The Dirt Road Where No One Was Supposed to See Me

For those who still don’t know me, my name is Renata. I’m twenty-seven years old and I live in a small town in the interior, one of those places where people speak in low voices and the clock seems to move more slowly than anywhere else. I’m slim, fair-skinned, with brown hair always tied back and a face that more than one person has described as sweet. My smile is shy. My hazel eyes drop when someone holds my gaze for too long.

What nobody suspects when they run into me at the market or greet me in the square is what goes through my head. Behind that good-neighbor face lives a mind that lights up with the slightest spark and, once lit, doesn’t go out until it has burned itself completely.

I like to feel. I like to desire. I like to excite myself until my body trembles and reason gives up. I didn’t choose it; I’ve always been this way, as long as I can remember. While the other girls dreamed of proper boyfriends and town weddings, I got lost in fantasies I would never dare to say out loud.

And everything I’m going to tell started one ordinary afternoon, just as the sun was going down and the day’s heat was beginning to ease.

I was alone at home, half sprawled on the sofa, with my phone in my hand and my head nowhere in particular. Then it vibrated. A message. And not from just anyone.

It was from a reader who had already read things of mine before. This time he didn’t hold back. His words were direct, blunt, so raw they left me clenching my legs together and breathing hard without having done anything yet.

I bit my lip and read it again.

I shouldn’t be reading this.

But I read it a third time, and by then I was already feeling that familiar heat waking in my lower belly, that tingle that soaks me from the inside before I can decide anything. I know that feeling. I know that when it comes, there’s no way to stay still.

I stood up.

I didn’t put on underwear. That was the first decision, the one that changed everything. I pulled on denim shorts so short they barely covered me, and a tight white tank top with nothing underneath. My nipples showed through the fabric and, instead of embarrassing me, it only turned me on more.

I wanted to play with fire. I wanted to feel exposed, fragile, dangerously free.

I took the bike out from the yard, the same one I’ve had since my teens, with the worn seat and the creaking chain. I left town by the back street, the one nobody uses at that hour, and headed down a dirt road that winds between the trees.

***

The path is truly solitary. Tall trees on either side, a couple of fields in the distance, and a silence so thick it gets under your skin. I pedaled slowly, feeling how the warm evening air brushed my bare thighs.

And then I understood: every time my body lowered against the seat, every bump, every jolt, was a caress. The seam of my shorts dug between my lips, and I did nothing to stop it. On the contrary. I sought out the ruts in the road on purpose.

My breathing grew heavy. My nipples, hard, rubbed against the fabric with every movement. And my mind was already far away, back at that message.

I braked hard, planted one foot on the dirt, and opened my phone again. I replied. I don’t know where I found the nerve, but I replied.

—Are you alone? —he wrote.

—Alone, in the middle of nowhere, and wetter than I should admit —I answered, and sent the message before I could regret it.

—I’m picturing you in those shorts and nothing underneath.

—Every bounce of the bike gives me a kiss down there. I’m not exaggerating. I’m soaked.

—I want you to stop. Find a place among the trees. Pull your shorts down and touch yourself slowly, thinking of me.

I read that last line three times.

Do it. No one’s going to see you. No one will ever know.

I couldn’t take it anymore.

***

I left the bike leaning against a trunk and slipped between the trees, where the grass grows tall and the path is no longer visible. I walked until I found a clearing, a patch of dry earth surrounded by brush, hidden from the world and at the same time exposed to the whole sky.

I stopped there. My heart was pounding hard, not from fear, but from pure anticipation.

I slid my shorts down slowly, feeling the fabric peel away from my damp skin. The evening air touched me where no one should be touching me in a place like that, and my whole body prickled. I let them fall into the grass.

Then the tank top. I pulled it off over my head and hung it from a branch, as if I needed to leave proof of what was happening.

Naked. Alone. In sight of nothing and everything at once.

I lay back on the dry grass. The blades pricked my back and I liked that too, that small pain reminding me where I was and what I was about to do.

My fingers started at my neck, moved down over my chest. I stroked my breasts, cupping them with both hands while a sigh escaped me and disappeared among the trees. My nipples, sensitive, answered each touch with a current running straight down to my belly.

—Like that... just like that —I murmured, speaking to someone who wasn’t there.

In my head, that stranger had arrived. He was holding my wrists against the grass, kissing my neck, marking my skin with his mouth. I imagined surrendering to him without conditions, losing the control I work so hard to keep in front of everyone else.

One hand kept going lower. I found the wetness that had been building since the phone’s first vibration, since the first line of that message. I touched myself slowly, in circles, without rushing, stretching every second because I knew the longer I waited, the stronger everything would be afterward.

Pleasure rose in waves. Every so often I stopped, pulled my hand away, let desire hang there right on the edge, and started again. It’s a game I play with myself. Taking myself to the brink and not letting myself fall, again and again, until my body begs me for it.

The sun kept sinking between the treetops and golden patches fell across my naked skin. The scent of dry earth, grass, that country air that grows denser when evening falls. Every distant sound —a bird, a branch, a dog barking somewhere out in the fields— reminded me how exposed I was, and instead of frightening me, it pushed me a little farther to the edge.

The phone vibrated in the grass beside me. I didn’t look. No need. His voice already lived inside my head, telling me exactly what I wanted to hear.

—Don’t stop —I told myself, voice breaking—. Don’t you dare stop.

My legs began to tighten. I felt that warning tremor, that pressure building up with nowhere to go. I clenched my teeth, arched my back against the earth, and let it come.

The first spasm shook me from head to toe. Strong, hot, almost violent. I let out a long moan and didn’t bother holding it back, because there was nobody there to hear me. Or so I wanted to believe.

***

I didn’t stop. I kept going, still trembling, still slipping my fingers, chasing the next wave before the first had even finished receding.

And that was when a branch cracked in the distance.

I went rigid. My heart stopped and then started again twice as fast. An animal? The wind? Someone? The path had been empty when I arrived, but there, naked in the grass, there was no way to know.

And the most disturbing part, the thing I would never confess to anyone, is that the idea of being seen didn’t make me want to run. It made me burn.

The mere possibility that some unknown eyes were out there, hidden among the trees, watching me touch myself without my being able to see them, pushed me back to the edge. I imagined that real reader, flesh and blood, standing a few meters away, silent, watching.

I kept going. Faster now, more desperate, glancing out of the corner of my eye toward where the branch had sounded, not wanting to find anyone and wanting it with every fiber of my being at the same time.

The second orgasm doubled me over. And then a third came right after it, chained to the first two, leaving me breathless, my legs open on the ground and my mind completely blank.

I stayed like that for a long while. Naked, wet, pulsing all over, with the evening sky turning orange above me and dust stuck to my back.

I didn’t hear anything again. Maybe there had never been anyone. Maybe it had only been the wind playing with my imagination, the one that always finds a way to push me a little further.

When I finally sat up, I took the tank top from the branch and the shorts from the grass. I dressed slowly, my body still sensitive to every touch of the fabric. I went back to the bike, climbed on, and headed back to town with the day’s last light.

I crossed the square, greeting Doña Amelia, who was watering her plants as she did every afternoon. I returned her usual shy smile, the one everyone knows. She would never imagine where I’d come from or what I had just done in that hidden clearing.

Back at home, freshly showered and still with a slow pulse, I grabbed my phone. The last message was still unopened.

—Did you do it? —it asked.

I smiled to myself before answering.

—I did. And I think someone saw me. But I’ll tell you that part next time.

I’m Renata, the sweet neighbor in the town where nothing ever happens. And believe me, this was only just beginning.