The Fire That Won’t Go Out, Even If It Wants To

Andrés is asleep on his stomach, the sheet pulled up halfway, his broad shoulders on display. The light coming through the blinds cuts his back into bands of gold. He is a handsome man. A good man. I know that, and I do not doubt it.

But the first thing I feel when I see him is not love.

It is hunger. A thick heat born in my belly and sinking slowly, unhurriedly, as if it knows it will stay all day. It is not new. It has been living in me for weeks like a tenant who doesn’t pay and won’t leave. Last night we tried something, but he fell asleep halfway through, exhausted from a long week, and I was left with that knot in my stomach I do not know how to untie. With panties soaked through to the seam and my cunt throbbing like a second heart, staring at the ceiling, squeezing my thighs together to calm a pulse that only beat harder.

I could wake him now. I could lay my hand on his back and press gently until he stirred. Slip my hand under the sheet, find his sleeping cock, and work it with my mouth until he woke up hard, pushing against my palate. The idea pulls a smile from me that never quite takes shape.

But I already know how that almost always ends: a distracted kiss, something mechanical and brief, and then him closing his eyes again, satisfied, while I lie there staring at the ceiling, even hotter than before. I’d rather not risk it. I’d rather get up before touching him, before facing that possible “not now, darling” that would hurt more than the desire itself.

I get up quietly. I pick up the clothes I left beside the bed and leave the room. As I pass the mirror, I catch a glimpse of myself: nipples outlined beneath my T-shirt, hard, swollen, as if they’ve been begging for a mouth for hours.

***

The shower is too hot. I know it and I do not turn it down.

The water hits me and I close my eyes. I do not think of Andrés. I think of Roberto, the electrician who came three days ago to replace the hallway fuse box. He had big hands, veins climbing up his forearms and disappearing beneath his T-shirt sleeve. He explained something about the breaker switch with a patience I had not asked for, and I nodded without listening, watching his fingers move over the panel. He asked me if I had a Phillips screwdriver. I went to get it from the kitchen. When I came back, he was looking at me from the hall with an expression I could not quite read.

He did nothing. Said nothing. He was just an electrician doing his job.

And still, here I am.

I brace one hand against the tiles and use the other to go straight to my cunt, no ceremony. I am already soaked, the wetness mixing with the hot water and sliding over my fingers. I part my lips with two fingers and with the knuckle of my middle finger I find the swollen clit peeking out, hard as a pebble beneath the skin. I start rubbing it in fast circles, without tenderness, with the efficiency of someone who has learned how to come in two minutes because the rest of her life does not leave her more time.

I imagine Roberto is the one touching me. That he cornered me against the hallway wall when I came back with the screwdriver, that he tore my clothes off without a word, that he shoved those thick, callused fingers deep inside me while I bit his neck. The image pulls a moan from me that I muffle with my mouth closed. I slide two fingers inside, curling them upward, searching for that spot I know by heart, and with my thumb I keep working my clit. My cunt squeezes my fingers, sucks them in, contracts on its own. A quick, functional release that solves nothing underneath but lets me get out of the shower without feeling like I’m going to burst.

I come with my teeth clenched, braced against the tiles, water pouring down the back of my neck. My thighs tremble for a second. I pull my fingers out and look at them: shining, sticky, with fine strands stretching between fingertip and fingertip. I rinse them under the stream. I take a deep breath. I get out. I dry myself.

The same routine as always.

***

I have breakfast alone in the kitchen. Andrés has already left; I hear the elevator door close and footsteps on the landing and then nothing, the clean silence of a weekday morning. The kids — Sofía and Mateo — are still asleep. I have twenty minutes that are completely mine.

I make coffee slowly. The sound of the water boiling, the smell filling the kitchen, the first sip warming me from the inside. These small moments are the closest thing to peace I have.

But even here, my mind does not stop.

As I look out the window toward the building across the street, I remember Thursday’s Pilates instructor. David. Early thirties, dark hair, a measured way of speaking that contrasts with how precise he is when correcting your posture. His hands on my hips to align them. His fingers adjusting the angle of my shoulders, a touch that lasted two or three seconds and was completely professional and neutral. Proper.

But I spent the rest of the class unable to focus on anything else. With my cunt burning inside my leggings, imagining those same hands pulling them down to my knees, bending me over the mat, sliding his cock into me from behind in front of all the other women.

I bring the cup to my lips and realize I’ve blushed all by myself, here, with no one looking. That amuses me more than it embarrasses me. Or maybe both at once. I look down at the coffee. I bite the edge of the toast. The house remains silent.

Why can’t I stop? Why does my head keep going back there?

I lift my hand to my neckline almost out of habit. I pinch one nipple through the fabric of my pajamas and the throb returns, straight to my clit, as if there were a wire stretched between my tits and my cunt. I imagine David here, in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, looking at me with an intensity I can’t tell if was real or invented. In the fantasy he does nothing at first, just watches. Then he comes closer without saying a word, lifts my shirt, sucks one nipple until it’s so hard it hurts, and with his free hand he spreads my legs and shoves three fingers into me at once. And that imagined look is enough to make the silence weigh more, to make the air grow dense, to make me feel my panties getting wet again beneath my pajamas.

I get up. I go to the guest bathroom — the one nobody uses, that smells of disuse and dry soap — and I masturbate again. This time slower. I pull my pants down to my ankles, sit on the cold edge of the closed toilet, and spread my legs as wide as I can. I look at myself in the mirror opposite: the reddened skin of my chest, the marked nipples, my cunt open and shining between my thighs. I feel a stab of shame and excitement at the same time, seeing myself like this, so exposed, so horny at ten in the morning on an ordinary Tuesday.

I let myself have the full fantasy: David in the Pilates studio after the last class, closing the blinds, ordering me not to move while he yanks my leggings off. His voice telling me “like that, very still,” while he licks my clit with the tip of his tongue, first softly and then sucking it whole, pulling at it with his lips. His fingers sliding in and out of my cunt with a slapping sound that carries through the empty studio. Then he stands, pulls his cock out of his pants — I imagine a thick cock, not very long but fat, with a red, swollen head — and sinks it all the way into me in one thrust, while he covers my mouth with his hand so nobody hears how I moan.

I work my clit with two fingers in fast circles and slide the index finger of my other hand into my cunt, making little pushes, imitating his imagined cock. I bite my lip. The orgasm is deeper than the one in the shower, coming in waves, arching me against the back of the toilet, leaving me trembling for a moment over the cold sink. A low moan slips out of me and I smother it with the palm of my hand. I stay there for a few seconds, with my fingers still inside, feeling my cunt contract around them in response.

I clean myself up, straighten my clothes, go back downstairs as if nothing has happened.

The toast is cold.

***

Eleven o’clock. I try to straighten up the house. Sweep, fold clothes, vacuum the hallway. Routine should occupy my head. It doesn’t.

I bend to pick something up off the floor and think of the neighbor on the fifth floor. Héctor. Forty-something, always wearing that expression of someone who has everything under control. On Tuesday in the elevator he looked at me two seconds longer than necessary when I asked him whether the community package had arrived. Just two seconds. But for three days I’ve been turning those two seconds over and over, building an entire story out of them that does not exist: Héctor pressing the emergency stop button, shoving me against the elevator mirror, hiking up my skirt, checking with two fingers how wet I am before turning me around and fucking me standing up, while I watch my own face reflected in the metal, mouth open and eyes shut.

I run the cloth over the living room shelf and squeeze my thighs together without realizing it. My mind jumps to a scene from the series we watched last night, that moment between the two leads no one expected and that left my stomach twisted in a way that had nothing to do with the plot. He holding her against the wall, her skirt hiked up, the camera hinting at what it wasn’t showing. Me, on the sofa, thighs pressed together and breathing changed, and Andrés beside me not noticing a thing. I try to push it away. It settles in anyway, and now I complete it in detail: the actor’s cock sliding into her slowly, the rough groan he lets out, his hands gripping her ass until they leave marks.

My head is a constant whirl. There is no rest. What should be a productive morning becomes a succession of images, assumptions, and desires that arrive uninvited. And the worst part is not that they appear, but that they come back again and again, each time in more detail.

I let myself sink onto the sofa for a moment. Just a moment, I tell myself. I close my eyes and tilt my head back. My hand slides inside my sweatpants almost before I realize it. The third time today. With no panties — I took them off in the bathroom and didn’t bother putting on another pair — I find my cunt already slick, swollen, ready before I am. I slide my middle finger between my lips and take it straight to my clit, which is so sensitive the first touch almost hurts.

There’s no specific fantasy, just a carousel: the electrician’s cock pulled out slowly, David’s tongue between my thighs, Héctor finishing in me against the elevator mirror. I put two fingers in and move them fast, with my wrist, without subtlety, chasing the orgasm like someone searching for the light switch in a dark room. With my other hand I pinch one nipple through my T-shirt. It is mechanical. Fast. I come without moaning, pressing my lips together, feeling my cunt jerk around my fingers in short spasms, a small orgasm that satisfies nothing underneath but lets me stand up and finish sweeping.

I smell my fingers before washing them. The scent of myself gives me another low stab, somewhere between shame and wanting to start again. It is exhausting. More than housework, more than lack of sleep. It is as if I live accompanied by a constant impulse that does not let me be at peace. And the only thing I truly want, for a moment, is silence. Inside and outside me.

***

The supermarket. Forty minutes of silent torture.

Not because anything happens. Precisely because nothing happens and I, in any case, live it as if everything did.

The guy at the fish counter asks whether I want him to skin the salmon and I need an extra second to answer because while he speaks I’m looking at his neck, the line of his jaw, something in the way he holds the knife that distracts me completely. I imagine myself on my knees behind the counter, sucking him off while he serves the woman with the cart beside me, not a muscle moving in his face. He doesn’t know it. He smiles at me with professional politeness and I tell him yes, thank you, and push the cart toward the dairy aisle with the sensation that I’ve done something indecent. My nipples show beneath my bra and I change the position of my arm to cover them with the cart.

I have done nothing.

That is the hardest part to explain: that everything happens only inside me. Nobody touches me, nobody says anything. The man in the produce section asks what I want and I answer normally, but inside there is a constant short circuit turning every interaction into something else. It is automatic. I’m not looking for it. Or maybe I am, in some corner of myself I don’t want to admit.

I leave there with my heart racing, overwhelmed by the intensity of my own reactions. My panties are stuck to my cunt, wet again, and I feel that friction every time I take a step. I feel invaded by sensations that do not fit the bland scene I’ve just lived through: fluorescent lights, special offers over the speakers, shopping carts crashing into each other. I have to sit in the car for a few minutes before starting the engine. I rest my hands on the wheel and breathe deeply, again and again, waiting for my pulse to settle.

I feel ashamed. Exaggerated. As if I had done something wrong when in fact everything happened only in my head. That is the hardest part: nobody saw anything, nobody knows anything... and yet I leave there carrying guilt that weighs as if it were real. And with a cunt that keeps throbbing under my jeans, demanding what the whole morning has failed to quiet.

I start the car. I drive slowly.

***

The children come home from school and the house changes temperature. Sofía needs help with a science project. Mateo wants me to listen to him talk about his trading cards for twenty minutes. The kitchen smells of stew and bread warmed in the microwave.

I am another person during these hours. Or the same person doing other things.

I taste the sauce, ask about the day, correct a letter Mateo has written backward, congratulate Sofía on a grade I didn’t expect. I am present. I’m not pretending to be. I love them, and that is real, there is no catch or hidden agenda.

But desire does not disappear because there are children in the kitchen. It only changes shape. It becomes quieter, more contained, like a fire whose draft you close so it won’t spread, but which keeps burning inside. It beats in the background while I stir the stew, while I listen to an excited account of recess, while I set the table.

Outwardly, everything fits. Inside, I count the minutes. Not with cruel impatience, not wanting time to move faster than it should... but aware that, when the house falls silent again, that current will stop pretending it does not exist.

***

Andrés and I on the sofa. A series neither of us is really following. The bluish light of the television bathes our faces. He has my hand in his, fingers intertwined naturally, a tender, everyday gesture. Familiar.

I do not feel only tenderness.

I feel an urgency climbing from my stomach to my throat, a tension that makes my leg move without my noticing. I try to focus on the plot, on the dialogue, on anything that can pull me out of my own head. It is useless. I barely know what’s happening on the screen.

My mind fabricates scenes that have nothing to do with the calm of the living room. I imagine interrupting the routine, throwing the remote to the floor, climbing on top of him without asking, without a word. Yanking down his pajama pants, pulling out his cock and taking it into my mouth before he can react, sucking him with hunger until he hardens between my lips, swallowing the saliva that pools in my mouth. Then straddling him, shoving my panties aside and spearing myself on his cock, soaked as I am, all the way in, not giving him time to say anything. Fucking him on the living room sofa with the TV on, bracing myself on the backrest, riding him until I come twice in a row. The fantasy is impulsive, almost violent in its intensity, as if it needed something to explode to release the pressure gathered throughout the entire day.

But I also imagine the other possibility. That he looks at me, surprised. That he smiles tiredly. That he says “not now” softly. And that phrase, so simple, weighs more than anything else.

I press my hand against my own leg to anchor myself in the present. He keeps watching the screen, oblivious to the storm going through me. I nod when he comments on a scene, smile when it’s time to laugh. On the outside, we are a calm couple sharing a series. On the inside, I’m a racing pulse hoping I won’t hear another “no” that leaves me, once again, alone with this urgency.

—I’m going to get some water —I say.

—Will you bring me something? —he asks, not taking his eyes off the screen.

—Of course.

I go upstairs. I enter the bedroom. I lock the door.

I lie down on the bed, pull my pants down to my knees, and yank off my soaked panties in one pull. I spread my legs with my knees bent, feet flat on the mattress. I bring two fingers to my mouth, wet them thoroughly — though I don’t need to, my cunt is a puddle — and lower them to my lips. I open them, expose the swollen clit shining under the bedside lamp, and start working it with an urgency that scares me a little.

With my other hand I lift my shirt and pinch my nipples, one and then the other, tugging them, twisting them until the sting goes straight to my cunt. I do not think of anyone in particular, or I think of them all at once: Roberto opening my legs on the hallway floor, David eating my pussy until I cry on the mat, Héctor fucking me against the elevator mirror with his hand over my mouth, the salmon guy on his knees between my thighs with that perfect jaw buried in my cunt, someone faceless looking at me as if they knew exactly what I need.

I shove three fingers in at once and curl them upward, moving them inside with my palm turned over, while with my thumb I keep circling my clit. The wet sound echoes in the silent room and that turns me on even more. I drive my hips against my own hand, ramming myself, fucking myself with the force I don’t dare ask for downstairs. Saliva gathers in my mouth. Moans escape me and I smother them by biting the pillow, face turned aside, eyes squeezed shut.

The orgasm shakes me from head to toe. I arch, my thighs tense, I feel my cunt suck my fingers in and expel them with one contraction after another, long, deep, never-ending. I bite the pillow so hard my jaw hurts. For a few seconds I cannot breathe properly, mouth open against the fabric, my heart beating in my clit.

Then, silence.

I pull my fingers out, shining and hot, and wipe them on a corner of the sheet. I open my eyes to the dark ceiling. I pull my shirt down, which had ridden up without my noticing. I pull my pants back on. I gather my panties from the floor and shove them to the bottom of the laundry basket, underneath everything. I run a hand through my hair. I look at myself in the mirror for a second: flushed, lips swollen, with that just-fucked face nobody has given me.

I go downstairs for the water. I hand him the glass. I sit beside him. He puts an arm around my shoulders without looking at me.

***

It’s past midnight now and I’m writing this while Andrés sleeps. His breathing is slow, calm. He knows nothing. Nobody knows anything.

I’ve counted: four times today. Four orgasms by myself, in the shower, in the guest bathroom, on the sofa, and in this very bed a little while ago. And I still feel that background tingling that never quite goes out, like embers left behind when the fire has no flame left but the heat is still there, waiting. Right now, writing this, I have my legs crossed tight under the sheets and my cunt is wet again, ready in case I decide on a fifth.

I don’t know if this has a name. I’ve looked things up online that I’d rather not repeat here. I’ve closed the tabs before reading the end of the articles, because sometimes you do not want a label, you just want to know you are not completely alone in this.

What I do know is that I do not feel broken. Nor whole. I feel like someone carrying something too heavy to bear alone but who cannot find a way to set it down without everything else breaking too.

Andrés is a good man. I do not doubt that. But between what I need — a cock inside me three times a day, a mouth on my cunt until I scream, hands that grab my hair and tell me filthy things in my ear — and what he gives — a tender kiss, a tired fuck on Saturday night when he isn’t exhausted — there is a distance neither of us has named yet. Maybe because naming it would make it real in a way it still is not quite real.

Tomorrow it will start again. The sun will come through the blinds. He will snore softly. And that dense heat will settle between my thighs again before I’ve fully woken up, punctual as always, without waiting for an invitation.

I have no solution. I only have this notebook, my right hand, and the certainty that, at least for tonight, I no longer have to pretend everything is fine.

That’s enough for me.