some times I think about this make out session that was cut short

I saw something I was not supposed to see and quietly disappeared forever

Some women will call you ugly while saying the nastiest things imaginable and mean both equally. Debby was that woman for me. “You are so ugly, can’t wait to be naked and wrapped around your arms again.” Said with no shame. She just whatever. She had responded to a video of myself i had sent on Snapchat. “you are never seeing me naked again” I responded. She laughed it off. I wouldn’t blame her; this was a regular sort of banter for us. But i can never not be surprised by what Debby had become.

What made it remarkable was where she started. I met Debby at an event I hosted on campus in my fourth year. She was finishing her final year, quiet in the way that reads as shy until you pay close enough attention to realize it is actually just selective. Some of my friends had broken off into a corner doing shots. I joined them. Debby was there too, declining every time someone offered. I found that strange — what do you want here if not the thing that makes these rooms tolerable?

“What on earth are you doing here if you do not drink alcohol,” I said. “Go home child, tomorrow is church.”

“Hahaha very funny,” she said. Flat. Unimpressed.

I liked that.

I moved over and we talked about things I can’t recall anymore. I was flirting and she gave it back. When it was time to leave we walked the girls to their hostels. I ended up behind the group with her, still at it. I was drunk and somewhere mid-sentence I just pulled her over and kissed her. She didn’t pull back. We stopped. Neither of us said anything. She had barely caught her breath when I pulled her in again.

That night started something. We would meet up in different spots on campus, talk, fool around, text each other into unholy hours. It was a semester-long series of reckless trysts that I enjoyed for the most part. I saw her on my own terms mostly — if I was on campus reading late and got bored halfway through I would call and she was almost always down. She wasn’t the only woman in my life at that point, which came with its own logistics, but Debby was consistent. Reliable in the way a secret is reliable. Always there, never announced.

I should say this: I was a hoe by most definitions but I wasn’t indiscriminate. There were women I made out with intensely, right to the edge, and stopped. Just stopped and left them there wanting. My friends thought it was insane. The women thought it was cruel. But it was my own private way of telling myself I hadn’t completely lost the plot. That somewhere underneath all of it was a person with some kind of line. It didn’t make sense to anyone but me, but it was mine.

With Debby, that line kept moving.

She texted one evening, said she was close by. A house away close. I was home but I had another woman in my bed. I told her I’d make it up to her. That led to us making actual plans, a specific date, her coming over properly for the first time.

She came. And as tempting as it was the second she walked through the door, I held back from ripping off her clothes. Decided to be decent about it. Have a real conversation. Let something other than the obvious drive the evening.

It lasted maybe fifteen minutes before we both admitted the silence between sentences. Beyond the flirting and the physical pull, we didn’t have much. The conversation had the energy of a job interview for a role neither of us had posted. I gave up.

“I am tired of pretending like I care about whatever it is we are talking about,” I said, and climbed onto the bed next to her.

She said nothing. Just sat there while I kissed her neck, her collarbone, every surface I could reach. And then she grabbed my head and made a sound that did something to my spine.

This was the thing about Debby that I had never fully explained to myself — she responded to touch in a way I had not encountered before. Every kiss. Every graze. Her small, finely shaped breasts seemed wired directly to something deeper in her and every time I touched them she reacted like the sensation was moving through her whole body. If this was how she operated with every man, she was dangerous. If it was just with me, she was devastating.

We went longer than I usually would. I wasn’t ready to go all the way with her yet, for reasons I couldn’t fully articulate even then. But I was there, fully present, attentive — more than I tended to be.

Then I touched her right breast and something came out of it.

I am not going to dress it up. I touched her breast and what came out looked like breast milk.

I went completely still.

She was somewhere else entirely, eyes closed, breathing hard, one hand firmly gripping my penis. She had not noticed. I was flat on top of her with absolutely nothing left in me. Whatever had been building in my body for the past hour evaporated in the span of one second. I lay there like a piece of furniture while she kissed me and I kissed back on autopilot, still stimulating her, enduring the remaining minutes until she seemed to arrive wherever she had been going.

We lay there after. She was satisfied. I was thinking about exit routes.

The thing is — it would have cost me nothing to say something. To ask a question. To be a human being about it. She might have had an explanation. She might have been mortified. Either way, something honest could have happened in that room.

Instead I stared at the ceiling and ran logistics.

“Lemme go get us food,” I said, and stood up.

I never brought it up. I never called it what it was. I just quietly stopped being available — texts slower, plans that didn’t materialize, the gradual administrative fade that men have perfected across generations. Debby, to her credit, didn’t chase. She let it dissolve the same way it had grown, without ceremony.

I think about that sometimes. Not with guilt exactly. More like curiosity about the version of me that chose a clean exit over a real moment. She deserved at least a conversation. Instead she got “Lemme go get us food” and a man who came back with the food but not with the longing he once had for her.

The most merciful lie I ever told. Or the most cowardly. I have not decided which.