The Afternoon I Discovered What My Body Wanted

From a very young age I knew there was something different in the way my body responded to the world. Any scene in a movie, a couple kissing in the street, a deep voice on the radio: one detail was enough to spark something inside me, in a place I didn’t know how to name. I didn’t understand what it was or why it happened to me, and for years I learned to hide it, to squeeze my thighs under the table and pretend I felt nothing.

I turned nineteen and still didn’t dare explore that terrain. I lived with my parents in an apartment in the center of Valverde, was in my first year of Design studies, and spent most of my time shut up in my room, between notes and the laptop they’d given me for university. I was curious about everything except my own body, as if desire were an exam I’d rather not take.

That Friday in November changed everything. My mother was cooking downstairs and the smell of stew rose up the stairs. I was, supposedly, reviewing an assignment due Monday. But curiosity had been gnawing at me for weeks, and that afternoon, with the door closed and silence on my side, I opened the browser and typed into the search bar something I had never allowed myself to look up before: woman masturbating alone.

I’m just going to look for a moment, I told myself. To understand what this is about.

The page filled with images and links, too many to process all at once. Thumbnails of open cunts, tits squeezed between two hands, fingers sunk in up to the knuckle. I moved the cursor from one to the next without deciding, my heart pounding in my throat and a warm wetness starting to gather between my legs. And then I saw it: the thumbnail of a mature woman, brown-haired and serene-faced, sitting on the edge of a bed. No one else was in the video. Just her and the camera.

I hit play almost without thinking. I turned the volume down as low as possible in case my mother’s footsteps came near, and leaned toward the screen as if I wanted to step inside it.

The woman was named Renata, according to the title. She moved slowly, without haste, with a confidence that left me hypnotized. She stroked her arms, her neck, slid the pads of her fingers over her blouse before unbuttoning it. Every gesture was deliberate, as if she knew exactly what her body needed and enjoyed making it wait.

Without realizing it, I had started to imitate her. My fingers climbed up my ribs, still over my T-shirt, clumsily repeating her movements. I felt ridiculous and fascinated at the same time. I didn’t want to miss a single detail of what she was doing, so I leaned back against the headboard and let my hands follow hers from a distance.

***

My mother’s shout broke the spell all at once.

—Aitana, come down and eat before it gets cold!

I snapped the laptop shut, heart racing, and straightened my clothes as if someone could read on my face what I had just discovered. I went downstairs trying to breathe normally, but my mind stayed upstairs, trapped in the image of that woman who seemed like a goddess indifferent to the rest of the world.

I sat down at the table and my mother looked at me over her plate. She has always had a radar for my moods.

—Everything okay, sweetheart? You’re flushed.

—Yeah, yeah —I answered too quickly—. I think I’m catching a cold, my body feels weird.

—Then finish eating and go upstairs to rest, it’s Friday and you don’t have to get up early —she said, going back to her stew—. Your father’s getting home late today, so relax.

—Thanks, Mom. I’ll do that.

I ate as fast as I could without making the hurry obvious. Every bite tasted like impatience, and my panties kept sticking to my wet pussy every time I shifted in the chair. The lie about a cold had bought me exactly what I needed: an entire afternoon with nobody bothering me, nobody knocking on my door. My mother, as always, treated me with the tenderness of someone who still sees a little girl where there’s already a woman with urgent questions.

I went up saying I’d sleep for a while, that please no one should wake me. I closed the door, this time locking it too, and stood for a moment in the middle of the room, listening to the sounds of the house: the sink running, the TV on downstairs, the routine moving on without me.

***

I took the laptop to bed and plugged in my headphones, determined that no sound would escape that room. I hit play and found Renata again, right where I’d left her, as if she’d been waiting for me all that time.

She was finishing undressing with the same calm as before. The blouse fell to the floor, and underneath there was a black bra that squeezed her big, heavy tits. She unhooked it in front and her breasts were freed, with dark, hard nipples pointing at the camera. She grabbed them with both hands, squeezed them, pinched the tips with her thumbs and index fingers until I saw her close her eyes and bite her lip. And I, almost by inertia, did the same. I took off my T-shirt, my pants, my already wet panties, leaving everything piled on the floor next to the bed. The cool afternoon air raised goosebumps on my skin. I had never looked at myself so much: my breasts, the curve of my belly, the dark patch of hair over my cunt, the way my breathing moved everything. For the first time I didn’t feel shame, but a new, hungry curiosity.

I started like her, from the top. I stroked my neck, brought my hands down to cover my breasts, squeezed them gently, testing what it felt like. A warm current ran down my back and went straight to my cunt, which was already throbbing like a second heart. I repeated the gesture, this time more slowly, surprised at how much everything changed depending on pressure, rhythm, intention. I caught one nipple between my thumb and index finger and tugged at it carefully; the jolt made my mouth open in a silent O. I did it with the other one, then with both at once, watching them harden until they looked like two little pink pebbles, the areola tightening around them.

I paused for a moment to look at myself in the wardrobe mirror, half-open in front of the bed. Seeing myself like that, naked and surrendering to something I had always hidden, with my thighs already shining with wetness and my tits red from squeezing them so much, made me feel a shame that lasted only a second and then turned into something else. I liked what I saw. I liked the woman looking back at me, with flushed cheeks, stiff nipples, and a determination I didn’t know I had. I tore my eyes away from the mirror and focused again on the screen, determined to get all the way through this discovery.

On the screen, Renata slid one hand between her legs. She spread her thighs wide to the camera and for the first time in my life I saw a woman’s cunt up close: swollen lips, glossy, a clit peeking out between the folds like a pink pearl. She touched it with two fingers, in small circles, and her mouth opened in a long gasp. I copied her without thinking, holding my breath, opening my legs until my knees touched the edges of the mattress. The first brush of my fingers over my clit ripped out a spasm so intense I nearly screamed; I bit the pillow just in time for my mother not to hear anything. I stayed still for a few seconds, frightened by my own reaction, my body vibrating like a tightened string and a drop of my juices sliding down my ass crack.

Then I tried again, more attentive, more careful. I traced slow circles around the clit, discovering which spots made my back arch and which ones forced me to clench my teeth. I was soaked, so much that the sheet beneath me was dampening, a warm little puddle of fluids that smelled like me, like something animal and new. I brought my fingers to my nose and breathed in that smell of mine, and liked it so much that I put them in my mouth and sucked them, tasting myself for the first time. Only the woman on the screen and I existed, two bodies separated by glass, doing the same thing at the same rhythm, two cunts opening at the same time.

Renata had slipped two fingers deep inside herself and was moving them in and out with a hypnotic rhythm, shining with wetness, while with her other hand she kept rubbing her clit. I lowered one hand to the entrance of my cunt, circled around feeling how wet I was, and slowly slid a finger in, imitating every motion she made. I felt everything inside me open to a sensation with no name: a tight, slippery heat, closing around my finger as if it wanted to swallow it. I pulled it out, went back in, played with the cadence until I found one that left me breathless. I added a second finger and the stretch made me moan softly into the pillow; it hurt a little and I liked it in equal measure. I curled them upward, groping blindly, and found a spongy spot on the inner wall that, when I pressed it, made me jerk against the mattress. There. Right there.

I started fucking myself properly with my fingers, in and out faster and faster, while with my left hand I rubbed my clit in tight circles. The wet sound of my fingers entering my soaked cunt slipped through the headphones and mixed with Renata’s gasps, and I think that was when I truly understood what was happening: I was masturbating, I was fucking myself, and it was the best thing I had ever felt in my life. The initial clumsiness had turned into something almost instinctive, as if my body remembered a language my mind had just begun to learn.

The tension kept building in waves, each higher than the last. I closed my eyes and stopped looking at the screen; I didn’t need it anymore. I focused only on what I felt, on the heat gathering in a point between my legs and threatening to overflow. I sped my fingers over my clit until they became a blurred tremor, kept pumping the other two inside me, searching for that spongy spot again and again. I squeezed my thighs around my own hand, threw my head back, arched my back so much my tits lifted toward the ceiling, and let that wave finally break.

The orgasm shook me from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet. I felt my cunt clench in violent spasms around my fingers, squeezing, releasing, squeezing again, while a burst of heat surged through my belly and exploded in my chest. I had to bury my face in the pillow to muffle a howl I didn’t recognize as my own. My legs were trembling uncontrollably, my thighs were soaked with a warm gush I hadn’t even known I could produce, and for a few seconds I was incapable of thinking about anything at all, only of breathing in short gasps, chest rising and falling as if I’d run for miles and my fingers still inside me, feeling how the last contractions squeezed them less and less forcefully.

I pulled my hand out slowly, almost afraid something would slip away, and looked at it. My fingers were shining, coated to the knuckles with my own juices, and without thinking I brought them back to my mouth and licked them one by one, clean, savoring that salty, slightly sweet taste that was myself.

So this was it, I thought when I caught my breath. This was what my body had been asking me for all these years.

***

I closed the page and stayed lying there for a while on my back, naked, my legs still open and my cunt pulsing slowly, staring at the ceiling with a smile I couldn’t erase. I felt light, freed, as if I’d taken off a weight I hadn’t even known I was carrying. The guilt I expected to feel never came; in its place was a kind of peace, the certainty of having discovered a part of myself that was mine alone.

I got into the shower to wash away the sweat and the smell of sex from the afternoon. The warm water on my still-sensitive skin was another kind of pleasure, calmer; the stream hit my swollen nipples and I had to brace myself against the tiles because my knees were still weak. I washed my cunt carefully, surprised at how open and throbbing it still was. Then I changed the sheets, hid the dirty ones at the bottom of the hamper, and opened the window to air out the room, carefully covering my little mischief’s tracks.

When I went down for dinner, my mother said I looked better. I told her the rest had done me a world of good, and I wasn’t exactly lying. That night I slept better than I had in a long time, hugging the pillow, knowing Monday would bring back university, notes, and routine, but that I would never again be quite the same shy girl I’d been before.

Sometimes I think about Renata, the woman in that video who will never know I exist, and I thank her in silence. Without meaning to, she taught me to look at myself without fear, to put my hand between my legs without guilt, to understand that desire wasn’t something wrong with me, but something that had been waiting far too long for me to dare listen to it. That Friday afternoon I stopped ignoring it. And ever since then, every time the house falls silent, I lock myself in, spread my legs on the bed, and know exactly what to do with it.