What I Learned from Another Woman When He Left Me

Five years ago I went through the most painful breakup of my life. Ignacio had cheated on me so many times I’d already lost count by the time I finally gathered the courage to leave. It wasn’t a clean exit; it was dragging myself through the mud for months, pretending I still believed his excuses until one early morning I packed my bags and left for my sister’s apartment without telling him.

I was twenty-six and had the feeling my body didn’t belong to me. I’d done whatever he wanted in bed for so long I no longer knew what I liked. I’d swallowed his cock every time he shoved my head down, opened my legs every time he wanted to get off, let him fuck me in the ass when I didn’t want to because he told me his friends’ girlfriends did it. That was the wound that took the longest to heal. The other one, the heart one, I silenced in the stupidest way possible: I downloaded two messaging apps I’d never used and talked to strangers so I wouldn’t think.

At first they were silly chats. Men sending dick pics I hadn’t asked for. Women asking me where I was from. I answered in monosyllables from the guest room bed at my sister’s, cell phone pressed to my face, waiting for exhaustion to beat out rage.

Camila appeared one night in February. Her profile picture was a close-up of a coffee cup on a wooden table, no face, no real name. She wrote to me because she liked my bio: “still learning how to be alone.” She told me she was in the same boat, but the other way around. She’d been single for two years and no longer knew how to stop being so.

We talked for weeks without sending each other a single photo. It wasn’t by chance. We were both playing the same game: we wanted to know whether what was behind the screen interested us before we looked at the wrapping. She told me she was thirty-two, that she worked at an architecture firm in another city, that she lived alone with two cats and cooked badly but enthusiastically. I told her about Ignacio. I told her the long version, the one I hadn’t even told my sister.

—And you’d never been with a woman? —she asked me one night.

—No. It never even occurred to me.

—That’s not the same as saying you didn’t want to, —she wrote.

I stared at the screen for a long time. She was right. I’d never allowed myself to think about it. At school there was a girl in my class who made me nervous when she changed next to me in gym, and I’d convinced myself it was jealousy. As a teenager I’d seen one of my sister’s friends go into the bathroom with her towel half on and felt something I chose not to name. Now, at twenty-six, with a screen between us and a stranger on the other side, Camila was putting names to all those scenes I’d filed away.

—And you? —I asked her.

—I have. Plenty of times. And I prefer it, if I’m being honest. I’d rather have a wet cunt in my mouth than any cock in the world.

I felt the word hit me between the legs. I pressed my thighs against the mattress without realizing it.

The conversations changed after that night. Not all at once. It was slow. A question about what clothes I slept in. A comment about how the sheets felt that night. A photo of her hand on her thigh, without her face showing. I mimicked her clumsily, because I’d never done that, not even with Ignacio. I sent her a photo of the edge of my collarbone. Then one of the inside of my wrist. She answered with slow words, unhurried, describing what she’d do if she had my wrist near her mouth, and from there she’d go down, tell me how she’d open my legs with both hands, how she’d lick me slowly from bottom to top until I was soaking her face, how she wouldn’t let me come until I begged her by name.

For the first time, I learned how to wait. Not to finish too soon. To read a line and let it settle into my body before answering. Ignacio had never given me that pause. With him it was all about reaching the end as fast as possible, getting it in, shaking myself four times, cumming inside, and falling asleep. With Camila, by contrast, there were nights I fell asleep with the phone in my hand and a throbbing between my legs I didn’t attend to because she’d asked me not to. There were nights I woke with my panties soaked and my clit hard against the seam and still didn’t touch myself, because every sentence of hers had taught me that pleasure can be cooked slowly too.

—I want to be the first one to do it to you, —she wrote me one early morning—. When we meet. I want to be the first woman’s tongue to feel that cunt of yours.

I had been avoiding thinking about that when. We lived in different cities, six bus hours apart. But after that sentence I stopped avoiding it. I bought a ticket for the first long weekend and told her by message. She took two minutes to answer. When she did, she only sent the address and the time she would be waiting for me.

***

I arrived at her building on a Friday at nine at night, with a small bag and a dry mouth. I went up five floors in a mirror-lined elevator and couldn’t bring myself to look at myself. I rang the bell.

Camila opened it and for the first time I saw her whole face. She had brown hair tied in a low bun, greener eyes than I’d imagined, and a white men’s shirt over a pair of shorts. She didn’t say anything. She took my bag, set it on the floor of the foyer, and gently pushed me against the wall behind the door.

—Did you imagine me like this? —she asked, her mouth an inch from mine.

—I didn’t imagine anything, —I said, because it was true.

She kissed me. It was different from any kiss I’d ever given. There was no rush, no sense that the kiss was the toll you paid to get to something else. The kiss was the thing. Her tongue entered my mouth slowly, looking for mine, sucking on it just a little before letting go. One of her hands went up under my T-shirt and squeezed one breast over my bra, her thumb seeking out the nipple until it went hard. When she pulled back, she looked into my eyes and laughed softly.

—You’re shaking. And your nipples are already hard. You spent the whole trip thinking about this, didn’t you?

—Yes.

—Do you want a drink first?

I nodded. She took me to the kitchen, poured me a red wine, and sat across from me at the counter. We talked for twenty minutes about anything at all, as if we weren’t going to do what we both knew we were going to do. She told me about her cats, who were hiding under the couch because they were scared of new people. She told me about work. I could barely hold the glass, because under my jeans I could feel my panties stuck to my cunt and I knew she knew it.

Then she set the glass on the table and said:

—Come here.

I followed her down a hallway to her bedroom. The light came from a low, orange lamp. The bed was huge, with a gray quilt and too many pillows. I stood beside the bed, not knowing what to do with my hands.

Camila came up behind me. She moved my hair away from the nape of my neck and kissed me there, right where the spine begins. I felt her warm breath and a shiver that ran all the way to my feet. Her hands wrapped around my waist over the shirt and stayed still, waiting, as if they were asking without words whether she could keep going.

—Yes, —I said, even though she hadn’t asked.

She turned me around slowly. She unbuttoned my shirt one button at a time, looking more at my face than at my body, as if what mattered was seeing how my breathing changed. When she got to the last button, she ran the pad of her finger from the base of my throat down to my belly button. I wasn’t wearing a bra. We both noticed at the same time. She smiled.

—You knew what you were coming here to do, —she said.

—Yes.

She crouched and sucked one nipple without warning. I let out a sharp breath. She took it all into her mouth, pressed it against the palate with her tongue, bit it just barely, and let it go with a wet sound. Then the other one. When she lifted her head, her lips were shiny and she was smiling slowly.

—They’re gorgeous. And really hard. I’m going to eat them for a good long while tonight.

She gently pushed me onto the bed. She pulled her shirt off over her head and was left in just the shorts. Her body was softer than I’d imagined, more real. Big breasts that hung slightly to the sides, dark wide nipples, a small scar over her left hip, a large mole under her right breast. It wasn’t the perfect body from the photos Ignacio had made me look at so many times to “give me ideas.” It was better. It was a body that had lived, a body made for fucking without hurry.

She climbed on top of me and kissed my mouth first, then my neck, then my breasts. She took all the time she wanted. She sucked my tits until my nipples hurt, ran her tongue over my sternum, bit the side of my ribs. Wherever she felt me respond, she stayed longer. Wherever I didn’t, she moved on without insisting. It was as if she were reading me in Braille. I closed my eyes and let myself go.

She unbuttoned my jeans with one hand and yanked them down along with my panties in one pull to my ankles. I heard her low laugh when she saw how soaked I was.

—Look at this, —she murmured, sliding two fingers along my slit from top to bottom—. You’re dripping, baby. All this for me?

—Yes, —I managed to say.

She opened my legs with both hands, looked at my split-open cunt for a full second, and blew lightly over my clit before lowering her head. When her tongue touched me for the first time, I arched my back and gripped the sheets with both hands. It wasn’t a quick lick. It was a broad, flat, hot tongue that slowly climbed from my entrance to my clit and stayed there, circling in exact loops, unhurried, not changing pace when I started moaning louder.

When she lowered her head beyond my belly, I opened my eyes and looked at her. I wanted to see. I wanted to know what face she made doing that to me. Camila looked up at that exact moment and our eyes met for a second before her mouth went back where it belonged. She sucked my clit inward, let it go, licked it in zigzags, slid the tip of her tongue into the opening of my cunt and came back up. Then she put two fingers in me. She curled them upward, searching for that spot Ignacio had never found, and when she hit it I knew because she told me with her eyes without stopping sucking me.

—Camila, —I gasped—, I can’t take it…

—Take a little more, —she said, her mouth pressed to my cunt, speaking against my clit—. I want to feel you clench my fingers when you come.

She worked them in and out slowly, never stopping licking me, and every time she curled her fingers upward I felt a jolt climb my belly. I started rocking my hips against her mouth without being able to stop myself, grabbing her hair with one hand, pressing her head against me. She didn’t complain. On the contrary. She moaned with my clit between her lips and that vibration finished breaking me.

I came screaming. I couldn’t hold it in. It was slow, it was exact, it was someone who knew what she was doing because she had a body identical to mine and knew every nuance from the inside. I felt the orgasm start in my legs and rise up to my chest in waves that wouldn’t stop, and she didn’t let go of my clit until I stopped shaking. I didn’t have to fake anything. I didn’t have to rush the ending so he could finish. For the first time in my life I wasn’t worrying about someone else’s pleasure. It was my turn and she knew it.

When I was done, I covered my face with both hands, laughing and crying at the same time. Camila settled beside me with her mouth still shining from me, gently uncovered my face, and kissed my forehead. Then she kissed my mouth and made me taste myself on her tongue.

—Are you okay?

—Yes. It’s just that… I didn’t know. I didn’t know it could be like this.

—I know, —she said—. That’s why I wanted to be the one.

Then it was my turn. My hands were shaking when I unfastened the button on her shorts, and she laughed softly and helped me take them off. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. The smell hit my face before I went down, and something in me that had been asleep for twenty-six years woke up all at once. I asked her three times if I was doing it right, and three times she told me to stop asking and look her in the face while I did it. I ran my tongue over her for the first time, scared, flat, slow, and she closed her eyes and squeezed my neck with her hand.

—Like that, like that, don’t stop, —she whispered.

I learned in real time. I learned that when I sucked her clit, pressing it softly against my palate, she arched her back. I learned that if I put my tongue inside her and then went up in one long motion to her clit, she let out a deep moan that made me wetter in return. I put two fingers in her the way she’d done to me, curling them upward, and searched blindly until I felt her clench around them. Camila grabbed my hair with both hands and rode my face shamelessly, moving against my mouth until she came with her clit between my lips, moaning my full name.

I learned more about her body in one hour than about my own in twenty-six years. I learned that certain sounds can’t be faked and that when they appear there is nothing more important in the world than holding onto them. I learned that two cunts pressed together, legs intertwined, moving slowly until both come at the same time, are something no cock in the world can replace. That night we came three more times each before falling asleep, sticky, with the sheets in ruins and our mouths swollen from kissing and sucking each other so much.

***

That night I slept wrapped around a woman for the first time. The next morning the sun and the purring of one of her cats, who had gotten brave enough to climb onto the bed, woke me. Camila made coffee and scrambled eggs and brought them to bed, and we ate without talking much, looking at each other now and then over the rims of our cups. When we finished, she set the tray on the floor, slipped under the sheets, and opened my legs with her nose to have breakfast on me too.

I stayed until Sunday night. Not much else happened, and nothing else was needed. We fucked in the bed, in the shower, on the living room couch with one of the cats watching us from the bookshelf. When I came back on the bus, with my cunt still sore and the mark of her teeth on the inside of my thigh, I realized the guilt I’d felt for months about flirting with strangers on my phone had evaporated sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning. There was nothing to feel guilty about. I had been listening to what my body had been trying to tell me since adolescence. It had been enough for someone to ask me and wait for the answer.

Five years later, Camila and I are still friends. We see each other from time to time, sometimes we sleep together and sometimes we don’t. We each made our lives with other people, but there’s something between us that neither of us wants to fully close off. I never saw Ignacio again. I didn’t miss him either. What he left me, without meaning to, was that February night when I opened an app I didn’t need to hide from him and ended up finding myself.