The Morning Quickie I Gave Myself When He Wasn't There

Last night I didn’t go out. I didn’t feel like noise, or people, or inventing a smile for anyone. I went to bed early, with my hair still damp from the shower, and fell asleep almost before my head touched the pillow.

I don’t remember what I dreamed. Maybe I dreamed of Mateo, of his hands, of the way he grabs me around the waist from behind when I’m still half asleep. Maybe I dreamed of a stranger. I don’t know. I only know I woke up suddenly, long before the alarm went off, my heart racing and a warm urgency between my legs that I know far too well.

I love waking up like that. I love morning sex, the kind that comes before your head fills with obligations, when the body is still just body and not schedule. You get up with a different energy, with skin that’s more sensitive, as if the night has left you right at the surface. It’s beautiful. The problem was that morning I was alone.

Mateo had been out of the country for four days and had several more to go. Work, meetings, a time zone that turned our calls into a permanent mismatch: when I woke up, he was just going to bed. At that moment, while my left hand slid on its own toward my belly, he was sleeping thousands of miles away, unaware of what his absence was causing.

I could wait until he wakes up. I could hold back.

I wasn’t going to hold back.

***

I stretched out my arm, felt around on the bedside table, and found the laptop. The screen hit my face with its cold light in the bedroom dimness. Almost by habit, I went into the page where I’ve been publishing my stories for the past couple of years. It’s hard to explain, but there I have a kind of parallel life. I write, I post what I write, and on the other side there are people who read me, who wait for me, who reply.

I’m lucky enough to be pretty well liked. I’m not saying that to brag; I’m saying it because it’s part of what happened that morning. I opened the comments inbox first, then the private messages, and that’s where the guys really let loose. They don’t hold anything back.

Some are sweet. They congratulate me, tell me I write well, that they’re looking forward to the next story. Others are nosy to the point of desperation: they want to know my age, my real name, whether everything I tell them really happened to me or whether I made it all up. And others, the ones that interested me that morning, are shamelessly explicit.

They ask me whether I have any idea what I provoke. The truth is I don’t, or not fully. I’m like this, effortlessly, without posing. I don’t believe my own hype, and I’m not trying to be an exaggerated version of myself. But reading that someone, someone I don’t know and will never know, is fantasizing about me on the basis of a few lines I left on a screen… that has its own voltage.

I opened a message from some guy named Lautaro. I don’t know if that’s really his name; it doesn’t matter. He wrote as if he had me right in front of him. “I imagine coming into your room without warning,” it said, “finding you asleep, slowly uncovering you so I don’t wake you, and just standing there watching you for a while before touching you.” I read it twice. The second time, more slowly.

My skin had understood before my head did. I felt that current run down my back, that tingling that starts at the nape of the neck and ends somewhere below the navel. The room was silent. All I could hear was the distant hum of the fridge and my own breathing, which was starting to change rhythm.

***

I kept scrolling through the messages. Another one, with no name, was even more direct. It described in detail what he would do with his mouth, how he would spread my legs, how long he would take before letting me come. It wasn’t poetry. It was raw, almost clumsy, and precisely because of that it worked. There was something honest about that unfiltered desire.

I thought about how many of them would be awake at that hour, in some other bed, reading me. The idea gave me chills. I write to be read, yes, but I rarely stop to imagine the other side: a real person, with their breathing and their pulse, getting turned on by words that came out of my head. That morning, for the first time in a long time, it felt concrete.

There was one more message, a short one, almost shy among so many brazen ones. “I’m not asking for anything,” it said, “I just wanted you to know you make me feel less alone.” I read it and something softened in my chest, though the rest of my body was still pulling the other way. Strange how desire and tenderness can coexist in the same second, in the same skin.

I left the laptop open on the sheet, the screen barely lighting the room, and slipped my free hand under the fabric. I started with my breasts, unhurried. I stroked myself, felt my nipples harden between my fingers almost immediately, responding before I had decided anything. I squeezed them lightly, played with them, and a sigh slipped out of me on its own.

I wish it were a mouth and not my own hand.

I closed my eyes and imagined exactly that. A warm mouth moving down my neck, pausing at the collarbone, biting slowly. A tongue over the nipple, circling it, and then a gentle bite that made me arch my back against the mattress. My imagination is good; years of writing for other people taught me how to build scenes with a detail I can almost touch.

The hand on my breast kept insisting. The other began to move lower, slow, deliberate, tracing my belly, my hip, the inner part of my thigh. I was making myself wait. I know what I like, and what I like most is the prelude, that moment when the body is already asking and you still haven’t given in.

Outside, dawn was beginning to break. A strip of gray light filtered in through the edge of the curtain and crossed the bed. I writhed slowly on the rumpled sheets, still not touching myself properly, stretching the anticipation until it became almost unbearable.

***

When I finally took my hand where my body was begging for it, I was already soaked. My fingers slid in without effort, and that first touch alone tore a moan from me that I had to smother by biting my lower lip, a habit I’ve always had, as if there were someone else in the house I didn’t want to wake.

I moved up and down without hurry, feeling every fold, knowing myself the way only a woman knows herself. My body answered every movement: skin prickling, hips seeking more pressure on their own, breath breaking. I thought of Lautaro watching me from the doorway. I thought of the other one, with his patient mouth. I thought of Mateo, of his steady hands, of the way he would speak in my ear. The images mixed, replaced one another, stacked on top of one another.

I took my fingers a little higher, to my clit, already swollen and exposed, waiting for its turn. I brushed it lightly and my whole body jerked. I started rubbing in circles, gently at first, adjusting the pressure until I found exactly the spot, the one I know by heart and which still surprises me every time.

Pleasure began to build from below, slowly and then not so slowly. I quickened the pace almost without deciding to, my hips lifting off the mattress, my heels digging into the sheet. One hand on my breast, the other between my legs, my head full of imaginary mouths and hands and faceless men desiring me from afar.

Like that, just like that, don’t stop.

I was talking to myself in silence, giving myself the orders I would have wanted to hear from another voice. The room was tilting a little. I could feel the heat rising through my chest to my neck, that unmistakable sign that there was no turning back.

***

I came all the way through. It wasn’t a silent or discreet orgasm: it was one of those that run from your feet to the crown of your head, leaving you trembling and open-mouthed, trying to breathe. I bit the back of my hand so I wouldn’t cry out, even though there was no one there to hear me, and I let the wave pass through me once, twice, three times, each aftershock softer than the last.

Then I stayed still. My hand still between my legs, my heart pounding against my ribs, my skin shining with sweat in the ever-brightening morning light. My mind blank, finally, that beautiful nothing that comes right afterward and that, for me, is almost better than the climax itself.

The laptop was still open beside me, the screen dimmed, the messages there, patient. I smiled to myself. Those men who write to me fantasizing about what they would do to me have no idea that, that morning, without knowing it, they had kept me company in the most intimate way possible.

I stretched out my arm and texted Mateo, even though I knew he wouldn’t read it for hours, when he woke up on the other side of the world. “I dreamed about you and woke up insanely turned on. Hurry back.” I didn’t tell him the rest. That, for now, stayed with me, between these sheets and the first light of day.

I got up, put the kettle on, and opened the window. The fresh morning air hit my face and I breathed deeply. I had started the day in the best way, alone and complete, with the calm certainty that the body, when it knows how to listen to itself, doesn’t need to wait for anyone to give itself what it asks for.

And while the water began to boil, I was already thinking about the next story I was going to write. This one, for example.