Desire

I never liked stuffed animals as gifts. Until the weekend I was home alone and realized what the one my ex left me was really for.

I locked the door and turned on the laptop, letting my imagination finish what a stranger had started in the crush of the platform.

I only meant to rest on the table for a while. I never imagined I’d end up with my hand inside my clothes, biting my lip so no one in the hallway could hear me.

I closed the laptop, stepped under the water without thinking about anything, and when the sponge brushed my breasts, I knew that shower wasn’t going to be like the others.

I had never touched myself. But that night, with the phone screen lighting my face, my fingers went down on their own and I didn’t want them to stop.

She knew she was alone in the flat. So when she took down the black box her friends had given her, she was no longer thinking about the notes waiting on the desk.

When her friend was asleep on the sofa, Vera challenged me to show myself and touch myself for her. I couldn’t refuse.

I lowered the blinds, turned off my phone, and for once I stopped thinking about what was right. I just followed what my body had wanted for weeks.

I got there forty minutes early, turned off the engine in the underground garage, and then the smell of that dawn came rushing back to me like a current.

I turned on the vibrator, opened a bingo game, and promised myself one rule for every ball. What happened next took me weeks to tell anyone.

I’m twenty-four and I’m still learning what turns me on. That afternoon, with my hand at my throat, I discovered something I didn’t know I needed.

Three mornings a week she cleaned the corridor right on the other side of my desk. And three mornings a week I learned not to look away from the glass.

It took two days to arrive, and for those two days I could think of nothing else. When I finally opened the box, I knew that night I was going to know myself in a new way.

I locked the door, took a deep breath, and told myself that afternoon I was finally going to find out what my body could do when no one was watching.

It started as a solitary game at midnight. By the time I was done, I had discovered something about my own pleasure I could no longer pretend not to know.

I waited for the house to go silent so I could turn off the light, open the drawer, and find out how far I could go on my own.

I asked my husband for a photo of himself and got one of another man: a perfect stranger. That night I had no idea how far that image would take me in my sleep.

I hadn’t written to him in a year. That afternoon I opened the email, typed his name, and before I thought it through, I was already telling him exactly what I wanted him to do to me.

There was still more than an hour to go, the seat next to me was empty, and that tingling between my legs was the only thing on my mind.

I promised myself I’d never miss him again. So why is my hand between my legs tonight, with his name stuck in my throat?