The Forest Flower Gave Me to a Stranger

Irene left the campus every afternoon through the south gate and took the shortcut that crossed the Valdehúmedo forest. It was the path everyone avoided at dusk, and the one she walked without thinking twice. The people in town spoke of old things among those trees: fairies that stole children, creatures that changed shape, voices that called your name when no one was following you. Irene listened to those stories with a polite smile and kept on crossing the forest, because it was half an hour less on the way back to the residence halls and because, deep down, she had never believed in anything she couldn't touch.

The trail began wide and bright, flanked by ferns swaying at the slightest breeze. Almost always, she ran into someone: a jogger, a couple from the university, some neighbor with their dog. She would nod and keep going. But there was a stretch, right in the middle, where the vegetation closed over the path like a roof and the light turned green and thick. There was never anyone there. There the air changed, grew dense, and the birds stopped singing as if they knew something she didn't.

That October afternoon, in that dark stretch, Irene stopped.

A few meters off the trail, on the twisted trunk of an oak, there was a flower that made no sense. It did not grow from the ground or from a branch, but directly from the bark, as if someone had nailed it into the wood. Its petals were a deep purple, almost black at the center, and they moved just slightly, slowly, although there was no wind. Irene had never seen anything like it, and she had been crossing that forest for three years.

She stepped closer. She knew she shouldn't, but her body moved ahead of her mind. She bent over the trunk and smelled it.

The scent went through her like a current. It was not sweet or floral: it was warm, animal, something between freshly sweat-slick skin and metal. A burning sensation rose through her chest and settled between her legs with such intensity that it left her breathless. At first it was slow, a dull heat. Then it became urgent, impossible to ignore, as if the flower had set her on fire from the inside and there was only one way to put it out.

She looked around. The path was empty in both directions. And then, without letting herself think about it, she slid her hand inside her pants.

She touched herself right there, standing beside the tree, her backpack still hanging from one shoulder. Just a moment, she told herself. Just until it passes. But it didn't pass. The more she rubbed, the more the fire grew, and her breathing began to break into short gasps that vanished among the trees.

She didn't hear the footsteps. She didn't feel the shadow peeling away from the undergrowth and approaching from behind, slowly, with the patience of someone who has waited a very long time for this precise moment.

The first thing she noticed was a leg beside hers. Without flinching—and that was the strangest part, that she felt no fear—Irene clung to that leg like a post, seeking support, still with her other hand occupied. She turned her head only slightly. It was a young man, with beautiful, too-perfect features, and eyes that did not reflect the little light that remained. He looked at her without smiling, without surprise, as if she were exactly where he wanted her.

—Don't stop —he said. His voice was low, calm, an order disguised as permission.

Irene obeyed. She didn't even consider anything else. Something in that tone took her decisions out of her hands and left them at her feet, and she discovered that surrender was the deepest relief she had ever felt.

The stranger pulled down her pants with a single gesture, unhurried, until they were pooled at her ankles. He positioned her: he spread her legs a little wider with his knee, bent her back forward with a firm hand at the nape of her neck. Irene let herself be shaped like clay. Every time he moved her, a current of pleasure ran down her spine, and she understood that this yielding—the not choosing, being placed where another decided—was part of the fire the flower had lit.

She felt his fingers before anything else. They entered her from behind, slow and precise, while she kept rubbing her clit with her own hand, now clumsy, trembling. He set the rhythm from within and she could only try to follow. It was a wordless dialogue in which she had not a single line.

—Still —he whispered against her ear, and knelt behind her.

Irene felt warm breath between her ass cheeks a second before the tongue. The first lick was gentle, almost tender, a wet touch that made her arch. Then he pressed in, and the tongue entered her from behind with a ease that should not have been possible. Irene held back a cry. She could feel him going into her, too much, more than any tongue should have been able to go, sliding deeper and deeper while the fingers kept working her sex without ever stopping.

She looked back, disbelieving. The boy's head—if it was a boy—was pressed against her body, his eyes closed, absorbed. And yet she felt that tongue advancing inside her as if it had a will of its own, as if it were exploring every centimeter of her insides. Reason begged her to run. Her body begged her not to move a millimeter.

She grabbed his hair with one hand. Not to pull him away. To hold on to something while the world tilted.

—Please —Irene said, and even she didn't know what she was asking for.

The orgasm began to form somewhere deep, much farther in than she could reach. It was not the quick, familiar pleasure of the nights in her room. It was something that grew in layers, a tide rising slowly and that he controlled completely: he sped up the fingers whenever she got too close, slowed them when she was about to come, toying with the edge, keeping her hanging from the blade until Irene thought she would lose her mind.

—Now —he said.

And he jerked his head, dragging the entire tongue in one stroke along her whole inner passage. Irene broke. The orgasm struck her with a violence that buckled her knees, one spasm after another that didn't end, that chained together as if he wouldn't let her come down. She clenched her fist in his hair, opened her mouth without any sound coming out, and her whole body became one single discharge.

It was so intense that she lost control of herself. The boy withdrew his fingers from her sex just in time, and a gush came out of her with a force that shamed and freed her at the same time, soaking her fallen pants and the dirt of the path. Irene had never done anything like that. She had never stopped being in control of her own body that way. And she had never wanted so much to lose herself.

The pleasure didn't end. As she came down, wave after wave, she felt the tongue slowly retreat from inside her, pulling back centimeter by centimeter, leaving behind a strange, warm emptiness in its wake. When it finally came out completely, Irene had the absurd sensation that it was taking something of hers with it, little nameless things that never quite reached the ground.

***

It took her a while to collect herself. Her legs were shaking, her heart was pounding against her chest, and cold sweat was beginning to replace the heat. When she finally managed to sit up and turn around, there was no one there.

The path was empty. No footsteps fading away, no branches snapping, no breathing. And on the oak trunk, where minutes before that impossible flower had swayed, there was now only smooth bark. No trace of purple petals. No trace of the boy.

Irene pulled up her soaked pants with clumsy fingers. She searched for her underwear on the ground, among the leaves, but couldn't find it, and a sudden urgency convinced her not to stay even one more second. She picked up her backpack and started walking quickly, almost running, not daring to look back, not allowing herself to think about what had just happened. She only wanted to get out of the forest. She only wanted to be safe.

She didn't see what happened next.

When her footsteps were swallowed by the trail, a figure detached itself from the shadow of the trees. The boy—or whatever had taken his shape—walked to a nearby bush and crouched down. There, tangled in the low branches, was Irene's underwear. He picked it up carefully, brought it to his face, and smelled it for a long time, eyes closed, just as she had smelled the flower. Then he kept it for himself.

He extended his hand toward the oak trunk. Under his fingers, slow, slowly, the purple flower sprouted again from the bark, fresh and damp, opening its petals once more to the forest's heavy air.

From the other end of the path, a cheerful girl's voice broke the silence. Another student returning to her residence halls, like every afternoon, knowing nothing.

—What a beautiful flower that's grown on that tree! —she said, and began to draw near.