The Camera That Rekindled Me After Years

There are desires one thinks have been buried, when really they were only asleep, waiting for a crack to let them back in. Mine had been that way for years, quiet, hidden behind the routine of being a wife and mother. But it only took an empty house and a sleepless dawn to wake it completely, with the same force as before.

I have to go back a little for it to make sense. When I was younger and didn’t yet have my daughter, I met a man on camera. I never saw him in person. We talked at night, when everyone was asleep, and he taught me things about myself I didn’t even know. What we had worked precisely because it lived behind a screen, far away, impossible.

The problem started when he wanted to move from the screen to the skin. He pressured me to meet, to touch for real, and I got scared. I wasn’t afraid of him, I was afraid of myself: of what I might do if I had him in front of me. So I cut it off. I closed the account, deleted him, got married, and convinced myself that woman had been someone else.

Time took care of the rest. My husband is a good man, but closed off, one of those who always repeat the same formula in bed and take offense if I suggest anything different. The relationship became comfortable and predictable, like a piece of furniture no one looks at anymore. I got used to it, or so I thought.

***

Then he left. A work trip, almost a month away from home. My daughter stayed with my mother for a few days, and I found myself alone in a house that was too silent, too much mine. The first night I barely noticed. The second I started tossing and turning in bed. The third I couldn’t take it anymore.

I got up, opened the computer, and recovered the old email account, the one I hadn’t touched in years. I was hot, desperate, with my body asking me for something my husband hadn’t given me in far too long. I wrote a short message, expecting nothing. I only wanted to know if he was still on the other side.

Days passed. I had almost given up when the reply arrived. Two dry lines, but enough to make my heart lurch. We agreed on one in the morning, when the whole building would be asleep and the city would belong to just the two of us.

I waited for that hour like a teenage girl. I showered, put on perfume, chose my clothes carefully. I was not the same woman as before: time, pregnancies, nights without being touched had shaped this version of me. I chose a pair of sky-high sandals and nothing else under a sheer robe.

When the video call opened, the first thing I felt was a knot in my stomach. Eight years had passed. But his voice was still the same, deep and calm, and from the very first second he knew how to speak to me. As if time hadn’t passed, I was once again that woman to him, the one who only existed at night and in front of the camera.

What was strange was how natural it felt. There was no awkwardness, no uncomfortable silences between two people meeting again after so long. He took control the way he always had, as if only a few hours had gone by and not nearly a decade. I, who during the day made decisions about the house, about my daughter, about everything, found myself in front of that screen unable to decide anything again. And I discovered how much I had missed that feeling of letting go of the reins.

—Look at you —he said slowly—. You look better than you did then.

And I believed him, because I wanted to believe him.

***

I put on music and started to dance. I knew that turned him on, so I moved slowly, letting the robe open little by little. I showed him what he asked for, spread my legs so he could see how I got wet, how I moistened just from feeling watched. I hadn’t been touched for a month and I was at a thousand, desperate to feel something.

Suddenly I cut the music. He was looking at me in silence, and that silence turned me on more than any word.

—Your body before was a girl’s —he said—. This one is a woman’s. Hips, breasts, everything. You’re a whole woman now.

He always liked my hips. And my breasts, which over the years had become fuller, drove him wild. He asked me to strip completely, and there I was, taking off the last layer in front of the only man who ever made good on the fantasies I didn’t even dare to say out loud.

—Lie down —he ordered—. Lift your legs. Open yourself and bring the camera closer.

I obeyed every word. I moved the computer until I was spread open for him, and he began to move through me with his tongue on the other side of the screen, licking the air as if it were my skin. It was absurd and at the same time the hottest thing I’d experienced in years. I was really moaning, because in my head that tongue was on me.

—Turn around —he said then—. Show me everything and let me run over you from head to toe.

I turned, lifted my hips, showed him what he wanted. We stayed like that for almost twenty minutes, him guiding me with his voice and me melting. I had never been so wet.

***

Then came the feet. He always had that weakness. He asked me to bring the camera to my feet and for a long while he licked them in the air, slowly, one toe at a time, while he described in detail everything he would do if he had them for real in his mouth. Fifteen minutes like that, and I didn’t understand how something so simple could have me trembling.

—Raise the camera —he murmured—. To your breasts. Wet them.

I did. I ran my damp hands over them, squeezed them, offered them to the screen while he told me exactly how he wanted them. We stayed in that game a while longer, until his voice changed and I knew what was coming.

—It’s time —he said—. Now.

I took the toy I had kept hidden, the one my husband never knew existed. I slid it into myself while he watched, and howled. I had spent a month wanting exactly this. Within minutes I came once, and kept going, moaning, breathing with an intensity that made me shake from head to toe.

When I managed to calm down a little, he asked me to dance again. And as I moved, he started talking dirty to me, with those words that would have disgusted me from anyone else’s mouth but from his lit me up like nothing else.

—You’re mine tonight —he said—. My little slut, my wide-hipped pig. I’m going to split you in two. I’m going to bite you until I leave you marked.

Every phrase was fuel on the fire. I was literally dripping between my legs, unashamed, completely given over to that man who dominated me without touching me.

***

And here comes the part I’m embarrassed to admit. In the bedroom I have a huge stuffed bear, ridiculous, one of those you win at amusement parks. That night I climbed on top of it, naked, and fucked myself imagining it was him riding me. Rubbing against the teddy bear, biting my lips, letting the fantasy do the rest. I know it sounds absurd. I also know it was one of the best things I’ve ever felt in my life.

That first night wasn’t the last. We met every dawn for weeks. He ate me up with his voice and I let him, did everything he asked, discovered corners of myself that had been turned off for years. I felt desired again, alive, dangerous. I looked at myself in the mirror during the day, with my mother-and-wife face, and no one would have imagined what that same woman was doing at two in the morning.

Every night we invented something new. One time he made me wait dressed and undress so slowly it took me half an hour to get naked. Another he forbade me to touch myself until he said so, and kept me on edge for an endless stretch, begging him with my eyes through the camera. I learned to enjoy the waiting as much as the finish, something I had never known in my marriage bed.

During the day I functioned on autopilot. I called my husband, told him unimportant things, asked about his trip in a calm voice he didn’t recognize. I hung up and went back to counting the hours until dawn. I lived two lives and, for the first time in a long time, both seemed bearable only because the second one existed.

***

The problem, of course, was the same as eight years ago. After several nights he started insisting again. He wanted to see me in person, to feel me for real, to finish once and for all what the screen only hinted at. And I felt that dizziness in my stomach again, that mix of desire and fear I don’t know how to handle.

Because one part of me is dying to go. To truly live all those nights, to let those hands do what the voice promised. And another part stops me, reminds me that I have a daughter, a husband coming back soon, an entire life that could come crashing down in a single dawn.

I’m still tempted. Every night I stay awake I think of him again, of his voice, of what it would be like to have him in front of me. I don’t know whether I have the courage or the cowardice not to do it. And that’s why I’m writing it here, in the dark, still with my body on fire and the question stuck inside me: what would you do in my place?