The Afternoon I Let Myself Be Carried Away by My Fantasy

I’m twenty-seven, I work in an architecture studio, and until a few months ago I thought I could manage desire however I wanted: control it, put it off, ignore it when it suited me. I’m good at ignoring things. At work, at home, with my family, who have spent years asking me when I’m going to “settle down.” But there are certain desires that don’t allow themselves to be postponed. Sooner or later they build up until there’s no room left, and then they don’t ask permission. They just come out.

It all started in Wednesday’s spinning class. The usual instructor had taken leave because of an injury, and Marcos was sent in to replace him. He arrived ten minutes before everyone else, checked the settings on every bike with the concentration of someone who either does things properly or doesn’t do them at all, and when he greeted us as we came in, he did it in a voice that sounded like aged whiskey and trouble. Tall, with the shoulders of someone who really carries weight and forearms covered in dark, close-cropped hair that, for some reason I couldn’t explain, I couldn’t stop looking at. I stayed still on my bike for almost thirty seconds while the rest of the room was already pedaling.

He came back the following Wednesday. And the one after that. And the one after that. Within a month, I had his schedule memorized without even meaning to. I knew he always arrived ten minutes early, that he tied his laces from right to left, that he started sweating at the nape of his neck before anywhere else. I also knew he had a girlfriend: I’d seen her waiting for him at the door a couple of times. A brunette with the face of someone who suspected nothing, which was reasonable, because I hadn’t done anything yet. Just watched. Just built it up.

I’m a virgin. At twenty-seven. By choice some days, because of circumstances on others, depending on how people ask and how I happen to be feeling when they ask me. There was never anyone I wanted to cross that threshold with, no one who stirred up enough desire for me to want to take that step. No one until Marcos appeared, and even that wasn’t going anywhere because he had a partner and I wasn’t that kind of woman. But desire doesn’t distinguish between what you are and what you’re not. Desire does what it wants, and you just manage it however you can.

What I could control was the way I managed it.

***

One Tuesday in April — Tuesday was always the worst, the day before his class, when the cycle was at its peak — I took my bike after leaving work and rode for forty minutes to the river clearing I knew from when I was little. A bend among willows and poplars, set apart from the main path, where the water flowed slowly and the ground was soft earth covered in fine grass. I’d gone there for a picnic with my parents one summer in childhood and never went back after that. It hadn’t occurred to me to return until that morning, when I woke with the image of Marcos so clear in my head that it took me several seconds to separate sleep from waking.

I rode with my heart beating higher than the effort justified. The air smelled of damp earth and freshly cut grass from some nearby field. In the last few kilometers, the path narrowed until the branches brushed my shoulders on both sides, and I knew I was getting close.

I parked the bike against a willow and stood there for a moment, listening. Just the water, the birds, the dry rustle of wind through the branches. No other human being for miles. The late afternoon sun came in at a low angle, tinting everything with a dense orange light.

I took off my T-shirt. Then my sports bra. The April air raised goosebumps on my arms and breasts, and I breathed in deeply, lungs full, as if I were releasing something I’d had compressed for months. I looked down and saw my nipples hardened by the coolness, the skin of my stomach trembling faintly against the breeze. I liked feeling like that, exposed and alone, without witnesses, with my whole body asking for what I’d been denying it for so long.

I lay down on the grass with my backpack rolled up under my neck. I took out what I’d brought: a vibrator I’d bought a long time ago in a moment of passing bravery and had never used with so much intention, with so much clarity of purpose. I left it at my side, still switched off, and closed my eyes.

I saw him arrive in the spinning room. I saw him adjust the neck mic before getting on the bike. I saw him look for me among the group and, when he found me, look away just one second later than necessary. Always that extra second. In my head, the scene continued differently.

The class ends and everyone leaves except me. Marcos crosses the empty room, tells me he’s been looking at me for weeks in a way he can’t keep ignoring, and I don’t deny anything because what’s the point. He touches my jaw with his fingers — those fingers with dark hair over the knuckles and a broad, warm palm — and asks if I want him to stop. And I tell him no.

I slid my pants down with my underwear and ended up naked under the evening sky. The breeze ran over my thighs, my hips, my stomach. I slowly traced my skin with my fingertips, unhurried, letting touch come before anything else. I opened my legs just a little, then a little more, feeling the cold air slip between the lips of my cunt and sending a shiver through me.

I was wet. Not since that moment, but long before: since I showered that morning and imagined him, since I decided where I’d go that afternoon, since I pedaled the first few kilometers with my stomach tight and my head full of images that didn’t ask permission to appear. I ran two fingers over the opening, sliding in easily, and the gesture made me let out a trembling exhale. I was surprised by how fast my body responded once I finally let it.

I switched the vibrator on to its lowest setting and rested it against my thigh before bringing it where I needed it. The soft buzzing against my skin was enough to cut my breath short. I slid it upward slowly, first along the inner thigh, then across the wet slit between my legs, until it pressed the exact spot on my clit. The first jolt arched my back; the second made me open my knees wider, searching for a better angle, better pressure, more of everything.

—Marcos —I whispered, not speaking to anyone, just wanting to feel the name in my mouth. To give a name to what I was doing.

His hands on my hips. His weight above me, controlled, unhurried. He asks if it’s my first time and I nod, and instead of backing off he slows down, looks me straight in the eye, does things carefully, as if that mattered. As if I mattered more than anything else in that moment.

I turned the intensity up. My hips lifted on their own, my feet braced in the grass to get a better angle, my back lifting off the ground. With one hand I held the vibrator in place; with the other I spread myself wider, parting my lips to let the device hit exactly where I needed it most. The sound was small, insistent, almost obscene in the river silence. I felt the heat build in my lower belly, felt my cunt throbbing with animal urgency, and I started moving my pelvis against the device with little desperate rocking motions.

—That’s it —I murmured, though there was no one there but me—. Just like that, fuck.

The first orgasm came without any visible buildup, without warning, the way things come when you’ve been waiting too long: all at once and completely, and it lasted much longer than I expected. It wasn’t a clean jolt, but a series of deep contractions that squeezed me from the inside, from my clit to the depths of my cunt, climbing through my abdomen and leaving my throat open in a wet, broken moan. I stayed still for a second, trembling, while the buzzing kept striking my skin and my whole body burned.

I screamed. The sound vanished among the willows and didn’t matter to anyone.

I didn’t stop. Sensitivity after coming can turn into pain or into something else, depending on your mood and how long you’ve been holding out against what you’ve been holding out against. That afternoon it decided to become something else. I pressed the vibrator back against my clit, first carefully, then with more pressure, and the overdose of pleasure tore an abrasive gasp from me. I brought two fingers to my cunt and slid them inside slowly, feeling the hot wetness, my pulse still racing, the entrance tightening around me. The vibrator’s metal buzzing above and my fingers sinking below made me lose any remaining control.

I turned onto my stomach with the vibrator beneath me and my hip pressing down on it. I picked up the fantasy where I’d left it off.

Marcos tells me he’s been thinking about this since the first Wednesday. That when he sees me in the third row, it’s hard for him to focus on the choreography. That he hadn’t planned any of this. And I think: neither had I. Neither had I. But here we are, and neither of us is moving.

In my head he unhooks my bra with steady hands, bends down and sucks one breast with restrained hunger, first one nipple, then the other, while he asks if I’m always this quiet or only when I’m about to come. I laugh, or try to, but he’s already opening my legs with a confidence that steals my breath. I feel his mouth move down my stomach, his beard scraping my skin, his tongue finding the exact center of my desire and licking my cunt with brutal precision, until my hips begin to move on their own and I grab his hair so he won’t stop.

The second orgasm was longer and deeper. I felt the contraction from the inside out, in slow waves, and I bit the grass between my teeth so I wouldn’t scream again. This time the pleasure didn’t rise all at once but spread like a thick current from my clit to my anus, tightening my stomach, my legs, my thighs, until I was trembling, my whole body hard and then soft in one single wrenching release. I kept rubbing myself a little more, without mercy, demanding the very last drop from my body, until the sensitivity became almost painful and forced me to pull the vibrator away with a muffled moan.

I stayed completely still on the ground, ear pressed to the earth, listening to my own heart calm little by little. The heat was still pounding between my legs. I could feel my cunt open, sensitive, wet, and the smell of my own body mixed with grass and earth felt strangely satisfying, almost feral.

I stayed like that for several minutes. The sun had dropped another notch. The birds were the same. The river sounded the same. The whole world had gone on functioning without noticing a thing.

I sat up slowly and sat on the grass with my legs crossed. My skin was covered in green marks from the grass and my head was completely empty, in the same way a room feels after being aired out for the first time in months: different. Cleaner. With more space.

I’m still a virgin, I thought, brushing a blade of grass off my shoulder.

But there are things that can happen inside you without anyone touching you. Things that change something without leaving a visible mark. Things that don’t need witnesses to be completely real.

I dressed slowly, drank the water left in my bottle, and got back on the bike. The ride home felt shorter, as it always does when you’re no longer going toward something and are simply going back.

The following Wednesday I walked into the spinning room five minutes earlier than usual. Marcos was adjusting the neck mic in front of the mirror. He looked up when he heard me arrive.

—Hi —he said.

—Hi —I replied.

I took my place in the third row. My heart steady. My head clear. Knowing I was still the same as always. Knowing too, with a clarity I’d never had before, that I was no longer exactly the same as before. That something had come out. That something had changed. And that, whatever it was, was completely mine.