A Stranger Made Me Come with Her Words

A precise piece of writing can ignite in the mind a succession of images so vivid that they set off a chain reaction: each word opens a door, and behind each door there is a warm room where the body begins to respond before reason understands what is happening. It isn’t magic. It’s just that some women know how to write.

It happens to me so rarely that I learned to recognize the exact signal. A tingle at the nape of my neck, breathing that turns shorter, knees that settle without my deciding them. That night I found a new author on one of those pages of stories where you can lose yourself for hours, and I knew from the second paragraph that I was going to stay awake.

Because she didn’t write like almost everyone else. She didn’t describe sex with that vulgar, pathetic hurry of some random video, where everything is named without shame and nothing is felt. She built the moment. She raised the scene brick by brick, and by the time the important part arrived, you were already inside it, breathing the same air.

She signed herself Marlena. I don’t know if that was her real name, and I didn’t care. What mattered to me was the way her sentences took me by the hand and led me, in a kind of waking dream, toward the instant she was recounting. Through that hand of ink I could feel everything that overwhelmed her while she lived what she later turned into literature.

That was the disturbing part. That through her description my own body began to react as if words had fingers. Her vowels brushed my nipples. Her consonants raised the skin on my breasts just from imagining how they had taken her in the episode she was revealing to me so slowly.

This isn’t reading. This is something else.

And while Marlena chained syllables together and threaded the words of a text that was at times tender and at others perverse, those same words became her fingers. They slid down from my breasts, crossed my belly, and stopped right there between my legs, where the heat no longer let me lie to myself. I closed my eyes for a second. When I opened them, my hand was already where it shouldn’t have been, but where I wanted it.

You, Marlena, who perhaps wrote because it turned you on, or because you had no one to tell your secrets to and needed to let out those sweet demons that chased you, had the slightest idea of the effect you were having on a stranger on the other side of the screen. Your imagination couldn’t begin to measure how wet every confession of yours made me, every fantasy you let slip with that naturalness of a woman who fears nothing anymore.

I kept reading. I got inside your skin to understand why you had given yourself to that man you didn’t know at all, a stranger who that night did to you what your husband never knew how to do. And yes, I understood you. I understood you completely. Your need was stronger than your caution, just as right then, reading you, it was stronger than my own shame.

I stretched a hand toward the nightstand drawer. There it was, still in its velvet case, the plug I had bought myself last Christmas. A whim I almost never used, something I almost felt shy looking at in daylight. I took it out slowly, prepared it carefully, and as I settled it in place I thought I could sense the breath of that man who, in your story, opened you with the same patience with which I opened myself.

The curious thing is that I didn’t need to imagine faces. Marlena didn’t describe faces, or bodies, or hair color. She described sensations. And that was why the stranger in her story could be anyone; he could be every man who had ever looked at me a second too long in an elevator or in the supermarket line. That lack of detail was her best trick: it left just the right space for me to pour my own into it.

***

By then the sheet was already damp beneath me. Your story tells me how the object of your desire becomes the verb, and how that verb turns you, my dear author, into the devoted object of his mouth. To feel that tongue of ink on my clit, I reached for the vibrator in the same drawer and switched it on at the lowest setting, barely a whisper, just enough to keep reading without losing the thread.

Because I didn’t want it to end yet. I wanted it to last as long as your tale lasted. I wanted to read about how your lover licked you while, with one finger, he found that exact spot your husband had never bothered to look for, and at the same time feel, in my own body, that slow climb that made me press my thighs against the warm plastic.

I had my phone in one hand and the vibrator in the other, and it was beginning to be too much. I set it on the pillow, beside my face, to have both hands free. I read like that, lying on my side, how you described the first moans, how you felt on your lips the first warm drop of that stranger while you thought, with a resentment that was almost sweet, of the useless man waiting for you at home.

I writhed in bed reading you. You told me that while that man had you face down, biting the pillow, you couldn’t stop wondering how it had been possible to give yourself to a stranger like that. And you came to a conclusion that left me breathless: that sometimes you have to sacrifice a little peace for a satisfaction no comfort can buy. That what one lukewarm man cannot do, another can, if he knows how to burn.

I turned up the intensity. I stroked my breasts with my free hand, played with my hardened nipples, and thought of that detail of yours that had undone me: that only a few months earlier you had become a mother, that you were full up, and that the man in your house didn’t even want to come near you, to the point of pushing you, without even knowing it, to seek outside what they denied you inside. There was something tragic and feverish in that, and it turned me on even more.

Because I knew that silence too. That shared bed where two people turn their backs on each other like two countries in a cold war. That feeling of being just another piece of furniture in the house, useful and never desired. That was why I read you so hungrily, Marlena. I wasn’t reading you to escape my life; I was reading you to remember that I still had a body, that that body still responded, that it hadn’t gone completely out while no one was looking.

***

Then the moment your whole story had been leading toward arrived. That instant when you yourself knew you couldn’t hold out any longer, that man was about to spill inside you. And you, in the midst of the fever, asked him not to pull out. To stay. To pour it all inside, because for once you wanted to feel desired down to the very last tremor, without calculations or conditions.

I read those lines with my heart pounding against my ribs. I sped the vibrator up almost without realizing it. You, by then almost out of words, described the whirlpool that was overwhelming you as you felt him come, that heat spreading, that sense of a boundary crossed that can no longer be undone. And I, reading you, was exactly on that same edge.

My jaw was clenched. The other hand was gripping the sheet as if I were about to fall from somewhere. Your final sentence, the one where you finally gave yourself over completely, hit me like a breaking wave.

And I came apart.

It was brutal. A spasm that shook me whole, that sent the vibrator flying out and knocked the phone to the floor with a dull thud. I cried out—really cried out, without thinking about the hour or the thin walls—and for a moment I stopped being me and was only that, a woman trembling in her bed because of another woman’s words, a woman I had never seen. A masturbation made of pure rhetoric.

***

I lay there, half fainted, my breathing in shreds and my skin still vibrating. In that strange state where you don’t quite know whether what’s happening is real or the tail end of a dream, I felt something. A presence. I opened my eyes halfway.

A thin figure was cut out in the bedroom doorway, against the hallway light. And I thought I heard a small voice, still sleepy, asking from the threshold.

—Mom, are you okay?

The air froze in my chest. The phone was still face down on the floor, the screen off. The vibrator, somewhere in a fold of the sheet, already silent. And I, still out of breath, still pierced by the last aftershocks of what I had just felt, searched for a voice that sounded normal, a mother’s voice like any other in the middle of the night.

I couldn’t find one.

—Yes, my love —I wanted to say—. Go back to bed.

But the words wouldn’t come. They got stuck somewhere between my throat and my shame, and for one endless second I could only stay there, in the dim light, looking at that silhouette in the doorway.

I can’t answer…

Tomorrow, when dawn comes, I’ll pretend nothing happened. I’ll look for Marlena again. I’ll look for her next story. And I know, with a certainty that frightens me, that I will open that door again.