My Friend Caught Me Masturbating on Her Sofa

I’m going to tell you something that happened to me quite a few years ago and that, for some reason I can’t understand, came back to my mind last week and hasn’t left me in peace since. I’ve turned it over so much that I decided to write it here, to see if, by letting it out, I can stop reliving it every night before I close my eyes.

Back then I was doing a distance master’s degree and, when final exams came around, I had to take the train to Barcelona to sit them in person. The timetable was split over two days, so I needed to stay there one night. Luckily I had a friend, Carla, who lived in the Sant Antoni area. I called her a week before, explained the situation, and without thinking she told me she had a sofa free and that it would be absurd for me to spend money on a hostel when I could make use of hers.

Before going on, I should say something about Carla, because without that context the rest doesn’t make sense.

Our friendship had never been entirely innocent. One night, several years before that trip, we went out with a group to a club near the port and got ourselves one of those drinks-fueled drunken nights that leave a mark on your record. According to what I was told the next day, we had been flirting all night and ended up the two of us in the upstairs bathroom. There, also according to her, she unzipped me and knelt down. I say “according to her” because my memory of that night is practically a black hole. I remember the first drink, I remember going up the stairs, and little else. The joke stayed with us forever.

Nothing like that ever happened again. Every time one of us was single, the other was in a relationship, and vice versa. But the tension was still there, right at the surface, showing the second we let our guard down a little. From time to time the bathroom episode would come up and I’d lament not remembering it, while she would bask in telling me it was a real shame, because she knew perfectly well what she was doing and mine, she always said with a mocking smile, had pleased her a lot more than it should have.

That said, I arrived in Barcelona first thing in the morning. I spent the whole day locked in a windowless classroom, with my head everywhere except on the exam, and when I came out I went with two classmates to have a beer at the first bar we found. The conversation was the usual one among defeated students: going over the questions, realizing the mistakes we’d made, and cursing the day we enrolled.

I got to Carla’s place around nine. When she opened the door, she gave me a long hug, one of those that lasts a second longer than good manners recommend. She smelled of a different perfume than the one I remembered. She was wearing cotton shorts and an old T-shirt with the logo of a band that no longer exists. She had ordered pizzas, put out two cold beers, and had soft music playing in the background. We ate at the low table in the living room while talking about family, the master’s degree, her new job at an advertising agency, and a thousand silly things I no longer remember. It was a comfortable conversation. And even so, every so often, there was a silence that weighed more than it should.

When the clock passed midnight I told her I was exhausted and would rather go to sleep early. We cleared away the half-finished plates and she handed me a couple of sheets and a pillow. The guest bed, she had warned me by message, was the living-room sofa. I didn’t mind. Anything horizontal was a luxury after the day I’d had.

I changed clothes, opened my laptop to check an email from work, and when I looked up, she was already leaning against the hallway frame, wearing her pajamas.

“Good night,” I said.

“Sleep well, handsome.” She smiled in that way I had never quite learned to read—“And hey, don’t forget tomorrow’s syllabus, because we both know your head has a certain tendency to forget important things…”

My face must have been a poem. Without asking permission, the torn-up images of that night in the club bathroom began to come back to me in sequence. Her knee on the floor. Her hair tied up in a bun that kept coming undone. Her hand on my thigh. A low laugh. I had spent years trying to reconstruct that scene, and right then my brain decided to cooperate.

“Don’t be mean, you have a boyfriend,” I managed to say.

“I’m not mean. I’m just stating the obvious. A kiss, sleepyhead.”

She went into her room and closed the door with a soft click.

I was left alone in the living room, with the desk lamp on and an erection I could not explain in any other way. There was no way to read the email. No way to think about anything else. My mind kept going back to that bathroom, to that knee on the floor, to the feeling I couldn’t remember but that my body seemed to have filed away somewhere.

***

I tried. I switched off the lamp and lay on my back. I counted to one hundred. I counted to two hundred. I imagined the exam the next morning, the pages of the study guide, the names of the authors I had reviewed on the train. Nothing worked. The pressure under the pajama pants did not ease up.

With all the care in the world, I pulled my pants down to my knees. The cold fabric of the sofa against my skin gave me a shiver. I started touching myself slowly, barely moving, alert to every sound from the hallway. For a moment I tried to convince myself I’d stop right away, that I only needed to let the tension out and sleep. But my head didn’t let go. My head stayed in the club bathroom, in her bun coming undone, in a laugh I was only half hearing.

I closed my eyes. I sped up. In the silence of the living room my own breathing sounded far too loud. I thought my friend might hear me and, instead of stopping me, that thought was what pushed me all the way over the edge. I fantasized about her peeking in, about her opening the door without warning, about her finding me like that. It would be humiliating. It would be ridiculous. And yet it was the only thing I could think about.

I opened my eyes to shift position and something in the room didn’t fit. It took me a second to process what. There was a silhouette in the living-room doorway that hadn’t been there before.

Carla, standing there, leaning against the doorframe, in her usual pajamas and with her arms crossed, staring at me without blinking.

My heart thudded hard in my chest. I wanted to yank up the sheet, cover myself, stammer out anything that could pass for an excuse. I did none of that. I stayed motionless, my hand still where it was, trying to figure out in the dim light whether what I saw on her face was anger, secondhand embarrassment, or something else I didn’t dare name.

She wasn’t angry. I understood that after a few seconds, when I saw her shift her weight slightly, uncross her arms, and let her eyes drop without pretending otherwise. She wasn’t looking at my face. She was looking lower.

“Keep going,” she said very quietly, almost a whisper. “I didn’t see you stop.”

I swallowed. My hand moved on its own, slowly, not daring to break the moment. I felt her walk through the darkness of the living room and sit on the far end of the sofa, legs tucked under her. She turned on the small lamp on the side table, just enough for us to see each other’s faces.

“It’s exactly as I remembered,” she murmured, without blinking. “Bigger, even.”

I couldn’t speak. Testosterone had disconnected my language. I sped up without thinking, almost on reflex, and then she lifted a hand and laid it on my wrist to slow me down.

“Slowly,” she said. “I’m not in a hurry, and neither are you. I was going to get some water and almost went back to bed without checking. Good thing I didn’t.”

I nodded. That was all I could do.

“Slower. I want to look properly.”

***

I obeyed. I moved at almost a caressing pace, trying to hold out past the limit that was already building. Carla bit her lower lip and leaned a little closer, her back bending toward me. She smelled of that same different perfume from dinner. Her pupils were dilated.

“Jesus,” she said, almost to herself. “What a shame I can’t do the same thing now as I did that night. Though, look, I almost prefer it like this. I want to see you. I want to keep this image. I want to give you a memory you won’t forget the way you forgot the other one. Stop for a second.”

I stopped. My body trembled with the effort. She leaned in even more, let a good amount of saliva fall onto me, and then leaned back again.

“Keep going. Imagine it’s me. Imagine that night. This time you can’t forget.”

“I’m going to come,” I whispered, my voice breaking.

“Not yet. Stand up. Get up here in front of me.”

I stood up. My legs were shaking more than I was willing to admit. I stood in front of her, stiff as a board, my pants around my ankles and the unreal feeling of living something that only happened to other people. Carla looked up at me with the same face one wears when looking at a forbidden dessert in a shop window.

“Pull everything back. I want to see it free.”

I did. And then she did something I haven’t been able to erase from my head since that night. She came very slowly, without touching me, and pressed her nose against me. She didn’t touch me with her lips, didn’t touch me with her tongue. She just breathed. Deeply, slowly, as if she wanted to memorize a smell. Her breathing quickened. One of her hands slipped under the waistband of her pajama pants. I heard it.

“Fuck, you smell exactly like that night,” she said, her voice thick. “I don’t know why it drives me so crazy. But it does. Keep going. Keep it against my face, right here.”

I resumed moving, this time without hiding it, almost brushing her cheek. Carla closed her eyes and stopped talking. Her other hand clenched the sofa cushion. She started moaning softly, holding back out of habit, trying not to wake anyone in a building that was already asleep. I heard her panting, tightening, curling in on herself with a long shiver, biting the back of her hand so she wouldn’t cry out. I wanted to slip the other hand inside her pajama top, I wanted to pull her to me, I wanted a thousand things I didn’t dare do either.

When she got her breath back, she looked up at me with glassy eyes. She put her hands together at chest height, forming a little cup, and gave me a half-smile.

“Here. I want to see it here. Don’t you dare get it all over my face, I’ve got a presentation with the director tomorrow.”

I laughed, or rather let out something that sounded like a laugh. I lasted only a few more seconds before exploding. I felt myself empty over her palms, over the pajama top, over the backs of her fingers. More than I would have believed possible. She had her eyes wide open, fascinated, not entirely hiding a smile.

“I told you not to get it all over my face,” she murmured. “You’re a mess.”

“Sorry,” I managed to say, almost voiceless now.

Carla stood up slowly, keeping her hands together so she wouldn’t lose anything along the way. She ran her tongue over one palm with a shamelessness that left me frozen, and without taking her eyes off me, she went to the bathroom. I sat down hard on the sofa. The dim living room, the small lamp on, my body undone. I had the sense of having been outside myself for a whole hour and no more than fifteen minutes on the clock.

When she came back from the bathroom, with a different T-shirt on and her face washed clean, she stopped for a moment in front of the sofa, winked at me, and, with a calm I had never heard from her before, wished me luck on the exam the next morning.

“We’ll talk about this another day. For now, sleep.”

And she went into her room just like that.

It took me quite a while to come down. That night I discovered how much it turned me on to be watched while doing it, an idea that had been inside me without me ever putting a name to it. And I also discovered that Carla and I had a conversation pending that went far beyond the bathroom of that club.

But that part, if you let me, I’ll tell you another day.