I Set My Friend Up with My Ex and Couldn’t Take My Eyes Off Them

I watched them from the bar at El Tabernero, that place with just enough light for nobody to wonder why some detail of the other person’s body looks so good. Camila was talking too loudly, the way she does when something matters to her and she doesn’t want to admit it. Mateo was listening with his elbows on the table and his head just slightly tilted, and I knew that tilt: it meant he was looking at a mouth and not listening to a word.

They’d been like that for forty minutes, at a little table by the window. I’d settled in the back with a vermouth and was spying on them in the reflection of the big mirror at the far end. They didn’t know I was still there. The three of us had arrived together, I’d done the introduction —“Cami, this is Mateo, my friend from college”— and I’d put on a face like I was getting an urgent text. “Work’s calling me, sorry, I’ll be back in an hour.” Camila had looked like she wanted to kill me. Mateo had looked like he didn’t believe me for a second. I’d gone out onto the sidewalk, walked around the block three times, and come back in through the service door by the bathroom.

It wasn’t the first time I’d set something like this up, but it was the first time I’d done it with this combination.

Look at what you’ve got. Look properly at what you’ve got.

Camila has a way of talking that sounds like a fight. She waves her hands around, her voice goes up, and when the other person tries to get a word in she snorts and starts again. Men get scared of that. Mateo didn’t. Mateo laughed every two minutes, and every time he laughed she went quiet for a second, looking at his teeth.

***

I kissed Camila two summers ago, in her apartment in Almagro, after a party where we’d drunk everything there was on the table. We sat in her kitchen eating a piece of bread with melted cheese, her on the counter and me standing between her knees, and suddenly I took a breadcrumb from the corner of her lip with my thumb and she grabbed my wrist and didn’t let go. The kiss started like that, with her hand around mine. After that, it was faster than I’d thought it would be.

I took her T-shirt off in the kitchen. I took her bra off in the hallway. By the time we got to the bed, my hands were already on her tits —small, round, with nipples that go hard before you even touch them— and my tongue was between her teeth. I licked one, then the other, first with my whole mouth and then with the tip of my tongue, until they went dark and taut, and Camila was gripping the back of my neck with both hands and telling me to bite, not to be afraid, to sink my teeth in. I bit her. She let out a short cry and shoved her pelvis against my thigh.

Camila isn’t quiet. Camila announces every single thing she likes and every single thing she wants to last longer. “Lower,” she told me that night in a broken voice. “Down, come on, bite my belly, suck my navel, lower.” I dragged her pants down with my teeth, pulling at the waistband, and when I got to her panties they were already soaked through, with a dark stain filling the whole triangle. I ran my tongue over the fabric and she arched her back like she’d been shocked. I pulled them aside with two fingers, her panties, and found the pinkest cunt I’d ever seen in my life, shining all over, with the clit already out asking for a mouth.

I licked it slowly, first along the sides, going up and down the lips without touching the middle, and she started cursing under her breath: “Yeah, there, you fucking bitch, there.” When I finally laid my tongue flat on her clit and pushed two fingers into her cunt, tight, looking for that swollen spot up top, Camila yanked my head against her and held it there, moving her hips against my mouth. I felt her whole insides contracting around my fingers in waves, faster and faster, and she let out a string of high, thin moans and filled my chin with slick. She came so hard the inside of her thighs trembled against my ears.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I climbed on top of her, my mouth still wet, and rubbed my cunt against hers, cunt to cunt like that, and we both opened our eyes at the same time from what we felt. We started moving, locked together, she gripping my ass with both hands and pulling me forward, and me braced on her tits so I wouldn’t lose the rhythm. Our clits touched with every thrust. Camila kept saying, “Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop,” and I didn’t stop, and at some point we tangled ourselves face down, both at once, my head between her legs and hers between mine, and the room filled with a sound that belonged to both of us together, and I didn’t know whether what I was hearing was her or me. She sucked my clit until I screamed against her cunt, and I came in her mouth at the same time she came for the second time in mine.

The next morning we had breakfast like nothing had happened. We never talked about it again. That’s what best friends are for: you can do anything once and put it in a drawer.

***

I’d known Mateo much earlier. We were together for almost two years when I was twenty-three and he was twenty-five, and what I remember most about him —more than the movies we saw, the trips we took, the stupid fights we had— is his cock. It’s unfair and it’s true. Mateo has a red, thick cock with prominent veins, and when it got hard it made me think of a flower that had opened too much. The head gleamed, swollen, and when I took it in my hand I couldn’t close my fingers all the way around the shaft.

I sucked him off for hours. I liked spitting on it and watching it slide, and he looked down at me with his brows drawn together, holding out. I learned to take it all the way to the back of my throat, eyes watering, saliva dripping from my chin onto my tits, and he’d grab my hair and not thrust —he never thrust, it was me who wanted it— but he’d look at me with a face that was worth ten thrusts. When it was his turn, he’d spread my legs and eat my cunt with a slowness that was almost cruel, circling my clit with the tip of his tongue without quite pressing it down, until I begged him please.

He also had a habit I’ve never seen in anyone else. Before sliding in, he’d tap the head, slowly, again and again, at the entrance. Not hard. Just enough to drive you insane. He’d run the tip over my whole cunt, up and down, wetting it with my own juices, and then he’d give my clit little dry knocks with the head of his cock. He’d look you in the eyes and ask how you wanted it, how much you wanted, where you wanted it, and while you answered with your body he kept tapping, gently, until you were the one begging. “Put it in me, put it all in me, please,” I’d tell him, not recognizing my own voice, and he’d smile. When he finally went in, he kissed you. As if the conversation only started then.

He fucked for a long time. He fucked every possible way. He’d turn me over and drive into me from behind, gripping my waist, watching my ass open each time he pulled out and went back in, and I’d press my face into the pillow so I wouldn’t wake the neighbors. I’d sit on top of him and make myself move, his hands on my hips marking the rhythm, and he’d bite my tits from bottom to top while I rode him. When he came, he came inside, and I felt that hot jet rise up my belly like he was filling me completely.

Don’t try to beat him. You can’t beat him. You always get there before he does, and he looks at you with a face that knows it.

We broke up over an unimportant fight and over all the important fights we hadn’t known how to say. But we were okay after that. Okay enough that two years later I invited him out for a drink “with a friend you’re going to like.”

***

And now there he was, watching them in the mirror, with a vermouth starting to sweat against the glass.

Camila had her elbow on the table and her cheek in her hand. Mateo was saying something —I couldn’t hear— and smiling at her with that smile of his, the one that made anyone answer him more than they meant to. Camila had her legs crossed and the top knee was bouncing a little, keeping time to a rhythm that wasn’t the bar’s music.

Come on. Touch her arm. Touch something, idiot.

He wasn’t touching her arm. Mateo, who in another life had touched everything on me in less than an hour, wasn’t daring to rest his hand on the table near hers. Camila, who had put her tongue in my mouth twenty minutes after we started drinking, was talking to him with her shoulders tense like a girl on a blind date.

They were two people I knew naked, on top of each other, moaning, and they were treating each other like two new office coworkers.

It was kind of funny. More than that, it was endearing. And, above all, it was hot. Because I imagined them together —his mouth on her nipple, his cock opening Camila’s cunt little by little, her hands buried in his neck, their legs tangled— and my panties got wet right there, standing at the bar, with some guy to my left talking football with the bartender. I rubbed one thigh against the other to pinch myself between my legs and felt how soaked I was.

I ordered another vermouth. Took a long sip. Decided they’d been alone long enough for a first scene, and that the second scene had to be my doing.

***

I went back to the table looking like I’d solved a problem at work.

“Okay, that’s sorted, what a pain in the ass,” I said, and dragged a chair over. I sat down on the long side of the table, between them, so my left thigh was pressed against Camila’s leg and my right against Mateo’s knee. I did it like it was the most natural thing in the world.

“So?” I asked, looking first at one and then the other. “Did you two get along?”

Camila looked at me with a glint I knew. Mateo laughed, and as he laughed he moved his knee even closer to mine under the table.

“Good,” he said slowly. “Very good.”

“Yeah, good,” she said, biting her lip. “You really do have a good eye for friends.”

“I have a good eye,” I said. “For more things too.”

Silence fell. One of those silences that aren’t awkward, that are the instant when three people realize at the same time they’re on the same page. Mateo brought the glass to his mouth and looked at me over the rim, not at her. Camila put her palm on the table and traced a finger over the cloth, and that finger drifted toward Mateo’s pinky until it touched it. He didn’t move it away.

“You know what?” I said. “My place is three blocks away.”

I said it without raising my voice, like someone commenting on the weather. Camila inhaled deeply and let it out through her nose. Mateo put down his glass. I realized he’d placed his hand over mine without my noticing.

“Should we ask for the check?” he asked, looking at Camila now.

“You do it,” she said, sliding her knee against mine until I could feel the heat through the fabric.

***

We walked the three blocks pressed together, without anyone saying anything. I was in the middle, one on each side, and every step confirmed it was going to happen. Mateo’s hand on the small of my back. Camila’s hooked through my elbow. The shared silence, the best possible confirmation.

In the lobby, Mateo kissed me first. He kissed me the way he used to —without rushing, opening my mouth with his tongue little by little— and Camila was kissing my neck at the same time, sucking slowly just above my collarbone, and as we went up in the elevator I thought that for years people had asked me what I was looking for, and that only tonight would I finally be able to answer. In the elevator Mateo grabbed one of my tits over my dress and pinched my nipple between his fingers, and Camila slid her hand under my skirt and ran her palm over my soaked panties. “You’re dripping,” she whispered, laughing against my ear. “Yeah,” I said, “for hours.”

Inside the apartment I took both their coats off. I took mine off too. I looked at them. I made them look at each other.

“Now you two,” I said. “I’m going to watch for a while.”

Mateo moved toward Camila like someone approaching something that would break if he handled it wrong. He put a hand on her waist. She lifted her chin. The kiss was slow, very slow, and I sat down on the sofa across from them, legs crossed, my heart pounding against my thighs.

I pulled Camila’s T-shirt off over her head from where I sat, without moving, with my eyes. I took Mateo’s shirt off with my eyes too. When he lowered his head to her chest and ran his tongue slowly under her nipple —exactly the way I’d done it to her two summers before— Camila made the same sound she’d made with me, and I squeezed my legs together and took a deep breath. I spread my legs right there on the sofa, hiked up my skirt, and slid my hand into my panties, starting to touch myself while I watched Mateo pull Camila’s jeans down and bury his face between her legs against the wall.

Camila leaned her head back against the wallpaper and grabbed Mateo’s hair with both hands. I saw her mouth open, her eyes half-closed, and I saw the way she pressed her pelvis toward his face. Mateo ate her cunt with a devotion I knew by heart, his whole tongue moving flat, and every so often he lifted his slick-shiny face to look at me sitting on the sofa with two fingers inside my cunt. When Camila was about to come —I knew her, I knew when she was almost there— Mateo stood up, unbuttoned his pants, and pulled out his cock, that red, thick cock I hadn’t seen in two years, and started tapping Camila’s entrance with the head, slowly, exactly the way he used to do to me.

“Bring her here,” I said at last, and my voice came out rougher than I expected. “Bring her here, I want her for myself.”

Mateo turned and looked at me with that smile. Camila held out her hand to me. I got up from the sofa.

The last thing I thought before they dragged me to the bed between them and everything turned into one single body of three mouths and six hands —Camila’s tongue in my cunt, Mateo’s cock entering mine from behind while I sucked her tits, the three of us coming in turns and out of order— was that I’d spent far too long keeping these two nights in separate drawers, and that this third one —the one I’d set up, the one that was just beginning— was finally going to be the drawer that held both of them.

***