The Red Blanket of the Stranger Who Watched Me

Ever since I was a little girl, I had a strange relationship with other people’s gazes. They didn’t make me uncomfortable: I sought them out. So when I rented the apartment on the worst block in the old quarter, the first thing I thought about wasn’t the noise or the filth, but the window. It looked straight onto the street, at just the right height for anyone to lift their eyes and see me.

My neighborhood was the closest thing to an open wound in the middle of the city. Bars that stayed open until dawn, nightclubs vomiting people out at five, drunks pissing against doorways, and, among all that, the still shadows of those who slept on the sidewalks. From my window I had seen more real sex than on any screen. Couples who never made it to the doorway. Hands slipping under clothes in alleyways. I watched it all and, with time, I wanted them to watch me too.

I had the habit of leaning back against the glass in my underwear, pretending to check my phone. Pretending I didn’t care that my ass was pressed against the pane, in full view of the entire street. I told myself it was a coincidence. That was a lie, of course. I did it on purpose, and the idea of unknown eyes roaming over me made me wet before I even realized it.

Let them look. Let them ache for it.

***

It was on a Tuesday afternoon that I noticed him. One of those dead days when even the bars couldn’t be bothered to open. I was in my usual pose, back to the glass, when something in the street moved differently from the rest.

It was an older man, one of those who slept on the opposite sidewalk from time to time. He had been camped there for weeks beneath the torn awning of a closed shop, with his bags and a red blanket that seemed to be the only splash of color on the whole block. That afternoon the blanket was rising and falling in a rhythm I knew all too well. He was masturbating. And he was watching me.

The logical thing would have been to draw the curtain. I felt the exact opposite. A hot current slid down my back and settled between my legs. I turned slowly, facing him through the glass. He froze for a second, surprised that I had caught him, and then went back to what he was doing with more urgency, as though he feared losing the permission he had just been given without a word.

I looked both ways down the street. No one. Not a single light on in the neighboring apartments, not a soul on the sidewalk. Just him and me and that red blanket trembling.

Then I smiled at him. I pulled my panties down to my ankles without hurrying, pressed my hips to the glass, and showed him everything I had. I spread my legs enough that, even from that distance, he could understand what he was seeing. I touched myself for him, slowly at first, with broad, exaggerated motions, like a performance meant for a single spectator.

The bulge beneath the blanket quickened. I wanted to give him more. I lifted my shirt, flattened my breasts against the cold glass, and kept rubbing my clit with my other hand, my eyes fixed on him. I don’t know how long it lasted. Long enough to watch him tense, shudder beneath the fabric, and then go still, defeated.

I didn’t come. And, strangely enough, I liked that more than orgasm. I pulled my panties back up, lowered my shirt, and when I looked again, the old man had already settled onto his side to sleep. Not a gesture. Not a thank-you. He had used me to finish and forgotten me immediately.

Like an object. Like something you use and leave behind.

That thought haunted me all night.

***

I masturbated thinking about him until I fell asleep, but when I woke I was still dissatisfied. There was something about having been treated like nothing, like any body behind a pane of glass, that wouldn’t leave me in peace. I had turned him into my fantasy without even touching him.

The next night I couldn’t resist. After one in the morning, when the street once again fell into that thick silence only my neighborhood knows, I put on some sandals and went downstairs. I remember the heavy breathing on the landing, my panties already soaked, my heart pounding as if I were about to do something forbidden. And I was.

I stepped out of the building. I looked both ways: everything dark, everything still. I crossed barefoot because the sandals were so light, and I went toward him step by step, feeling myself get wetter with every meter. The smell reached me before I did, that dense scent of street and unwashed body that should have made me back off. It didn’t. It turned me on in a way I was embarrassed to admit.

I knelt beside him on the filthy concrete. He was asleep on his back, the red blanket half fallen away. I carefully pulled it aside. He was exposed, defeated by sleep, completely unaware of the woman who had knelt in the middle of the night to offer herself to him.

I pulled my panties down to my knees and touched myself while I watched him. It was madness, and I knew it. A stranger crouched on a sidewalk, aroused to the point of delirium by a man who didn’t even know she was there. I felt like the dirtiest thing in the world, and that was exactly what finished lighting me up.

I lowered my head and let his smell fill me completely. I almost came from that alone. I felt like a lost bitch, a submissive woman who had crossed the street in the dead of night to offer herself, and the humiliation of knowing myself that way hit me in waves.

***

I touched him. The moment I barely brushed him, the man woke with a start and propped himself up on his elbows. For a second I was afraid he would shout, that he would shove me away. He did none of that. He looked at me in the darkness, understood at once what was happening, and a slow, crooked smile spread across his face.

—Well now —he said, his voice rough from days without speaking—. The girl from the window.

I didn’t answer. It wasn’t necessary. I moved closer, still on my knees, and let him take the lead. He grabbed my hair with one hard hand, without asking permission, and guided me. He was not gentle. I didn’t want him to be. He used my mouth the way he had used the blanket the first night, with that same selfish indifference that had driven me mad from the start.

I kept rubbing myself without stopping while he held my head. My fingers went in and out in the rhythm he set, and when I came — trembling, gasping, right there in the street — he noticed and stopped dead. I knew what he wanted without him having to say it.

I took off my shirt and let it fall. I spread the red blanket on the ground and lay down on it, face up, legs wide open, offering myself under the dirty sky and broken streetlights. He settled over me with a weight that pinned me to the concrete through the thin fabric, and he entered me in one thrust. I was so wet he met no resistance.

He fucked me with a force I hadn’t expected from a body so worn down. I held back my moans by biting my lip, terrified some window would light up, but the fear of being caught only fed everything more. He groped my breasts with rough hands, sought my mouth, and I gave in and let him in, let him do whatever he wanted with me.

I came again, quickly, almost without transition. He didn’t ease up. I was languid, weak, so I handed over the last of my control: let him keep going however he wanted, whenever he wanted, as far as he wanted.

***

He lifted me from the ground with an ease that surprised me. He put me face first against the cold wall of a closed doorway, shoved my hips back, and took me from behind. I screamed against the wall, a short cry I managed to swallow in time, and came again with my knees trembling, on the verge of giving out.

There I was: submissive against the peeling wall of an alley in the worst neighborhood in the city, bent over and possessed by a stranger who the night before had watched me like an object behind a pane of glass. The thought of what I was doing, of how low I had sunk because of my own desire, made me bring my hand to my clit again. I rubbed myself while he drove into me, chasing one more orgasm with the desperation of someone who knows she will never feel anything like this again.

After a few minutes I felt him harden even more inside me, that unmistakable tension of the end. He came with a rough groan, squeezing my breasts so hard he left marks, and I felt his heat surge through me from the inside as a thread of my own pleasure spilled onto the red blanket.

We stayed like that for a moment, both of us panting against the wall, my muscles still tight. Then he let me go without ceremony and lay back down, just like the first time, as if I had already fulfilled my function. It didn’t bother me. He had given me exactly what I had come down to find.

***

I got dressed in silence. My panties were soaked as soon as I put them on, and I almost liked that sticky discomfort, that proof of what I had done. I folded the red blanket, still warm, and took it with me. He didn’t protest; he was already asleep.

Since that night, that blanket has lived in my bed. I masturbate on it when the scent fades and I need to remember him, that raw, forbidden smell that no clean sheet can replace. And from time to time, when the street falls silent again in the early hours, I go back down barefoot. I make sure he leaves me just like the first night: used, emptied, and deeply satisfied, one more stranger who crossed the street to give herself to the only man who dared to look at her for real.