My Confession: I Never Asked Forgiveness for Wanting Like This

My name is Mariela, and I’m going to tell this without asking permission or forgiveness. I’m almost forty, with fair skin, green eyes, and a body I keep in shape with the discipline of someone who knows exactly what she has. I walk down the street and feel eyes sticking to me like hands. I like it. I’ve always liked it. I dress to be looked at, to make people want what they’re not going to have, and sometimes so they can have it.

I don’t know how many men passed through my bed. I used to count, years ago, and stopped when I understood the number meant nothing. There were so many that most of them have no name in my memory, no face. I cross paths with them in the street and don’t recognize them. One comes up, smiles, tells me that one night years ago we ended up together, and I nod politely while I try, without success, to place him. It’s not contempt. It’s that there were too many, and each one was a night, not a story.

Only one of them did I truly love. Andrés. I loved him so much that for a while I believed I could be a different kind of woman, one of those who settle for a single mouth. It lasted until he found a video on my phone where I wasn’t with him. There were no shouts. He just looked at me as if I’d broken something inside myself, set the keys on the table, and left. Since then, I haven’t wanted to give anyone else the power to look at me like that. I have lovers, not boyfriends. It’s cleaner. No one expects from me something I’m not planning to give.

***

My mother was the first to teach me what I was worth. Not with speeches: with example. I remember her in front of the mirror, slowly painting on her lips, explaining that a beautiful woman who knows what she wants doesn’t have to answer to anyone. She took me to the doctor when I was old enough, made sure I was protected, taught me how to put on makeup, how to choose clothes that hint without shouting. At first it was hard for her to see me that way. One thing was her, and another was her daughter repeating the pattern.

She accepted it the morning she came downstairs early and found me in the kitchen with a man she didn’t know, the two of us half-dressed, laughing like accomplices. She stood in the doorway for a second, sighed, and put on the coffee maker. That was the whole conversation. From then on, we stopped pretending.

My mother had more lovers than anyone would imagine, and she still does, even though she’s past sixty. I met some of them because they passed through her life first and mine after. There was never anything strange between us: she lived her desire, I lived mine, and sometimes those desires coincided in the same man, on different nights. My cousin Renata completed my education. With her I learned to read men in thirty seconds, to know which ones were worth it and which weren’t worth the effort of taking off my clothes for.

***

As a teenager I kept magazines I shouldn’t have had, hidden where no one would look. I flipped through them alone and imagined myself in the place of the women in the photos, not watching them: being them. That was the seed. Long before I touched anyone, I already knew my body was a question I wanted many to answer.

I remember one of my first conquests as an adult with a sharpness that surprises me, because I’ve forgotten so many others. It was at a wedding I went to alone, in a red dress my mother would have approved of. I saw him across the hall, a tall man holding a glass he wasn’t drinking from, looking at me with that mix of hunger and fear I know so well. I did nothing. I just let the night move forward, let him gather his courage, let the music and the wine do the work for me.

He asked me to dance after midnight. We danced pressed together, his hand inching up my back centimeter by centimeter, testing how far he could go. I let him go that far. His palm gripped my waist firmly, and I noticed how hard his breathing had gotten, how the glass trembled in his other hand before he set it down on a table. He brushed his crotch against my hip as the music pushed us along, and I smiled without pulling away, feeling my own heat build between my legs. When he whispered in my ear that he had reserved a room, I told him to wait five minutes before going up, so no one would see us leave together. Not out of shame: for the pleasure of the secret, for the electricity of crossing the lobby knowing what was going to happen upstairs while everyone else kept toasting downstairs.

That night I learned something that has stayed with me ever since: the most intense desire isn’t in the body, it’s in the waiting. In the minutes between decision and act. In the elevator going up alone, in the dim hallway, in the second before the door opens. After that, everything is consequence. What matters, what really turns me on, is the edge of anticipation.

When I walked into the room, he already had his shirt unbuttoned and his gaze fixed on me as if he were afraid of falling apart. He locked the door and stood still, breathing deeply. I took off my dress slowly, without hurry, letting him watch me. He had a hard, young body, with the bulge marking the fabric of his pants. I told him to come closer and he did, like an animal forced to learn manners. He kissed my neck first, then my mouth, with clumsy hunger and insecure hands that soon stopped being insecure. One of his hands slid up my back to the bra clasp; the other squeezed a breast with such desperation that a moan slipped from him when I buried my fingers in his hair.

I pulled his pants down to his knees and his erection sprang free, thick, hot, pulsing for me. I took it in my hand and gave him a slow handjob, feeling the taut skin, the wet foreskin, the hard head brushing my palm. His legs went weak. “Do you like it?” I asked him, and he said yes, voice breaking, while I made him suck one nipple and brought two fingers to my mouth to wet them. Then he laid me out on the bed with almost desperate urgency, spread my legs, and buried his face between my thighs. Licking my cunt with voracious precision, with a long, firm, direct tongue, until I arched and held his head so he wouldn’t pull away. He sucked my clit until I was trembling, and when he put one, then two fingers inside me, I felt him opening me slowly, filling me with movements that sent little spasms through my belly.

I was already soaked when I pulled his face away and made him come up. I bit his mouth, tugged his belt, and took him in my hand, guiding him until the head of his cock opened me all the way. He entered me little by little at first, hot, hard, grazing every fold, and then deeper, until he was buried in me and we stayed still for a second, both of us panting, him looking at me as if he didn’t know whether I was going to devour him or laugh. I clamped my legs around his ass and started moving on top of him, setting the pace, my pelvis rising and falling on that throbbing flesh, feeling the wet, deep pounding, every thrust hitting the bottom of my cunt and making me see stars.

Then I turned him over. I put him on his back and sat on top with my hair falling over my face. I told him to look at me and I gave it to him slowly, making him go in and out with a perfect rhythm, digging my nails into his chest, forcing him to stay still while I was in charge. He held my hips with both hands, harder and harder, and came up into me with those tense young-boy hips of his, wanting to hold out and unable to. I sucked his neck until I left marks and then whispered for him to fuck me properly, not to be gentle, to break my rhythm. Then he started thrusting for real: hard, deep, without mercy. The mattress creaked, the headboard hit the wall, and I felt open, full, used in the best possible way.

He turned me over again, put me face down, lifted my hips, and took me from behind without wasting time. My breath stuck in my throat when the tip of his cock opened the asshole of my ass and he started pumping in and out with a force that made me grit my teeth. He held me by the waist, sinking his fingers into my skin, and each thrust shook my whole body, making me bounce on the mattress. He slipped a hand between my legs to rub my clit while he fucked me from behind and that was too much: I came with a muffled cry, convulsing around him, soaking everything, my legs going weak and my head going blank. He kept going, even harder, until I heard him moan as if he were breaking apart.

I asked him to take the condom off only at the very end, when he was already close to the edge. He looked at me like he couldn’t believe I was saying it, and I told him again not to waste my time. He pulled back just enough, finished with his hand, and I saw his face change just before he came: jaw tight, chest rising and falling, the cum spilling hot into the sheath he had left on the table. He was a wreck, sweaty, smiling like a satisfied idiot. I watched him for a second, still trembling inside, and then went to the bathroom to clean myself with warm water, knowing that downstairs they were still toasting and that no one imagined the delicious disaster we had just made between those walls.

I dreamed of doing this professionally. Now when I think about it, I tell myself that if I were ten years younger I wouldn’t hesitate: camera, profile, all of it. I got to that party late, but not to the other one, the real one, the one made of flesh and sweat and dawn.

I have rules, though. People think a woman like me has no limits, and they’re wrong. I insist on protection always, no exceptions, no matter how much they beg or how much I like them. I get tested with a constancy that would surprise more than one saint. My pleasure isn’t at odds with my health. On the contrary: taking care of myself is part of being able to keep going.

I like big men, the kind who take up space when they walk into a room. When I was young, I was drawn to older men, that security years give you. Now I lean toward younger men, toward energy that doesn’t get tired. I like kneeling, I like the weight of a body on mine, I like the heat when it’s over. I almost never repeat with the same one. There’s something about the first time with a stranger, not knowing what I’m going to find, that no second time can match. Every new body is unmapped territory, and I’m one of those who prefer getting lost.

***

When I like someone, I don’t hide it. I hold their gaze a second longer than I should, I wink, I let my smile say what the words keep quiet. From a very young age I learned that silent language: a hand lingering on my waist on a dance floor, a touch that isn’t accidental, and I already know I won’t go home alone that night. I like feeling desired. It’s not vanity. It’s fuel.

With my mother, in another era, we used to go hunting together. We got ourselves dressed up, looked in the mirror and approved of each other, and went off to some bar to choose. People asked if we were sisters, and we enjoyed seeing their faces when we cleared up the relationship. We hunted like a team: she distracted, I finished the job, or vice versa. We came back each on our own, at dawn, and the next day we told each other just enough between laughter and coffee.

Along the way I met many women like me, women who enjoy themselves without apologizing. In certain places I saw couples who share, men who get turned on watching their women with someone else, people who made desire into an open game instead of a shameful secret. I learned there are more of us than the world admits. It’s just that most keep quiet, and I decided long ago that I wasn’t going to stay quiet.

How many times have I been called every name in the book for doing exactly the same thing that gets celebrated in a man?

I lost count of the insults the same way I lost count of the lovers. Slut, easy, lost. Women who envied me said them, and men who couldn’t keep up with me said them. I learned to wear them like someone wears a strong perfume: let it bother whoever it has to bother. Because here is the uncomfortable truth: I’m not broken, I’m not looking for anyone to fix me, I’m not hiding a trauma under the sheets. I simply like it. I like it so much that I organized my whole life around that pleasure and went to sleep peacefully every night.

***

I’m not going to pretend everything was perfect. Losing Andrés hurt for real, and there were dawns when a bed full of bodies felt emptier than any loneliness. But every time I thought about changing, about domesticating myself, about being the neat woman others wanted, something in me rebelled. I wasn’t born for a single mouth, or to pretend a modesty I don’t feel. I tried it once. It didn’t work. And I chose not to betray myself again.

Today I look at myself in the mirror, with the years barely marking me, and I see a woman who knows who she is. I know what I want before I walk into a bar. I know which gaze to seek, which man to follow me, which night is waiting for me. I don’t owe anyone explanations, and that, after so much, is true freedom.

I know that one day my body will ask for calm. That the night will come when I’d rather stay home. When that day comes, I won’t grieve what I left behind, because I left nothing untried. For now, I keep desiring, I keep choosing, I keep going out to find what makes me feel alive.

This is my confession, without makeup and without regret. I was like this, I am like this, and I will be like this until my body gives out. If someone reads this looking for a scandal, I’m sorry. The only scandal here is that a woman dares to say, out loud and without trembling, that desire belongs to her.