The Night I Discovered That Only I Know How to Give Myself Pleasure

That night I got home tired of pleasing everyone else. I took off my clothes without turning on the big light, just the little lamp on the table, and I let myself fall onto the bare bed. It was hot. I lay there for a while on my back, staring at the ceiling, listening to my own breathing. And then, almost without meaning to, I lowered my gaze to my body.

I almost never look at myself closely. I know I have big breasts; I know because I carry them every day, because people notice before they look me in the face. But knowing it and really looking are two different things. That night I really looked.

Without a bra —I almost never wear one— my tits were spreading outward under their own weight, soft and heavy at the same time. I gathered them up with both hands, pulled them together in the center, and for the first time I didn’t think about who would want to touch them. Only about how they felt between my fingers.

I kept looking at myself. The veins that showed during the years I spent breastfeeding never quite disappeared. I traced them with the pad of a finger, those blue threads that rose up to the nipple and gave the areola a slightly darker tone. I noticed how long my nipples were, how they stiffened as soon as the air brushed them. And without realizing it I started pinching them, gently, and my whole body answered at once.

How long has it been since I touched myself thinking only of me?

That was the question that flashed through my head. I always get aroused by a memory, by a mouth I miss, by someone else’s hands. I’m always wanting to give someone else pleasure, hoping they’ll give it back after. But that night there was no one in my head. Only the size of my tits, only the shape of my breasts, only me. And that got me wet faster than any borrowed fantasy.

The pinching turned into rubbing. I kneaded one breast while with the other hand I squeezed the nipple of the other, and I could feel all the tension I’d built up over the last few days beginning to loosen, slowly, like a knot finally giving way. I looked at my hard nipples and my mouth watered. I wanted to suck them myself. I didn’t want anyone else’s mouth. Mine.

***

And that’s what I did. I kneaded the right tit, lowered my head as far as I could, and sucked it. Because nobody knows how to suck them like I do. Nobody knows the exact pressure, the sweet spot between pleasure and pain, that edge where my nipple gets so sensitive that my whole body trembles without it hurting. I found it on the first try, because it’s mine and I know it by heart.

They’re my tits. Big, heavy, with their veins and their marks. And I love them. My stomach has stretch marks, a fine spiderweb right above the navel, and before that used to make me ashamed. That night it didn’t. That night I lowered my gaze down my belly to the pubic hair and liked what I saw. I liked being me.

I opened my legs in an almost reflexive movement, as if I were expecting something to enter me. But no. This time nobody got into my thoughts. Not even the memory of him, of his body, of the things he did to me. For once the bed was mine and so was my head.

As I parted my thighs, the air filled with my smell. That dense, warm scent that rises when I’m truly wet. All my life I was intoxicated by other people’s smells —other skins, other sex, other mouths— and I almost always ended up feeling used, emptied out, a little less myself. That night the smell was mine and I liked it. I got drunk on myself without guilt.

I lowered my free hand. I was soaked. I ran my fingers over my swollen lips and felt them slippery, sticky, alive. I wet my fingertips thoroughly and brought that dampness up to my nipple. I made it shine with my own fluid and sucked it again, and doing that I tasted myself whole: a salty, mineral taste, mine. And again my body answered, again everything sped up and more came from below.

***

I hadn’t even touched my clit yet and I already knew I wasn’t going to last long. I know myself; I know that current that starts at the base of the spine and spreads through the legs, that warning that something big is coming. I wanted to hold it back. I didn’t want to rush the orgasm. I wanted to stretch out the night, lengthen that strange moment when I desired myself without asking anyone’s permission.

But I’m weak when it comes to my own pleasure. I looked at myself again from top to bottom, the body so many hands had pawed, the breasts so many mouths had bitten, and I thought that of everyone who had passed through me, none of them had ever truly loved me. Only me. Only I make love to myself the way I deserve.

I slipped in two fingers. I curved them forward, searching for that rough area on the inner wall, the one no lover ever found on the first try and that I can locate with my eyes closed. I rested my thumb on my clit and started pressing both at the same time, a slow, deep rhythm, while I kept my tit in my mouth. Nobody knows how to touch me like this. Nobody knows the map of my own cunt better than I do.

I didn’t last a minute. I felt the first spasms rise like a wave and stopped fighting them. I screamed. I said foul words, the worst ones, the ones I wouldn’t say in front of anyone, loose insults at the ceiling while pleasure split me in two. My whole body tightened, my back arched on its own, and I came with a force that even surprised me.

It was a brutal squirt. I soaked the bed, felt the warm liquid spread beneath my thighs and didn’t give a damn. I writhed as if I’d gotten a cramp through my whole body, legs trembling, fingers still inside, not wanting to come out, squeezing out every last contraction. I am mine and I love myself, I thought, or maybe I said it out loud, I don’t know anymore.

***

I was left limp over the wet mattress, as happens to me every time after a strong one. I don’t know how long I stayed like that, eyes closed, floating in that soft hollow that comes after orgasm, not thinking about anything, finally owing nothing to anyone.

When I started to come back, to slowly recover awareness of the room, I felt something strange. A sticky liquid on my cheek, different from mine, thicker. I opened my eyes with effort, still heavy, and thought I saw a shadow moving away toward the door, slowly, soundlessly.

I parted my lips and recognized the taste before the idea. Unmistakable. Semen. Warm, чужое, on my face.

I should have been scared. I should have shot up, screamed, looked for an explanation. But no. I stayed still, staring at the empty doorway, with that thing drying on my skin, and the only thing I felt was a strange calm.

Because that night, for the first time in a long while, I belonged to no one. I wasn’t used, I wasn’t borrowed, I wasn’t left half-finished waiting for a tenderness that never came. That night I loved myself. And if someone was watching from the dark, if a shadow took its own ending from my body without my asking, it was only a witness. A spectator to something that didn’t belong to him.

I wiped the back of my hand over my cheek, without disgust, almost indifferently, and closed my eyes again. Tomorrow I would decide whether it had been real or just the tail end of the dream I was sinking into. That night I only wanted to keep feeling like this: whole, wet, exhausted, and, for once, completely mine.