The Desire I Imagine When I Go Out Riding Alone

I’ve never told anyone this. I’m writing it now because it weighs less when I get it out of my head and leave it somewhere, even if it’s on a page no one will ever read. I’m thirty-two, I’m five foot nine, and I’m the opposite of delicate: broad shoulders, strong legs, the body of someone who rides for miles every weekend. The people I pass on the street would never imagine what I think about. And that distance between what I look like and what I want is exactly what turns me on the most.

I’ll start with the only real thing, because everything else lives only in my imagination.

On Saturday mornings I head out along the dirt roads that circle the town. I like the silence, the smell of damp fields, the feeling of being far away from everything. But there’s one detail I keep to myself: under my cycling shorts I wear a thong. Not a discreet one. A flashy lace one, in a color that would be visible from far away if someone yanked my clothes down. No one knows. I ride for hours with that secret pressed against my skin, and every time the seat brushes me I feel that garment reminding me who I am when no one is watching.

If someone knew, I think. If someone found out.

That’s where the fantasy starts. Always the same, though every time I add a new detail.

***

I’m on a secluded stretch, one of those where the road slips between the trees and the highway disappears from view. I hear a bicycle behind me. It’s a man quite a bit older than me, with gray hair and arms weathered by the sun. He catches up to me, matches his pace to mine, and starts talking to me as if we’ve known each other all our lives. I give him a name in my head: Marcelo.

The conversation is light at first. The weather, the hills, how good it feels to breathe at this hour. But there’s something in the way he glances at me from the corner of his eye, in the way he lingers for an extra second on my legs, that makes me understand he can read what the others can’t see too. We ride together to a clearing where the road widens and no one comes by. We stop. The silence turns thick.

—That outfit suits you —he says, and he doesn’t mean the cycling shorts.

I don’t answer. I lower my gaze. That’s all the response he needs.

Marcelo leans his bike against a tree without rushing, like someone who has all the time in the world. He comes closer. He puts a hand on my hip, slowly, and with the other he brushes the edge of my shorts until he finds the lace hidden underneath. He smiles. Not in surprise, but in satisfaction, as if he had guessed my secret before touching it.

—Look at what you’ve got hidden away —he murmurs—. And here I took you for just another guy.

In the fantasy my legs tremble. I like that part: the exact moment when I stop pretending. He turns me against the tree, pulls my shorts down to my thighs, and leaves the thong on display. I feel exposed and desired at the same time, and those two things together are what I chase every time I close my eyes.

***

From there, Marcelo stops treating me like a man. And that, which in real life would be so hard for me to ask for, happens on its own in the fantasy.

He speaks to me softly, with a calm authority that doesn’t need to raise its voice. He tells me how to stand, how to arch my back, where to put my hands. I obey every word. There’s a surrender in that that I can’t find anywhere else: letting someone else decide for me, becoming whatever he wants me to be for as long as it lasts.

—You weren’t born to be in charge —he says in my ear—. It shows in the way you lower your eyes.

He’s right, and in the fantasy I’m not ashamed to admit it. I feel relieved.

I imagine him promising me things. That if I behave, he’ll teach me. That he’ll shave me completely, my legs, my chest, everything, until my skin is as smooth as I’ve always dreamed it would be. That he’ll buy me proper lingerie, not the stuff I hide at the back of a drawer, but the kind you choose carefully, checking which pieces go best together. That he’ll transform me into someone else, a version of myself that exists only in my head and that I gave a name years ago: Lucía.

Lucía. That’s what I call myself when I’m alone in front of the mirror.

In reality I’ve never dared go beyond the thong and a lipstick I put on and wipe off within five minutes. But in the fantasy Marcelo takes me all the way. He turns me, slowly and in his own way, into the woman I keep hidden inside.

And what surprises me most, every time I rehearse this scene in my head, is that he never rushes. He doesn’t treat me like a one-night conquest. He treats me like something worth caring for. He tells me we’re going to take it slow, that there’s time, that first I need to learn to see myself the way he sees me. That patience is, perhaps, the most erotic part of it all. Not sex itself, but the feeling that someone finally understands exactly what I need without my having to explain it in clumsy words.

***

The clearing among the trees changes. It’s no longer a dirt road: it’s a room in an old house in some forgotten town, with half-closed shutters and a wide bed. Marcelo isn’t alone. In the fantasy, his wife appears, a woman his age with firm hands and a playful look. They’ve been together for years and share a taste no one in town would suspect.

She looks me up and down and nods in approval, like someone assessing a good find.

—You’ll do —she says under her breath—. We’ll have to polish you up a bit, but you’ll do.

The two of them get me ready. She does my makeup patiently, explaining each step as if she were initiating me into a trade. He watches from the armchair, unhurried, letting her take charge of that part. I feel like a project, like something being built little by little, and I love that. I’m not a man who just happened to pass through: I’m someone they’re turning into what they wanted to have.

—Tell her thank you —she tells me when she’s finished.

—Thank you —I say, and my voice comes out higher than I expected.

***

The scene I repeat most is the game between the two of them. Marcelo takes me first, slowly, while she holds my face in her hands and tells me in my ear how well I’m doing. The lace thong is still there, shifted only a little to one side, because he likes it when I don’t take it off completely. He asks me not to make a sound, then asks me to make as much noise as I want. He contradicts himself on purpose, just to remind me that he makes the rules.

The anal penetration, in my head, isn’t rough or rushed. It’s patient. He knows what he’s doing and I trust him, which is the hardest thing to get in real life and the easiest in fantasy. She kisses my neck meanwhile, strokes my hair, calls me by the name I chose. Lucía here, Lucía there. Hearing that name in another mouth, not my own in front of a mirror, is what finally sets me on fire.

—See how well-behaved he is? —he says to her, without stopping—. If you catch them in time, they learn fast.

And I, in the fantasy, don’t want to be anywhere else.

***

Sometimes I take it one step further. I imagine it’s not just the two of them. That Marcelo invites a friend his age, another calm, self-assured man, and that the three of them use me all afternoon while the woman directs the scene from her chair, like a conductor who knows exactly when each instrument comes in. I imagine someone sets a phone on the dresser and records, and that idea —being recorded, being seen by people I’ll never meet— gives me a mix of panic and desire I can’t explain.

Because that’s what’s hardest for me to admit: the exhibitionist part is the one I like most. It isn’t enough to do it. I want someone to see what I become. I want proof that, at least once, I was exactly what I always wanted to be and I didn’t hide.

In those longer versions of the fantasy, the woman keeps giving me instructions the whole time. Look at the camera, smile, tell the three of them what you want. And I do. With that higher voice of mine, unashamed, I repeat out loud every word I’d never dare say in real life. Marcelo and his friend laugh softly, not at me, but with that complicity of people sharing a good secret. And for once I feel at the exact center of something, desired by everyone in the room.

***

Then the fantasy fades on its own, as all fantasies do, and I’m back on the real dirt road, on the bike, in the honest sweat of exertion. I keep pedaling with the lace thong under my shorts and no one for miles around suspects it. The seat brushes me, the memory of what I’ve just imagined stays with me a little longer, and I smile to myself, out in the middle of the fields.

I don’t know whether I’ll ever dare go further. I don’t know if Marcelo exists somewhere, waiting to cross paths with me on a secluded road, reading in me what I think I hide so well. Maybe he does. Maybe next time I hear a bike behind me it won’t be my imagination.

For now, this is enough for me: the secret pressed against my skin, the name I give myself when I’m alone, and the certainty that somewhere in a corner of my head, I already am everything I want to be.

Lucía. And I still have the rest to tell them.