The Night I Gave Myself Over to Myself in the Patio

I still remember the cold of that night with a precision that surprises me. It wasn’t the uncomfortable cold of winter, but a clean, almost transparent one, the kind that wakes your skin up instead of numbing it. I was in the patio finishing hanging up the laundry, with my hands a little numb and the rest of the world asleep around me.

My name is Renata, and that was the first time I understood how far my own body could take me when no one was watching.

The house was on a quiet street, the kind where at two in the morning not even a car passes by. I had left the washing for last, as always, because I hated hanging things out during the day. I preferred that dead hour when the patio became mine, when I could move around in sleepwear without anyone seeing me, with only the company of the sheets hanging there and the distant barking of some dog.

I took the damp clothes out of the basket one by one and stretched them over the clothesline. The motion was mechanical, boring, repeated a thousand times. But that night there was something different in the air. The silence was so dense it was almost touchable, and the darkness wrapped around me like a blanket no one had asked for but that still kept me warm.

I don’t know at what moment it started. Maybe it was the fabric of a T-shirt brushing my neck, or the cold raising goosebumps on my arms, or simply the absolute certainty that I was alone. But suddenly I felt a warm tingling that had nothing to do with the clothes or the weather. A small, stubborn heat, born somewhere below my navel and refusing to go out.

I froze, with a towel half-hanging in my hands.

What’s happening to me?

I looked toward the kitchen window, dark. I looked at the wall separating my patio from the neighbors’, high and solid. No one. Absolutely no one. And that loneliness, instead of calming me, lit me up even more. It was as if the whole patio were giving me permission.

I lowered the towel, one of the thickest I had, a heavy terry cloth that smelled of soap and night. Instead of hanging it up, I let it drop onto the tiles. The gesture seemed absurd and exciting at the same time. I was about to do something I had never allowed myself to do, and the mere thought of it made my pulse race.

I sat down on the towel with my legs bent. The cold ceramic seeped through the fabric, but I didn’t care. My breathing was ragged and my ears strained for the slightest noise, though deep down I knew no one was coming.

I slid my hand under my T-shirt, slowly, as if I were negotiating with myself. My palm moved up my belly, recognizing every inch of warm skin, and reached my breast. I stroked my nipples with my fingertips, first one, then the other, in slow circles, and felt them harden under my touch.

A sigh escaped me without permission.

The cold night and the heat of my own hand created a contrast that drove me wild. Every time the breeze brushed the bare skin of my body, goosebumps rose on me, and every time my fingers pressed again, an electric current ran from top to bottom through me.

I turned over on the towel slowly, almost as if I were spinning on a carousel, looking for a new position, a new sensation. I wanted to feel everything. I wanted that night to last as long as possible.

I’m alone. No one can see me. I can do whatever I want.

The idea intoxicated me more than anything else. There was no guilt, no hurry, no one to explain myself to. Just me, my body, and the complicity of the darkness.

With my other hand I reached down below my waist, feeling for the elastic of my boxers until I slipped inside. My fingers found the tip and circled it gently. It was already hard, throbbing with a rhythm of its own, demanding attention. I began to stroke it up and down, with calculated slowness, enjoying every inch as if it were the first time I had touched it.

Before I knew it, I was jerking off there, under the open sky, in my own patio, with nothing above me but the stars hidden by clouds.

And I didn’t care about a thing.

I felt shameless, bold, even a little slutty, and that word, which in any other context would have made me uncomfortable, at that moment lit me up like gasoline. I was alone, enjoying my body without embarrassment, completely naked from the waist up and with my bottoms half lowered, giving myself the most magical wank I can remember.

God, how I like this.

I loved the feeling of my firm hand working the thing pulsing between my fingers. I loved the way my other hand kept playing with my nipples, pinching them just enough, right on the edge between pleasure and a delicious little pain. I loved being, that night, the absolute master of my own pleasure.

The cold no longer bothered me. On the contrary: I needed it. Every blast of icy air against my sweaty skin multiplied the intensity of everything, as if my body didn’t quite know whether it was cold or hot and, just in case, chose to feel it all at once.

***

I remember that feeling of heat with a clarity time never managed to erase. A strong, overwhelming heat, flowing from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head, as if a warm tide were rising inside me and leaving me breathless. It was too much and, even so, I wanted more.

I writhed on the towel, arching my back, pressing my heels into the cold ceramic. I was so comfortable and so uncomfortable at the same time, so exposed and so safe, that the contrast had me on the brink of madness.

I never thought I would make love to myself like that. Like this, to myself, in the darkness of my patio, surrounded by damp sheets that swayed ever so slightly in the wind. I hadn’t planned any of it. I had gone out to hang the laundry and ended up discovering a version of myself I didn’t know, one that dared to desire itself without filters, without guilt, without witnesses.

Without realizing it, I sped up my hand. My breathing turned into short, desperate gasps. I clenched my teeth so I wouldn’t make a sound, even though inside I was screaming.

A little more. Just a little more.

My legs began to go numb, that particular stiffness that warns you the end is near. The muscles in my belly tightened like ropes. I squeezed my eyes shut and let the whole universe shrink down to that point of heat between my hands.

I was already right on the edge. I felt it rising, unstoppable, a wave I wouldn’t be able to hold back even if I wanted to. And I didn’t want to. Damn right I didn’t want to.

My hand rushed through the last caresses, firm, precise, and then the world split in two.

I came with such intensity that it folded my whole body over. I felt everything release in waves, one after another, each one deeper than the last. I had to bite my lip to smother the moan trying to escape, and even so a rough, animal sound slipped out of me and was swallowed by the silence of the patio.

The semen covered my hand, warm against the icy air, and slid slowly while I kept trembling. I stayed like that for a few seconds, or maybe minutes, with no sense of time, my head resting on the towel and my eyes fixed on the dark sky.

***

Little by little my body began to cool down, to land back in reality. My breathing slowed, deep and steady, until it returned to almost normal. The heat that had run through me receded like a tide going out, leaving me with a feeling of peace I hadn’t felt in a long time.

I lay there a little longer, naked and happy, listening to the distant dripping of some poorly closed faucet and the rustle of the sheets against the wind. I wasn’t in any hurry to get up. I wanted to stretch that moment out as much as possible, to keep it whole, intact, so I could come back to it whenever I needed to.

I thought about how absurd it would sound if I told it out loud. A person alone in her patio in the middle of the night, hanging laundry and giving in to an impulse she herself never saw coming. But there was nothing absurd about how I felt. I felt free. In control of myself. Reconciled with a body I had spent so long struggling to inhabit.

That night I understood something no mirror had ever shown me: that pleasure doesn’t need an audience or permission, that darkness, silence, and the courage to try are enough. That sometimes the most intense fantasy isn’t the one other people live out, but the one you discover alone, when you finally stop judging yourself.

At last I sat up. I gathered the towel, now crumpled and warm, and set it aside to wash again. I hung up the rest of the laundry with a silly smile that wouldn’t leave my face. The cold was still there, just as clean as before, but I was no longer the same person who had gone out into the patio half an hour earlier.

I slipped back into the house on tiptoe, closed the door carefully, and got into bed with my body still vibrating on the inside. Before falling asleep, looking up at the dim ceiling, I knew that morning would stay with me forever.

And here I am, telling it for the first time, hoping you enjoy it as much as I still remember it.