The Night I Learned to Touch Myself

It’s difficult to describe myself. Today I’m an ordinary woman, though I’ve been told I’m pretty. Fair skin, shoulder-length brown hair, brown eyes, slim. I’m twenty-three, and what I’m about to tell you was my first time with my own body—the night I learned that pleasure could spill over without anyone’s permission.

My bedroom is circular, with a cone-shaped ceiling and walls covered in dark blue. At dawn, the light comes through the picture window and paints the sheets gold. As a child, I hated it: it seemed cold, small, sinister. My older sisters, Catalina and Estela, had fun making up ghost stories for me. Now, by contrast, it’s my sanctuary, and from the window you can see the treetops of the forest, which at sunset look bathed in gold.

I’m jumping ahead in time on purpose. What I want to tell you began one summer afternoon, when my friends Silvina, Karina, and Amelia came to spend the day. Back then I still didn’t know how to name what happened to me with women, though my body knew perfectly well. My panties grew damp when I looked at their thighs; my mouth went dry whenever one of them bent over and gave me a glimpse of her cleavage.

Karina and Amelia are blonde twins, with light eyes and gym-built bodies. That day they were sprawled at the head of my bed, wearing very short skirts. Silvina and I sat on the rug, she in white pants so tight they outlined the line of her panties.

“Caro, are you listening to me?” Silvina asked.

I jumped. I’d been staring blankly at Karina’s legs. She had unknowingly opened her thighs a little, letting me see the edge of a pink cotton garment.

“Yes, yes, sorry,” I lied. “It’s just that I hate this room at night.”

“But it’s beautiful. You even have your own bathroom,” Silvina said.

“It’s scary. My sisters always said a young woman died here,” I blurted out, just to say something, so they would stop looking at my face.

The twins shuddered, and we changed the subject. I kept biting my tongue so I wouldn’t stare where I shouldn’t. When they left, around seven, I breathed for the first time in hours.

After dinner I took an incredibly long shower. Beneath the hot water, I tried to sort out the turmoil inside me. There was no longer any doubt that I liked women. Nor was there any doubt that I had to keep it to myself. I left the bathroom wearing only panties and a bra and sat down in front of the computer, my wet hair dripping over my shoulders.

I opened a search engine and timidly typed the word masturbation. I knew nothing. My eyes moved over a long, meticulous article explaining what the clitoris was, where it was, and how to stimulate it. Every paragraph tightened my chest further. I began squeezing my thighs together without realizing it. I was getting wet. As I read about the techniques, my hand moved down over the cotton without thinking and pressed right there, on the spot the text described.

I felt a lash of sensation. Heat rose from my navel and made my nipples prickle against my bra. I squeezed a little harder, using the tips of three fingers on the fabric, which was already soaked. The screen stopped mattering. I closed my eyes and imagined Karina, the way she’d looked that afternoon, her skirt hiked up to her waist. I stroked myself in circles, clumsily, and felt the button between my lips growing hard, swollen, insolent.

Just as the tingling began to spread, someone knocked on the door. I sprang like a jack-in-the-box, covered myself with the first sheet I found, and threw myself onto the bed.

“Come in.”

It was my mother. Forty-something, blonde, elegant, always going out with her divorced friends. When they were all in the living room, I couldn’t take my eyes off the neighbor, a dark-haired woman with long legs who smiled at me as if she knew exactly what I was thinking.

“I’m going out with the girls, sweetheart. See you tomorrow,” my mother said, and closed the door.

I heard the car engine fading away. I stayed still for a while, breathing unevenly, waiting for my pulse to slow. Then I lost myself in fantasies about the neighbor, about Karina, about Amelia’s open mouth when she laughed. Time dissolved. A strange noise brought me back.

I checked the time. It was twenty to midnight. The noise came again. A low, muffled moan, definitely one of pleasure. Then another, and another, in two different voices. I put on a silk robe, grabbed my phone as a flashlight, and tiptoed into the hallway.

***

The moans were coming from the television room. When I got there, the door was ajar, and the only light was the bluish glow of the screen. I peered through the crack, my heart pounding against my ribs.

My sisters were on the sofa. Catalina, the older one, sat with her back against the cushions, legs spread and head thrown back. Estela knelt between her thighs, one hand buried between her sister’s legs and the other in her own crotch. Both of them were completely naked. Catalina’s nipples were red and stiff; Estela’s breasts hung heavily as she moved.

My breath caught. I should have left. I didn’t.

On the television, a redhead with enormous tits was masturbating in close-up. With two fingers she spread her outer lips, and with the other two she punished her clitoris at a frantic rhythm. She moaned with her mouth open, bit at the air, and the sound bounced off the walls of the room, mingling with my sisters’ moans.

“Faster,” Estela whispered to Catalina. “Put them all the way in, come on.”

Catalina obeyed. She drove two fingers in to the knuckles and began moving them with a thick, wet, obscene sloshing. Estela collapsed onto her sister’s chest and bit one of her nipples, without stopping masturbating her with the other hand. I watched with my mouth open, pressed against the doorframe, feeling the robe cling to my skin with sweat.

I had never seen anyone have an orgasm. I saw three in a row.

First came the redhead on the screen. She arched her back to an impossible angle, cried out, and a short, thick jet spurted from between her fingers, splattering as far as the camera. Then it was Estela: she shook her hips against Catalina’s hand, gripped her shoulders, and let out a tight howl, biting her lip so she wouldn’t wake anyone. Last came Catalina, with Estela biting her neck and masturbating her with two soaked fingers. She came wrapped around her sister, trembling from head to toe.

When they shared a long, heavy kiss, their mouths wet and their hands still on each other’s sex, I couldn’t take it anymore. I let go of the doorframe and hurried back down the hallway, my pulse throbbing between my legs.

***

I locked my bedroom door and threw myself onto my back on the bed. The robe fell open. I tore off my bra and soaked panties in one pull, let them drop to the floor, and lay naked beneath the moonlight coming through the window.

I looked at my body for the first time with real hunger. My tits, inherited from my mother, large and erect, with nipples so hard they hurt. My flat stomach, my tightly pressed thighs, and between them, trimmed brown hair over a slit that was already open and glistening.

I started with my nipples. I pinched them between my forefinger and thumb, tugging a little. A direct lash to my clitoris, as if a wire ran from one point to the other. I ran one hand over my neck, down my stomach, then slowly brought it to my cunt. My lips were swollen and slippery. I spread them with two fingers and found the fat button poking out of its hood.

“Roxana,” I murmured, giving the redhead from the television a name.

I imagined her between my legs. Her mouth, the one that had bitten at the air in the video, now sucking my clitoris with the same ferocity with which she had punished herself. I began moving in circles, gently at first and then harder and harder. I licked the middle finger of my other hand and brought it down toward the entrance to my cunt. At first, only the tip. It was like opening a door with water pressing against it from the other side. My juices spilled down my thighs and stained the sheets.

With the upper hand I kept working my clitoris at a rhythm that wasn’t mine, that I had learned by watching. With the lower one I pushed my finger in to the knuckles and discovered a soft, spongy place that responded when I pressed it. A louder moan escaped me than I intended. I bit my lip to keep quiet.

I thought of Karina again, her skirt hiked up, of what it would be like to slide my tongue between the thighs that had obsessed me all afternoon. Then I thought of Catalina moving her hand inside Estela, the sloshing I had heard from the doorway. Of the redhead screaming in my ear. Of the neighbor, with her knowing smile. All the images blended together, and the tingling began in my clitoris and shot down my legs to the tips of my toes.

“There,” I said aloud, alone, not knowing who I was speaking to. “There, there, there.”

My back arched without my telling it to. At that moment I understood the redhead’s impossible angle: it was a reflex, the body bending because it couldn’t do anything else. My thighs clamped violently around my hand, and I squeezed my clitoris with all my fingers at once. The orgasm shook me from the inside, in waves, each one deeper than the last. I felt a hot spurt between my buttocks, soaking the sheet. I screamed into the pillow.

When I came back to myself, my hand was wedged between my legs and my heart was beating in my throat. I stayed that way, trembling, laughing to myself in the silence, touching myself slowly to prolong the echo.

Before falling asleep, still naked on the wet sheets, I thought that the next morning I would look at Karina differently. And the neighbor. And my sisters. Especially my sisters.

I fell asleep with my hand there, guarding the place where I had just discovered myself. I dreamed things I still don’t dare repeat.