A Monday of Desire That Left Me Breathless

I’ve decided to write this because I need it to exist somewhere. Not for anyone to read. Only so it can live outside my head.

The protagonist is called Clara. A name I chose at random, though maybe it isn’t so random after all. In her words you may find something of yourself. Or something of mine. I don’t know yet.

Monday

7:00 in the morning. Light slips through the slats of the blinds and snaps me back into the world. Beside me, Andrés is still asleep, turned away from me, breathing slow and deep. I watch him for a few seconds. I know that back better than anything else in the world. And yet what I feel looking at it now is not tenderness.

It’s something else. Something that starts just below my navel and sinks slowly, insistently, without asking permission. A dull throb between my thighs that’s already wet, that’s been there for hours. I slip a hand under the sheets almost without noticing and touch myself over my panties: the fabric is soaked, pressed to my cunt, and just that realization is enough to make my pulse quicken.

Last night he fell asleep halfway through a caress. It wasn’t rejection, it was exhaustion. I know that. But my body doesn’t distinguish between the two, and it’s been waiting for hours. The heat between my legs is a physical certainty, as concrete as the mattress beneath my back or the sound of the street beginning to wake. I close my thighs and feel my clit throb, swollen, demanding.

I could wake him.

The idea brings on a smile that never quite forms. I know how that almost always ends: something brief, something that takes care of his need and leaves me more tense than before. Four half-asleep thrusts, a quick finish inside me, a kiss on the forehead and his back again. The kind of relief that’s not enough and leaves the echo of hunger reverberating for hours. So I get up without touching him, without saying anything, before that possibility turns into another silent disappointment.

7:20. The shower.

Hot water falls over my shoulders and runs down my body. I soap myself slowly. My hands pass over my breasts and my nipples harden at once, as if they’d spent hours waiting for someone to pay attention to them. I pinch them between index finger and thumb, tug a little, and a jolt goes straight down to my cunt. I close my eyes.

Andrés disappears.

Roberto appears, the electrician who came last week to change the fuse box. In his forties, big hands, that tight T-shirt that hid nothing. He had asked if he could use the bathroom and I’d said yes from the kitchen, without looking at him too much. Or that’s what I want to believe.

In the shower I look at him. In my fantasy he looks at me. I imagine him walking in without knocking, pushing me against the cold tiles, lifting one of my legs up to his hip. I imagine his cock hard against my stomach over his jeans, that thick workman’s cock that shows when he bends down. I imagine unzipping him with a trembling hand, taking him out, feeling his hot weight against my palm. Thick. Throbbing. With a thick bead of precum peeking from the tip that I spread over the head with my thumb.

I brace one hand on the tiles and with the other I take my fingers where I need them. I part my cunt lips with two fingers and the bud between them is already slick. I start rubbing my clit in small, fast circles while, in my head, Roberto shoves it into me, all the way in, without asking. “Shut up, love, shut up,” he says in my fantasy, and covers my mouth with that electrician’s hand that smells like metal. I imagine him fucking me against the wall, standing up, with that strength people who work with their bodies have, each thrust slamming into my ass, wrenching a moan out of me that he smothers.

I’m not looking for anything elaborate, just enough to switch off so I can function. Three minutes. I slide two fingers in and with the other hand keep working my clit, pressing hard, and the orgasm shoots up through my legs and breaks short and efficient, like taking a pill. I clench my teeth so I won’t moan. I get out, dry myself off, look at myself in the mirror for a second before looking away. My cheeks are flushed and my nipples are still hard.

Same routine as always.

7:50. The kitchen.

Coffee smells like promise and the toast crackles when I break it open. I hear the sounds from the bedroom: Andrés waking up, the water from his shower, drawers opening and closing. The children are still asleep. This half hour belongs to me completely.

I sit at the table and for a moment I don’t think about anything. Just the coffee. Just the bitter, hot taste, the cup between my hands. The front door shuts when Andrés leaves. The house falls silent.

Then, without me summoning him, Sergio comes back.

The Pilates instructor from Saturday. Thirty-something, calm voice, that precise way he has of correcting posture — his hands firm on my hips, his fingers adjusting without hesitation — which might seem completely professional if I hadn’t taken too long to look away when the class ended.

I blush alone in the kitchen. I feel the heat in my cheeks and, lower down, something that reawakens with a speed that unsettles me. I bite the toast as if that will help. It doesn’t help. I clench my thighs and feel myself getting wet again, still sensitive from the shower orgasm, and yet already wanting more.

My hand goes to my neck almost by instinct. It slides down over the T-shirt to my breast and I pinch my nipple. I imagine him here. Leaning on the counter, arms crossed, looking at me with that calm that wasn’t indifference. In my fantasy he does nothing more than that: he looks. It’s enough to make the kitchen air feel dense. Then, in my head, he comes closer without saying a word, turns me against the table and pulls my leggings down to my knees. “You’re wet,” he says in the fantasy, running a finger over my cunt from back to front. “You’re like this all day, aren’t you?”

I get up abruptly. I go upstairs. The guest bathroom, the one nobody uses during the week. I yank my leggings and panties down to my ankles and lean against the sink. I look at myself in the mirror: mouth parted, hair tousled, nipples showing through the T-shirt. This time I take more time. I spread my legs as far as the clothes tangled around my feet will allow and watch my hand move down. I imagine his hands, the precision of his fingers, those long fingers that in class adjusted my hip with a firmness that left me trembling for half an hour.

I imagine myself kneeling on the mat with him behind me, gripping my hair while he slides into me slowly, millimeter by millimeter. “Hold the posture,” he says in my head, with that instructor’s calm voice. “Hold it.” I imagine clenching my cunt around his cock while he opens me up, and then the rhythm speeding up, the hand moving from my hair to my neck, his hips slamming against my ass. I slide three fingers in and curl them upward, searching for that spot so few people find properly, and with my other hand I work my clit, fast, insistent. The orgasm comes deeper than the shower one, lifts through my belly and leaves my legs a little shaky and a thick wetness running down the inside of my thigh. I wipe myself with toilet paper. I straighten my clothes in the mirror. I go back downstairs. The toast is cold.

***

11:00. The house chores.

I mop, fold clothes, pick up what was left where it shouldn’t have been. The mind should empty itself with repetitive motion. It doesn’t. I bend to pick something up from the floor and, with no transition at all, the neighbor from the third floor appears: his greeting from last Tuesday, that fraction of a second when it seemed he was going to say something else before getting into the elevator. I imagine him now coming into my house without saying a word, lifting my skirt, kneeling between my legs and eating my cunt as if he’d spent months waiting to do it. I run a cloth over the bookshelf and my head projects a scene from the series we watched last night, a moment that lasted ten seconds on screen but has spent hours lodged behind my eyes, the one where he grabs her by the throat and says something in her ear.

There’s no rest. It’s a constant whirlwind: images, fragments, assumptions, little stories my head builds from almost nothing. What should be a productive morning turns into a succession of involuntary detours.

I collapse onto the sofa for a moment. Just a moment. I close my eyes.

My hand goes down on its own. Under the waistband of my trousers, under my panties, to the cunt that’s still there, ready, swollen, slick. It’s so sensitive after two times that the first touch almost hurts. I rub myself in slow circles, with no precise fantasy, letting the images mix: the neighbor’s mouth, Roberto’s cock, Sergio’s fingers, some stranger shoving me against the elevator wall and fucking me from behind with my clothes still on, barely pulled aside.

The third time that day is almost mechanical, more like scratching an itch than anything else. No precise fantasy, no elaborate scene. Just sensation, two fingers inside and my thumb on my clit, the smallest relief, a brief shiver through my hips, the promise of getting through the next few hours. I pull out my glistening fingers and stare at them for a second before wiping them on a tissue.

I sit there for a while, staring at the ceiling. This can’t be normal. And then I think maybe it is, and I’ve simply never heard it anywhere because nobody says it out loud.

I get up. The laundry needs finishing.

12:45. The supermarket.

What should be an unimportant hour turns into an exercise in restraint. The boy stacking cans in the canned goods aisle apologizes when his cart brushes mine and smiles out of pure politeness. My head amplifies the gesture, adds things that weren’t there, builds a distorted version of a second that meant nothing: I see him taking me to the storeroom, lifting me onto the canned-goods boxes, pulling down my panties with his teeth. The man at the butcher’s asks whether I want the thin cut or the thick one and I take too long to answer because I’m imagining him leaning over the counter and fucking me on the cutting board, still wearing his stained apron.

It’s automatic. I’m not looking for it. Or at least not consciously, though there’s a corner of me I prefer not to examine too closely.

I leave with the bags and my heart racing, as if I’d lived through something that in reality never happened. My panties have gotten wet again. I sit in the car before starting it. Hands on the wheel. Slow breathing. I feel ridiculous and exhausted too, which is the worst possible combination: ashamed of something that only happened inside my head.

No one saw anything. No one knows anything. And still, the guilt weighs the same.

***

6:15 p.m. The children are home now.

Workbooks open on the kitchen table, stew simmering slowly on the stove. I check their homework, explain a fractions problem twice, ask how school was, listen to the answer with real attention.

I’m their mother. I’m here. That isn’t a lie.

But the desire hasn’t gone away for a single moment of the day. It has folded in on itself, become smaller while the children are in front of me, but it’s still there. An engine in the background that keeps turning even if no one hears it. When I serve their plates, when I pick up the glass that almost falls, when I send them to brush their teeth and switch off the light in their room softly… all of that happens on the surface. Underneath, I count the time that remains. Not with cruel impatience, not wanting the hours to pass faster than they should. Just aware that when the house falls silent again, that current will stop pretending it doesn’t exist.

10:40 p.m. The sofa.

Andrés has my hand in his. Some series on television. Low volume, dim light. It’s a pretty scene, one of those that from the outside looks exactly like what a couple on a Monday night ought to look like.

I can’t focus on anything happening on the screen.

The urgency returns with an intensity I wasn’t expecting. It rises through my chest, tightens my throat. I move my leg without meaning to and feel how my cunt, still sensitive from the three times before, throbs again as if nothing had happened. Andrés comments on the plot and I nod, answer something coherent, smile at the right moment. On the outside we’re two calm people sharing an ordinary night. Inside I’m a racing pulse hoping not to hear another “not now” that leaves me alone with this all over again.

I want to throw him on the floor right now.

The fantasy is abrupt, almost violent in how intense it is. I picture him here, on the sofa, the series paused, the distance between us gone. I imagine climbing onto him astride, yanking off his pajama pants, pulling out his cock and taking it without foreplay, without polite caresses, riding him until I come on him with my hand over his mouth so he won’t wake the children. I imagine sucking him first, kneeling between his legs on the sofa, looking up from below while I take him all the way into my mouth until I choke, listening to him moan softly, drinking every drop when he comes. Taking what I’ve needed all day without asking permission, without waiting.

But I also imagine the other scene. His surprised face. The tired smile. The soft “not now, darling” spoken with all the gentleness in the world, which is exactly the version that hurts most. Not because it’s cruel — it isn’t — but because it leaves me completely alone with something that has nowhere to go.

I squeeze my fingers around my own knee.

“I’m going to get water,” I say.

I go upstairs. The bedroom is dim. I lock the door, something I never do. I lie down on the bed and this time I do take off my trousers and panties. The panties are soaked, heavy, with a translucent stain in the crotch that I look at for a second before dropping them to the floor. I spread my legs over the duvet. I don’t think about Roberto or Sergio or any stranger from the supermarket.

I think about Andrés.

About him from five years ago. About the version of him that looked at me in a way I can now barely remember exactly, but know existed. About how he fucked me then, without waiting his turn, without fatigue, with that hunger I took for granted would never end. About how he grabbed my hips and took me from behind with his face buried in my hair, breathing like an animal against my neck. About how he licked my cunt for half an hour without lifting his head, as if it were the only thing he had to do in the world. About what there was between us when desire didn’t need to apologize or look for a better moment.

I slide in two fingers, then three. I pull them out shining and bring them to my mouth. Then back down. I start with my clit using the pad of my middle finger, quick circles, while with my other hand I pinch my nipples, one after the other. I lift my hips against my own hand. I imagine Andrés between my legs, eating me until I arch, and then climbing up my body to push his cock into me while looking me in the eyes the way he used to.

And that mix of desire and longing and rage and love makes the orgasm the most intense of the four. It arches me whole on the bed, contracts my cunt around nothing, rises through my belly in long waves that don’t end when I think they end, and forces me to muffle the sound against the pillow, biting it, while my fingers still can’t quite stop, stretching each shiver until it almost hurts.

I stay still for a minute. With my fingers still inside. With my chest rising and falling. With tears at the edge of my eyes for a reason I couldn’t name.

I clean myself. Put on my pajamas. Go back downstairs. The series is still on. Andrés looks up.

“Everything okay?”

“Yes,” I say. I sit beside him. I take his hand.

***

It’s almost one in the morning. He’s asleep. I’m writing.

The fire hasn’t gone out. It’s calmed down enough to let me think clearly, but it’s still there, dozing, ready for tomorrow. For the day after. For ever, probably.

I don’t know if this has a name. I’ve looked sometimes with vague phrases I then delete from my search history, as if words could incriminate me. What I find always seems too clinical or too dramatic to describe what I feel, which isn’t suffering exactly. It’s more like a constant noise that never fully shuts off. An unwanted companion who, nonetheless, has spent years settled in the room next door.

What I do know is that today I masturbated four times, that I had four orgasms with my own fingers, that I came thinking of an electrician, a Pilates instructor, a random stranger and finally my own husband asleep two meters from me, and that none of the four really solved anything. They only postponed the next one.

What else I know is that I love Andrés. That I don’t want anyone else in my real life, the life that happens outside my head. That if Roberto the electrician or Sergio from Pilates showed up at my door for real, I’d close that door without hesitation.

But inside my head there are no doors.

And that, I still don’t know whether it’s a problem or simply what I am. Tomorrow it will start again. I know it already. And the strange thing — what unsettles me most of all — is that a part of me doesn’t want it to stop.