I Confess My Addiction to Touching Myself All the Time
As long as I can remember, I’ve never been able to stop. I’m not talking about a passing habit or a teenage phase that fades on its own. I’m talking about the fact that any free moment, any gap in the day no matter how small, I spend with my hand between my legs. It’s the first thing I think about when I wake up and the last before I go to sleep.
The strangest thing is that I’m not even as obsessed with fucking as I am with thinking about it afterward. I go to bed with someone, yes, but deep down what I’m really waiting for is the moment I’m alone, going over every detail in my head and touching myself while I remember it. Sex, for me, is almost archive material. The real show starts when the door closes.
The men I hook up with think they’ve hit the jackpot. I always ask for the same thing, for them to fuck me from behind, and they leave convinced I’m a gift from heaven. The funny part is that I’m the lucky one. While they focus on their own pleasure, I’ve got my hands free, my eyes half-closed, and I rub myself at my own pace without making it too obvious. They finish exhausted. I finish wanting to do it again alone.
If anyone saw me on an ordinary day, they’d most likely find me sprawled out on the bed, the sheets in disarray, giving myself pleasure without a break while I imagine scenes I’d never say out loud. It’s not something I decide to do. It’s something that just happens, like breathing.
***
When I’ve had a partner, my fantasies have always gone down the same strange path. More than once I insisted a boyfriend set up a threesome, and not because I was dying to share him with another woman. I did it so I could watch. I wanted to sit in a corner, watch him lost between another woman’s legs, and touch myself while I watched them as if it were a movie made just for me.
That’s my uncomfortable truth. I enjoy watching and touching myself more than participating. Some people would say I’m a voyeur, and they might be right. What turns me on isn’t contact, but distance, that delicious knowledge that I’m there watching something burning while I come apart in silence.
I have another habit I’ve never confessed to anyone. When I’m about to come, I like to slide a finger in from behind all the way to the end. I can’t explain why, but that gesture multiplies everything, as if it closes a circuit. It’s my private trick, the one I save for when I want the orgasm to leave me trembling.
***
The vice is so strong it sneaks into absurd situations. I can be on the phone with anyone, I don’t care who—a friend, my boss, the husband of an acquaintance—and while I’m carrying on the most normal conversation, I’ve got my other hand under my underwear, moving slowly so my voice won’t give me away. I learned to control my breathing out of sheer necessity. If they knew what I was doing on the other end of the line, they’d never call me again.
Anyone would think that with such a huge appetite I’d love sucking, licking, doing everything with my mouth. But no. What I really need is to have my hands free. That’s my obsession: my fingers, alone or with company, giving me what I know nobody gives me better than I do myself.
I remember my university years as one of the most intense times in that respect. I shared an apartment with several girls, and the best moment of the week was when one of them brought a hookup home. I’d lock myself in my room, pressed against the wall, and while I heard them through the partition I’d give myself pleasure nonstop. Every muffled moan that reached me was gasoline. I didn’t need to see anything. Hearing and imagining were enough.
***
The days when I come home especially horny are a problem. If I’ve spent the whole day out of the house without being able to touch myself, I arrive with my panties soaked and an urgency that doesn’t take no for an answer. I throw my keys down wherever they land, strip off everything any old way, and go straight for my favorite toy. When I don’t have it handy, I improvise with whatever I can find, without too many scruples. That’s how I come two or three times in a row, until I’m limp.
The truth is it isn’t so different from my normal routine. Come home, get naked, lie back on the couch with my legs open, and give myself pleasure until I burst. It’s my way of ending the day, my way of leaving the tension somewhere else. Some people meditate. I do this.
The weekends I spend alone are another world. I spend the whole day naked around the house, from one room to another, and I completely lose count of how many times I touch myself. I do it in the kitchen leaning against the counter, I do it rubbing myself against the edge of a table as I pass, I do it lying on the living room floor for no reason other than wanting to. It’s not planned. It’s just that my body asks for it every so often and I never learned how to say no.
***
I have a secret I’ve never told a soul. Every morning, before I get out of bed, I open my phone gallery and pick the photo of some random contact. I don’t care who. I touch myself looking at that face, and just when I’m about to finish, I send them an innocent good-morning message. The moment I see they’ve replied, I come while looking at their name on the screen. That person will never know the role they played in my waking up.
With porn, something similarly contradictory happens to me. I start out looking for extreme stuff, brutal scenes that catch my eye because they’re so over the top. But I always end up in the same place: videos of women pleasuring themselves alone. I watch them to copy them, to learn a new gesture, to feel like I’m not the only one living hooked on my own hands.
***
The one who understood me best was a guy I dated for a while. He was the perfect man for someone like me, because what he liked most in the world was watching me do it beside him. With him there was nothing to hide, and that turned it into one of those stretches of time you never forget.
Every morning I woke up five minutes before him on purpose. I’d start touching myself slowly, and he’d open his eyes to the sound of my gasps right by his ear. There was no better alarm clock. If I saw him reading quietly on the couch, I’d throw myself onto the rug, spread my legs, and start without asking permission, knowing he’d look up from the book sooner or later.
When we went out to dinner with friends, he already knew the ritual. At dessert time I’d excuse myself for a moment, lock myself in the restaurant bathroom, and come back to the table with flushed cheeks and a smile only he knew how to read. No one else at that table could imagine what I’d just done three meters from them.
If we went for a walk in the country, we always ended up behind some rock, with our clothes half down, touching each other like two impatient teenagers. And as for the movies, I’d rather not even get into it. I’d go in with nothing under my skirt, and in the dark I’d have two or three orgasms while he covered my mouth with his hand so we wouldn’t make a scene right there in the theater.
***
What almost nobody would believe is that, deep down, I’m a shy person. I have trouble looking people in the eye, I blush over stupid little things, I avoid being the center of attention at any gathering. And yet sometimes I fantasize about filling my house with cameras connected to those sites where people pay to watch. I’m convinced I’d make a fortune. Few women must live desire with this intensity, awake at all hours, tied to an appetite that is never satisfied.
I’m not saying it as a complaint. I’m saying it because for once I wanted to say it out loud, to let go of the secret I’ve carried forever. That’s how I am, I’m not planning to change, and if I’ve learned anything it’s not to apologize for it. Tomorrow I’ll wake up five minutes before the world, choose some random face on the screen, and it will all start over again.