I Touched Myself Halfway Through the Route and No One Knew

There are Sundays that are mine and no one else’s. My husband sleeps in late, the house slips into a calm that feels like it belongs to another planet, and I sneak out before the rest of the world wakes up. Sometimes I read in the kitchen with a coffee going cold without my caring. Sometimes I do a little yoga in the yard, with the grass still damp beneath my feet. And almost always I go for a walk on the outskirts of town, a route of a few kilometers that I know by heart.

That early autumn morning I needed it more than ever. I was coming off a thick week, one of those that leaves your body begging for something without you quite knowing what. They had been strange days: readings that had stolen my sleep, long conversations with someone I barely knew, a current of dirty curiosity that had gotten under my skin and wouldn’t quite leave.

I dressed in my usual clothes. The black leggings, the thin sweatshirt, the worn-out sneakers that already have the exact shape of my feet. I pulled my hair into a ponytail in front of the hallway mirror and stood there for a second, looking at myself. I looked pretty good for someone who’d slept badly. I grabbed my phone, my earbuds, and left, closing the door quietly so as not to wake anyone.

The air outside was cold and clean. Empty streets, shutters down, the occasional cat crossing as if it owned the town. I set off at a brisk pace, still deciding what to put in my ears. A podcast that explained the world. Music so I wouldn’t think. The news, because I like being up to date.

I started with the news, as I almost always do. But after a few minutes the same topics from the whole week were looping in my head again, repeated to the point of boredom, and I realized that instead of clearing my mind they were stressing me out. I lowered the volume, opened the app’s search bar, and, almost without thinking, typed two words I don’t usually look up in the middle of the street.

Erotic stories.

I laughed to myself. A woman of a certain age, in her leggings and ponytail, nodding at the early-morning runners while in her ears a deep voice told her a story that was anything but innocent. There was something about the contrast that thrilled me. On the outside, just another neighbor out exercising on a Sunday. On the inside, something entirely different.

The narrator had a measured, husky voice, the kind that seems to caress the back of your neck. He was telling the story of an employee who stayed late at an office and accepted certain assignments that weren’t in her contract. But it wasn’t the plot that hooked me. It was the way he told it. At one point, almost out of nowhere, the narrator casually mentioned that while recording it he could feel himself getting hard. He said it like that, without shame, like someone commenting on the weather. And I had my breath cut off for a second.

I pictured it. I imagined the man with the deep voice sitting in front of a microphone, one hand on the page and the other lost beneath the table. I imagined the slow rhythm of his words matching another, more private rhythm. And I found myself getting just as worked up as he was, maybe more, kilometer after kilometer, with every sentence he spoke.

***

By the time I’d covered half the route, my body had become a problem. My legs were shaking, and not from the effort. I felt the fabric rub against me with every step, and every brush was a tiny jolt that made me clench my teeth. I could feel my pulse in places where a woman shouldn’t be able to feel her pulse while walking along the road.

The landscape in that stretch did nothing to calm me down, and it didn’t help with keeping up appearances either. It was the ugliest part of the whole route: a few industrial warehouses in the distance, a strange smell of metal and wet earth, open lots of dry grass on either side of the asphalt. Nobody walks there for pleasure. For that very reason, at those hours, there wasn’t a soul around.

There was a low concrete wall at the edge of the path, the kind that separates one lot from another without really separating anything at all. I sat on it under the excuse of catching my breath. Just a minute, I told myself. One minute and I’ll keep going. But I knew it was a lie the second I thought it.

The story kept playing in my ears, though I had stopped listening to the words. Now all I heard was the voice as background, as texture, and in my head things were mixing together that had nothing to do with the office story. The readings from the week came back. So did the conversations with that stranger, that complicity of typing things I would never say to his face, that absurd and delicious urge to be, for a while, the boldest woman in the world.

My hands were freezing from the morning cold. The rest of me was burning. I looked to one side and then the other of the road. Nothing. Only the distant hum of a machine in one of the warehouses and the wind moving the dry grass. Then, before the sensible part of me could say anything, I slipped my hand under the waistband of my leggings.

The first touch tore a sigh from me that I had to swallow. I was soaked. So much more than I expected, in a way that was almost shameful, thick and slippery, as if my body had been waiting all week for exactly that permission. The coldness of my fingers against that heat was a shock that made me arch my back against the wall.

***

I moved slowly at first. I had to keep up appearances. A woman sitting on a wall, catching her breath, one hand tucked in against the cold. That’s what anyone passing by would see. The idea of doing it in plain sight and having no one know it thrilled me as much as my own fingers did.

I closed my eyes for a moment and opened them again immediately. I didn’t want to lose sight of the road. There was something about watching the horizon while I touched myself, about knowing that at any moment a shape could appear in the distance, that made every sensation stronger. Fear and desire pulling in the same direction. If someone comes, I stop. If someone comes, I stop. And yet, part of me almost wanted someone to come.

I found my rhythm. I stopped pretending I was resting. The narrator kept going with his deep voice in the background, oblivious to what he was provoking from miles away, and I used him, clung to that voice like a rope. I imagined the story being told to me, in a low voice, against my ear. I imagined hands that weren’t mine. I imagined glances. I imagined the face that stranger from the conversations would make if he knew what his memory was doing to me in the middle of nowhere.

The pleasure rose in waves, each one higher than the last. I had to breathe through my nose, slow and deep, biting my lip so I wouldn’t let out the moan building in my throat. Silence was part of the game. Any sound could give me away. So everything narrowed inward: the pleasure, the air, the racing heartbeat, all locked up inside my body while on the outside almost nothing moved.

When I came, it was like letting go of something I’d been clenching all week without realizing it. A long, deep contraction that forced me to fold forward and plant my free hand on the edge of the concrete. A tiny sound escaped me, almost a whimper, lost in the wind before it could fully exist. My legs really shook then, with no chance left to hide it.

I stayed like that for a moment, bent over myself on that ugly wall by an ugly road, my heart pounding and a smile on my face that wouldn’t fit. The factories’ metallic smell, the cold on my cheeks, the dry grass: never had such an unromantic place given me so much.

***

I pulled my hand out slowly. I reached into my pocket for the tissue I always carry and cleaned myself up as best I could, carefully, still feeling little aftershocks of the orgasm moving through me. I fixed my leggings, tightened the ponytail that had come loose to one side, and forced my face back into that of a normal woman out for exercise on a Sunday.

Just then, in the distance, a runner appeared. He was jogging toward me, earbuds in, regular pace, completely oblivious. I got to my feet with a ridiculous tremble in my knees and managed to nod at him as he passed, the same way I had nodded at so many others that morning. He nodded back without slowing down. He suspected nothing. He had no reason to.

And that was perhaps the detail I liked most of all. That seconds earlier I had been on the verge of orgasm in that very spot and for the world absolutely nothing had happened. My secret was safe, tucked under my sweatshirt, hidden behind a polite smile.

I started walking again. The kilometers back felt light, almost floating. The narrator’s voice had finished telling its story long before and I had let it die without replacing it with anything else. I walked in silence, listening only to my own footsteps and the wind, replaying what I had just done with a mix of disbelief and pride. Did I really just do that?

I got home with my legs still weak. My husband was still asleep, oblivious to everything, and the house kept that same otherworldly calm I had left it in. I undressed in the bathroom, turned on the tap, and stepped under the hot water with a long sigh. Steam fogged the mirror, the morning cold dissolved from my skin, and I laughed again, alone, under the spray.

It was my first time out there, in the open air, satisfying myself with my own hands in a place where anyone might have seen me. I had imagined it a thousand times while reading other people’s stories. Never did I think I would dare.

As the water ran down my back, I was already thinking about next Sunday. About the usual route, the concrete wall, the deep voice in my earbuds. Will it be the last time? I smiled with my eyes closed, letting the water answer for me.

I knew perfectly well it wouldn’t be.