I Touched Myself in the Car in Broad Daylight

Two days ago I took the highway that crosses the south of Almenara at that hour when everyone is heading to work and no one looks at anyone. It was nine in the morning, the sun was coming in flat through the windshield, and the middle lane lurched forward 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, anticipating it—had already kept me awake half the night.

I chose a mustard-colored dress, loose, one of those you can slide aside with two fingers and not show a thing. Nothing underneath. Before leaving the house I put the toy in place and left it there in silence, waiting. The remote fit in the palm of my hand, small, discreet, like a large coin. I tucked it into the space beside the gear shift and started the car.

Only until the roundabout, I told myself. If I change my mind, I’ll turn it off and that’s that.

I didn’t change my mind.

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

The first vibration ran through me from head to toe. It was soft, barely a tingle, but I had been imagining it all morning and my body reacted as if it had been holding its breath. I gripped the wheel tighter. To my left, a man in a white shirt was talking on his hands-free, tapping the wheel with one finger to the beat of a song I couldn’t hear. He didn’t look at me. No one was looking at me.

That was exactly the point.

The light changed and I moved on. The tingling turned into 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 spot between my legs beating harder and harder.

***

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

Every car I passed had someone inside who had no idea. The girl in the red convertible, with huge sunglasses and her hair tied 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 meter from me, separated by a window, and none of them suspected that the woman in the yellow dress was biting her lip to keep from moaning.

I turned up the intensity one notch.

Heat started climbing up my neck. I could feel my face burning, my ears hot, that flush you can’t hide. I rolled the window down a little so some air would hit me, and as I did, the driver in the car beside me turned his head. It was just an instant. He looked at me without seeing me, the way you look at a traffic light, and went back to the road.

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

That idea—the idea of doing it in the middle of all of them, in broad daylight, with the secret throbbing under the fabric—was what really drove 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 straightaway and I let some of the tension out of my shoulders. For a moment I let pleasure take over, rising through my belly in slow waves. I had to ease off the gas 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 like this 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 of those things ends well on a highway.

I needed to stop.

***

I had memorized the place ahead of time. A rest area a little farther on, an open parking lot surrounded by pine trees, almost always empty at that hour. I put on my indicator and left the highway with my pulse hammering in my throat.

I eased in slowly. The lot was smaller than I remembered: a strip of cracked asphalt, a few half-faded white lines, and at the back a row of trees that offered poor shade. I parked facing the pines, as far from the road as possible, and turned 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 folded towel under me, because I know myself and I know how these things end. Good thing I did. I tilted the backrest back a few centimeters, reclined, and finally spread my legs all the way open.

The difference was brutal. Still, with no road to watch, all my attention fell in a rush on that spot that had been burning for far too long. I turned the intensity up to the maximum and threw my head back against the headrest.

“Finally,” I murmured, to no one.

I put my hands on my chest. The dress gave way easily. All morning I had wanted this: to pinch my nipples, squeeze them slowly, feel how every touch connected in a straight line to the pulse below. I touched them with my fingertips, first gently, then harder, until pleasure stopped being a current and became a tide.

And then I saw it.

***

There was a car parked a few meters away. It wasn’t close; I hadn’t seen it when I came in because it was half hidden in the shade 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, hand on my chest and heart in my mouth. The sensible part of me said: start the car, leave, this is over. The other part, the one that had been burning bright red all morning, said something very different.

They couldn’t see me. Of that I was almost sure. The distance, the reflections on the windshield, the shadow of the trees. 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 exist, that was enough. And that alone was enough.

The mere idea that someone was there, that that faceless stranger was breathing the same air while I twisted 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.

***

I stopped thinking about whether they could see me or not. I stopped thinking about everything. I focused on the vibrations, on my fingers, on the heat rising through my belly in waves that kept coming closer together. I rocked my hips against the seat without being able to help it, searching for the angle, that exact point where everything becomes unbearably good.

The car filled with my breathing. I was gasping without trying to hide it, because there, with the windows closed and the pines in front of me, I didn’t have to pretend I was driving, that I was on my way to work, that I was a normal woman on a normal day. It was me, alone, legs spread 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 setting, and that combination split me in two. I felt the first warning, that tug that starts very deep inside and lets you know there’s no turning back. I squeezed my thighs around the toy, arched my back, and let it come.

And it came like few times before.

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 cry out, 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 go, with the towel doing exactly the job I had put it there for.

Good thing I did.

***

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 people in a hurry 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 ever saw me, or whether there was even anyone inside or if I imagined it in the middle of the delirium. And the truth is, it doesn’t matter.

I straightened my dress, picked up the towel, tucked the remote back into the space beside the gear shift. I glanced at myself for a second in the rearview mirror: red face, tousled hair, a smile I couldn’t wipe away.

I started the car again and went back onto the highway, once more just one more among everyone else, invisible again. But I was no longer the same woman who had entered that morning. I was wearing the secret now, still hot, and with the certainty that I was going to do it again.

I enjoyed it more than I should admit.