Desire

I promised myself I wouldn’t give up until I made it happen. What I didn’t know was how long my body would take to give me what I’d been begging it for all night.

I lay down naked thinking I only wanted to sleep. Three hours later, I was still discovering how much pleasure I could give myself.

It was two in the morning when a video put the idea in my head. Days later, I walked through the supermarket with a secret vibrating between my legs.

I closed the bathroom door, turned on the tap, and promised myself I’d be quick. Lie. That night I discovered how far I was willing to go with myself.

We had grown up sleeping in adjoining rooms, until one night a sound on the other side of the wall made me understand I no longer looked at her like a sister.

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 still learning what turns me on. That afternoon, with my hand on 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.

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.