I Pleasured Myself in the Car in Broad Daylight

Two days ago I took the highway that crosses the south of Almenara at the hour when everyone is heading to work and nobody looks at anyone else. It was nine in the morning, the sun was pouring flat through the windshield, and the middle lane was inching along in fits and starts, that slow rhythm of the city waking up. I was in my car, both hands on the wheel and a secret burning between my legs.

I had planned it the night before. It wasn’t an impulse. I took the toy out of the drawer, charged it until the little light turned green, and left it on the nightstand like someone laying out clothes for the next day. I knew exactly what I was going to do, and that —knowing it, waiting for it— had already kept me awake half the night.

I chose a mustard-colored dress, loose, one of those you can pull aside with two fingers without anything showing. Nothing underneath. Before leaving home I put the toy in place and left it quietly there, waiting. The remote fit in the palm of my hand, small, discreet, like a big coin. I tucked it into the little space next to the gear shift and set off.

Only as far as the roundabout, I told myself. If I change my mind, I’ll turn it off and nothing will happen.

I didn’t change my mind.

I waited until I was on the highway, until I was lost among the other cars, just one more in that sea of people in a hurry. And then, at the first red light by the exit, I lowered my hand and pressed the button.

The first vibration went through me. It was soft, barely a tingle, but I had spent all morning imagining it and my body responded as if it had been holding its breath. I gripped the wheel. To my left, a man in a white shirt was talking on speakerphone, tapping the steering wheel with one finger to the beat of a song I couldn’t hear. He didn’t look at me. Nobody was looking at me.

That was precisely the point.

The light changed and I moved forward. The tingle became something more insistent, a low, steady current that forced me to breathe slowly so I wouldn’t lose focus. Driving and feeling that at the same time was hard, I won’t deny it. I had to split my attention between the lane, the mirror, and that exact point between my legs beating harder and harder.

The fabric of the dress no longer rested innocently on me. Each vibration pressed my sex into the seat, sent a shiver through my stomach, and made me close my thighs tighter, as if I could hold the pleasure inside so it wouldn’t escape through my skin. The toy rubbed and pulsed in a steady rhythm, first at the entrance, then deeper, searching for the exact core where desire turns into hunger. My mouth went dry. I swallowed and felt my pulse hammering between my hips.

***

What I liked most wasn’t the toy. It was the people.

Every car I passed held someone who had no idea. The girl in the red convertible, with the oversized sunglasses and her hair pinned up. The father in the minivan, with two kids fighting in the back seat. The delivery guy in the white van, looking at his phone when he shouldn’t have been. All of them a yard away from me, separated by a window, and none of them suspected that the woman in the yellow dress was biting her lip so she wouldn’t moan.

I turned up the intensity a notch.

The change was immediate. It wasn’t just a stronger tingle, but a deep jolt that made me arch my back against the seat and dig my fingers into the wheel. Heat started climbing my neck. I could feel my face burning, my ears hot, that blush you can’t hide. I lowered the window a little so I could get some air, and when I did, the driver in the car beside me turned his head. It was just a second. He looked at me without seeing me, the way you look at a traffic light, and then went back to the road.

If you only knew, I thought. If you only knew what you have beside you.

The thought sent a lash of pleasure through me so obscene I had to clamp my thighs together so I wouldn’t writhe in the seat. There I was, within reach of anyone’s gaze, the dress hiked up just enough for the air to touch my thighs and the secret vibrating between my legs like an untiring tongue. Traffic moved in jerks, and every brake forced me to feel the leather seat rubbing against my sex, the exact spot where the toy was driving me out of my mind. I bit down on my lower lip, slowly, until it hurt.

That idea —doing it in the middle of everyone, in broad daylight, with the secret throbbing under the fabric— was what really pushed me to the edge. Not the device. The fantasy. The measured risk, the clean transgression of someone doing something forbidden without breaking anything.

The highway opened into a long straight stretch and I let some of the tension out of my shoulders. For a moment I let the pleasure take me, rising through my belly in slow waves. I had to slow down because my legs were trembling. A truck passed on my right, huge, making the whole car vibrate, and I swear that extra vibration tore a sigh from me I couldn’t hold back.

I had already been going like that for fifteen minutes. And I knew that if I kept driving, I was going to lose control of the car or of myself, and neither ended well on a highway.

I needed to stop.

***

I had memorized the spot in advance. A rest area a little farther on, an open-air parking lot surrounded by pines, almost always empty at that hour. I signaled and exited the highway with my pulse pounding in my throat.

I drove in slowly. The lot was smaller than I remembered: a strip of cracked asphalt, a few half-erased white lines, and at the back a row of trees casting poor shade. I parked facing the pines, as far from the road as possible, and switched off the engine.

Silence fell all at once. All you could hear was the distant hum of the highway and, inside the car, that deep purring that had been driving me crazy for fifteen minutes.

Before leaving home I had prepared the seat. A towel folded beneath me, because I know myself and I know how these things end. Good thing I did. I moved the backrest back a few inches, reclined, and finally opened my legs all the way.

The difference was brutal. Still, with no road to watch, all my attention dropped at once onto that point that had been burning for far too long. I turned the intensity all the way up and tipped my head back against the headrest.

“Finally,” I murmured, to no one.

I took my hands to my chest. The dress gave way easily. I had wanted this all morning: pinching my nipples, squeezing them slowly, feeling how every touch linked straight to the pounding below. I touched them with my fingertips, first gently, then harder, until pleasure stopped being a current and became a tide. My nipples hardened right away, sensitive to air and pressure, and when I tugged one of them a little harder, the moan that escaped me sounded wet, urgent, hungry.

My free hand dropped shamelessly to my sex. The fabric was already soaked, clinging to me with heat and arousal. I pulled the dress aside just enough to touch myself, and when my fingers found the edge of my lips I was struck by such a clean jolt that I shut my eyes at once. I was slick, swollen, open. I touched myself slowly at first, sliding two fingers over my clit, drawing little circles that made me breathe faster. Then I went lower, testing the entrance, feeling the toy pushing from inside while I opened myself with my hand.

And then I saw it.

***

There was a car parked a few meters away. It wasn’t close; I hadn’t noticed it when I pulled in because it was half-hidden in the shadow of a pine tree. A dark car, with someone inside. I couldn’t make out the face. I didn’t know whether it was a man or a woman, whether they were looking at their phone or asleep or waiting for someone. I knew nothing.

All I knew was that they were there.

For a second I froze, one hand on my chest and my heart in my mouth. The sensible part of me said: start the car, go, this is over. The other part, the one that had been blazing all morning, said something very different.

They couldn’t see me. I was almost sure of it. The distance, the reflections on the windshield, the trees’ shadows. It was practically impossible for that person to know what I was doing a few meters from their car.

But they could be there. They could simply exist. And that was enough.

The mere idea that there was someone, that that faceless stranger was breathing the same air while I writhed in my seat, lit me up in a way I hadn’t expected. I didn’t need them to see me. It was enough to know they were there. That my secret, for once, had a possible witness.

I closed my eyes.

And then I touched myself more brazenly. I spread my legs wider, sank two fingers into my cunt slowly, feeling the wetness close around me, and pulled them out to rub my clit again with the pad of my hand. The noise was minimal: my breathing, the leather seat creaking, that low buzz of the toy inside me, insistent as a mouth that never tires. Pleasure climbed my spine and left my belly taut, on the verge of breaking.

I imagined the one in the dark car finally looking at me. I didn’t care whether it was true or not. I imagined them seeing me opening my dress, soaking my fingers, taking one hand to my mouth to bite it and keep from crying out. I imagined them catching the shine of my crotch under the dirty light of the parking lot, seeing how my hips chased my own hand, how the toy made me shudder in short, hot waves. The fantasy made it worse. Much worse.

“Look at me,” I whispered, my voice broken, though I didn’t know whether I was speaking to them or to my own desire.

***

I stopped thinking about whether they could see me or not. I stopped thinking about anything. I focused on the vibrations, on my fingers, on the heat climbing my belly in waves that came closer and closer together. I moved my hips against the seat without being able to help it, searching for the angle, that exact point where everything becomes unbearable because it’s so good.

The car filled with my breathing. I was panting openly, because there, with the windows closed and the pines in front of me, I didn’t have to pretend I was driving, or going to work, or a normal woman on a normal day. It was me, alone, legs open in a parking lot in broad daylight, chasing an orgasm that had been promising itself to me for fifteen kilometers.

I pinched one nipple hard just as I turned the toy up to its highest level, and that combination split me in two. I felt the first warning, that tug that starts very deep and tells you there’s no turning back. I clamped my thighs around the toy, arched my back, and let it come.

And it came like few others have.

It was long, intense, the kind that leaves your ears ringing and your legs useless. I came biting the back of my hand so I wouldn’t scream, though part of me —the same part as always— wanted the stranger in the dark car to hear everything. The waves kept coming one after another, and all I could do was breathe and let myself be carried, with the towel doing exactly the job I had put it there for. The orgasm clenched my abdomen, made my thighs tremble, and left my cunt throbbing around the toy as if it wanted to keep sucking me even after the climax.

When the strongest peak passed, my body didn’t stay still. It kept shaking in little spasms, as if there were still traces of electricity running through me from the inside. I ran my tongue over my lips, tasting the salty flavor of my own skin, and let one hand rest on my breast while the other stayed between my legs, pressing softly, unable to move away completely.

Good thing I did it.

***

It took me a long while to come back. I stayed reclined, the engine off and the toy finally silent, feeling my body settle down beat by beat. Through the half-open window came the smell of pine and hot asphalt. The highway kept humming in the distance, indifferent, full of hurried people who would never know anything about the woman in the mustard dress.

When I finally opened my eyes and looked toward the trees, the dark car was gone. I hadn’t heard it leave. I don’t know when it went, or whether it had ever seen me, or whether there had even been anyone inside at all or I had imagined it in the middle of the delirium. And the truth is, it doesn’t matter.

I straightened my dress, gathered the towel, put the remote back in its little space next to the gear shift. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror for a second: red face, messed-up hair, a smile I couldn’t wipe off.

I started the car again and went back out onto the highway, once more just one more among everyone else, once more invisible. But I wasn’t the same woman who had entered that morning. I was wearing the secret, still warm, and with the certainty that I was going to do it again.

I enjoyed it more than I should probably admit.