She Perfumed Her Underwear Before Giving It to Me

I got home still with my pulse racing, as if my body still couldn’t quite believe what had happened a little while earlier. I left the car keys in the little drawer by the entrance, next to the bundle of building keys and a couple of loose coins, and hung my jacket on the coat rack. It was an automatic gesture, one of those I make every night, but that night my hands knew they weren’t handling just any routine.

In the bag I was carrying was the new shirt I’d bought myself that afternoon, still with the tag on. And beside the shirt, wrapped up almost surreptitiously, were the underwear of that woman from the cinema. I like to wash newly bought clothes before wearing them for the first time, so I took the bag straight to the laundry room. The shirt, in any case, wasn’t going to put itself into the drum.

I took the shirt out first, tore off the tag, and left it on the shelf. Then I reached in and brushed the fine fabric of her garment. I pulled it out slowly, almost respectfully, and stood there for a moment in silence, with that thing in my hands.

I looked at them again under the white light of the room. They were dark blue, almost navy, with a fabric that was sheer both front and back. They weren’t small; neither was she a petite woman. But what caught my attention were the marks: whitish rings and some yellowish tones on the front. It was the trace of everything she had released that afternoon, of how wet she had gotten even before things had really started.

I had never had a pair of underwear like that in front of me. I mean, like that, to look at them calmly and understand what I had between my fingers. And I admit that simply holding them took me right back to the dark cinema, to her hand searching for mine over the armrest, to the way she looked ahead as if something were happening on the screen that was really happening between our legs.

I didn’t make it up. It happened. And this thing I have in my hand proves it.

My body started reacting before my head did. I felt it down low, that first warm sign that tells you what’s coming.

I brought them close to my nose almost without thinking. The truth is they didn’t give off a smell I could clearly identify as discharge, nor that sex smell a woman has when she gets completely soaked. What surprised me was something else: they smelled of perfume. A sweet, heavy perfume, exactly the same one I had noticed when she came back from the cinema bathroom and sat back down beside me.

It took me a second to understand, and when I did, I smiled to myself, standing there.

She perfumed them. In the bathroom. Before giving them to me.

She had planned it. She was clear that she was going to leave me that garment and, even more, that at some point during the night I was going to smell it. That’s why she bothered to spray them, to turn a used thing into some kind of perfumed gift meant for me. How smart she had been. I stayed there shaking my head, half disbelieving, with a mix of admiration and horniness rising slowly in me.

I had run into her at the late screening, the kind almost nobody chooses on a weekday. The auditorium was practically empty and she sat two seats away from mine, even though there was an entire row free. It wasn’t a coincidence. Ten minutes into the film, without looking at me, she set her purse on the floor and moved her hand to the armrest we shared.

I wasn’t breathing. I had my eyes fixed on the screen, not understanding a single scene, paying attention only to those fingers inching toward mine millimeter by millimeter. When they finally touched, neither of us pulled our hand away. She turned it slowly, intertwined her fingers with mine, and squeezed, as if to tell me she knew exactly what she was doing and had no intention of stopping.

What happened after that in the dim light was far more than anyone would expect from a cinema seat. I remember it in the dark, in fragments: her breath on my neck, her voice asking me things in my ear without raising the volume, the way she bit her lip so as not to make a sound. And in the end, before leaving, that quick gesture under her coat, the folded underwear she put in my hand without saying a word, just with a crooked smile.

Without letting go of the underwear, still with the entire memory of that afternoon’s fuck in me, what had been lit inside me finally finished growing. It didn’t take long before I had a full erection. I ran my hand over the front of my pants several times, checking the obvious, keeping it there, stretching that tension without hurrying.

“What if I jerk off?” I said quietly, to nobody.

I answered myself, also quietly.

“No. I’m going to jerk off.”

There was an old chair in one corner of the room, one of those you sit on to tie your shoes. I pulled it closer, sat down, and lowered my pants to my knees. I took it out and it sprang up at once, though it wasn’t as hard as it had been in the darkness of the cinema. That had been something else, brutal, one of those things that don’t happen again easily. Now I had it a bit softer, more manageable, and I looked at the bright side: that way I was going to feel every stroke in more detail.

I brought my hand to my mouth, moistened it a little with saliva, and slid it over the head so it would glide well. With the other hand I held the underwear, bringing it back to my nose. I breathed deeply. Her perfume filled my head again. I started moving.

Since I’m not circumcised, the skin covers the head, so I could see perfectly how it was uncovered and hidden again with each movement. I kept a steady rhythm and, every so often, sped up a couple of strokes and then slowed again. Every time I felt myself going up another notch, I pressed the fabric to my nose and inhaled hard, as if I wanted to shove the whole memory inside me.

On a couple of occasions I even stuck out the tip of my tongue and brushed the fabric to feel its texture. The soft cloth, the perfume, the image of her looking ahead in the theater while she squeezed my hand. It got rock hard, the veins perfectly outlined. I had to stop to moisten myself again.

I kept going. The fabric stuck to my face, my hand setting a tighter, more urgent pace. I closed my eyes and stopped looking at the garment so I could see her: her profile lit by the screen, the way she bit her lip when the tension rose, the moment she leaned toward me in the dimness and told me in my ear what she wanted without raising her voice.

When I felt it starting to build, that tingling that begins low and gives you a few seconds’ warning, I lowered the underwear and put them right underneath. I wanted everything to end up exactly on the marks she had left that afternoon. To mix with her trace.

It came out slowly, in spurts, and I kept watching as the blue fabric went white with it, one stain over another. It was much more than I expected. When I released the last drop, I pulled the head away, closing it with the skin as if squeezing out whatever might still be inside, and leaned back in the chair to breathe deeply.

“Fuck,” was all I managed to say.

I stayed like that for a while, breathing hard and with a tingle in my legs, the kind that remains after a good jerk off. When I came to myself, I saw there was still a thread of cum showing. With the same garment I finished cleaning myself, almost carefully, as if cleaning myself with them were the last part of the ritual she had started in the cinema bathroom.

***

I pulled my pants up and buttoned them. I gathered the underwear, now heavy and damp, and dropped them into the drum along with the new shirt and a couple of other things I had to wash. I poured in the detergent, closed the lid, and turned the cycle dial.

The machine started up with its low hum and began filling with water. I stood watching it for a few seconds, as if something more than fabric were being washed inside. In a way, that was exactly it. Tomorrow those panties would come out clean, without marks, without smell, without anything to give the afternoon away. Only the memory would remain, and memory doesn’t go away with any spin cycle.

I went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and took out a beer. I popped it open and took the first sip leaning against the counter, looking from a distance toward the laundry room. That day had to end like this, I told myself: with a cold beer, no rush, and with a woman’s perfume still stuck in my nose that, besides being pleasant, was the kind that doesn’t let go easily.

I thought about her. About how, probably, at that very hour, she would be at home imagining exactly what I had just done. She had left everything prepared for that. I took another swallow of beer and smiled in the empty kitchen.

Well played. I hope there’s a next time.