking me slowly with her mouth. I could feel her breathing against me, her nose pressed to my pussy, her chin wet. I gripped her hair with both hands and shoved her against me, moving my hips over her face. That was the only answer I knew how to give her. My legs were close to giving out. The cold wall held up my back, but everything else was trembling.

She returned to my clit and sucked it hard, pulling it outward with her lips, and at that moment she slid in a finger. I felt it sink into me all at once, all the way in, and a moan escaped me that my hand didn’t quite manage to cover. She started moving it inside, curling it, searching for that spot even I didn’t know how to find. When she touched it, my whole body folded forward.

“There,” I gasped. “There, fuck, there, don’t move from there.”

She added a second finger. I felt them opening me inside, pressing that spongy place, while her tongue never stopped working my clit. Her other hand slid up my belly and found a nipple. She pinched it hard, twisting it, and the mix tore a tremor through my legs I couldn’t control.

I don’t know how much time passed. In the hospital time wasn’t counted like it was outside. It could have been five minutes or twenty. When I felt it building over me — a hot wave rising from my thighs toward my belly — I yanked her sweater upward.

“Wait,” I said. “Wait, I don’t want to come like this.”

She stood up, confused, her mouth still shining, her chin soaked with me. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand and licked her fingers one by one, never taking her eyes off me.

“I want you to fuck me. Hard. Like you’re really fucking me.”

I said it like I’d been rehearsing it my whole life. She smiled in the dim light, a smile you could barely make out.

“Turn around,” she ordered. “Hands against the wall. Ass out.”

I obeyed. I pressed my palms to the cold plaster, arched my back, and stuck my ass out, my pants still tangled around my ankles. Mariana pressed her body against mine from behind, bit the nape of my neck, and ran one hand over my chest, squeezing my breasts, while the other slid between my legs.

She slipped in one finger first, all at once. Then the second. I felt them opening inside me and starting to move, in and out, faster and faster, while her palm slapped my clit with every thrust. Her other hand covered my mouth, knowing I wouldn’t be able to control myself on my own anymore.

“Be quiet,” she whispered in my ear. “Be quiet, slut. They’ll hear you getting fucked in the hallway.”

She added a third finger. I felt a stretch that burned for a second and then the sheer pressure of having her inside me, filling me, moving. She fucked me with her hand the way a man would have fucked me with his cock, with rhythm, with intent, driving me against the wall with her hips. Her other hand squeezed my mouth shut and covered my nose for a second too, and each time she let me go to breathe, a muffled moan escaped me that she cut off again immediately.

“Come,” she said, her mouth against my ear. “Come on my hand, I want to feel all of it.”

I came with my face crushed against the cold wall. It was a long, dirty orgasm that made me clamp my teeth down on her palm and leave a mark. I felt myself tighten around her fingers, squeezing them, and a hot spurt ran down the insides of my thighs and soaked my fallen panties. She didn’t stop. She kept moving them, slower now, stretching my orgasm out until I had to grab her forearm to make her stop.

“Enough,” I gasped. “Enough, I can’t anymore.”

She pulled her fingers out carefully. I heard them come free from me with a wet, obscene sound that bounced down the empty hallway. When I was done, my knees were trembling so badly she had to hold me for a moment, embraced from behind, while I tried to breathe slowly. I felt her hand rise to my mouth and slide in the two soaked fingers. I sucked them without thinking, tasting myself on her, while she kissed my neck.

“Shhh,” she said, laughing softly in my ear. “Good girl.”

The footsteps came back. This time closer, for real. A flashlight lit a stretch of the corridor and moved toward us.

We dressed in a hurry. I picked up the bra from the floor and tucked it into my coat pocket. My panties felt cold and soaked when I pulled them back up. She ran her fingers through her hair and wiped her chin with her sweater sleeve. When we came out of the alcove and started walking back to room 312, we did it as if we were returning from the coffee machine. The nurse crossed paths with us, nodded, and walked on. I don’t know how she didn’t smell what we’d just done.

***

We never spoke of it that night. I sat in the green armchair beside my mother and laid my hand over hers, which was warm from the electric blanket. Mariana sat in the chair next to mine, took out her phone, and pretended to read something. Every so often, when she thought I wasn’t looking, she looked at me. And I, when I thought she wasn’t looking, did the same. I still had her between my legs. Every time I changed position, I felt my swollen cunt rub against my wet panties and wanted to drag her back into the hallway.

At five in the morning, as the sky began to brighten behind the window, she fell asleep with her head on my shoulder. I touched her hair. It smelled like green apple and hospital and, very faintly underneath, like me. I thought I didn’t want to go home.

My mother died ten days later. Mariana was at the funeral, in the front row, wearing a black coat I had never seen before. Andrés came too, out of respect, and left early. My sister was crying beside me, and it was hard for me to feel anything except that hand, Mariana’s, gripping my elbow so I wouldn’t collapse.

That night, after everything, Mariana stayed with me at my house for the first time. Not because of the urgency of the hallway. For something else, something slower, that I am still learning how to name.

What happened in that hospital was only the beginning. The start of a life I didn’t know was mine, and which I’ll keep telling in the stories to come.