The Night I Touched Myself Again After Becoming a Widow

Beatriz broke through the distance of her everyday farewells and moved toward Adrián to kiss him, catching him off guard. They were nothing more than two chaste kisses on the cheek, two cordial kisses between office colleagues that served to confirm something that had been fermenting inside Beatriz for weeks. Two kisses to know she was alive again. She still didn’t know if she was ready for love, but for sex—for sex, she was desperate.

She drove from the building on Larios Street to her house on autopilot, her fingertips brushing the steering wheel and her mouth still warm from the scrape of his beard. She arrived, took off her heels in the hallway, poured herself a glass of red wine, and sat in front of the television to kill time until the hour when the house stopped hurting. She flipped through channels. Nothing. A game show, a match, two movies she’d already seen. She turned it off at one. She climbed the stairs slowly, as if the silence weighed on every step, and went into the bedroom she had shared with Miguel until two years ago.

The bed was still too big. Too cold.

She put on her summer pajamas—a sleeveless cotton camisole and black lace panties Miguel had given her on his last birthday while he was still alive—closed her eyes, and told herself she was going to sleep. And for a moment, she believed it.

But the two kisses came back. Adrián’s hand resting for a second on her waist as he leaned toward her. The smell of his neck, cedar soap and something animal underneath. His hazel eyes. The broad shoulders of a thirty-seven-year-old man who went to the gym at midday. The crooked smile with which he said goodbye, as if he could guess.

Beatriz squeezed her thighs beneath the sheet.

***

Her right hand moved down on its own. She hadn’t told it to, or so she wanted to believe. It slipped beneath the elastic waistband of her little shorts, settled over the lace of her panties, and stayed there, hesitating, like someone recognizing a place she hadn’t returned to in far too long. There was already moisture beneath the fabric. A warm, viscous wetness that dampened her fingertip when she pressed lightly.

“Fuck,” she said aloud, and the word scraped her throat.

She hadn’t said fuck since Miguel died. She hadn’t said fuck in bed for much longer than that, truth be told, because the last years of his illness had extinguished everything resembling desire. And before the illness, well, they weren’t exactly the kind to say filthy things to each other either. They loved each other deeply, made love tenderly, fell asleep holding hands. But soaked cunts and dirty mouths? Not much.

Now, though, Beatriz’s cunt was soaked. The word came out on its own with the wetness, and with the word came a hot lash that split her belly in two.

She yanked the sheet away, pulled the camisole up beneath her breasts, and dragged her panties down to her ankles. She kicked them onto the floor. She spread her legs. The light from the bedside lamp—that one she hadn’t turned off since Miguel was gone because darkness in the room killed her—lit up her shaved, glistening sex.

She looked at herself.

She hadn’t looked at herself in two years. Her lips were a little fuller than she remembered, darker. When she exposed her clitoris with two fingers, it was swollen, vivid pink, throbbing between her fingertips. Beatriz ran her fingertip over it, barely a caress, and her whole body arched upward as if she’d been shocked.

“Jesus,” she gasped.

She slipped her middle finger into her mouth, wet it thoroughly with saliva, and brought it down again. She started on the outside. She traced slow circles around her clitoris without touching it directly, teasing it, drawing it out. She remembered the way Adrián looked at her, the way he held her gaze two seconds too long every time he passed a report across her desk. She imagined those thick, clean fingers, the metal watch around his wrist, doing what hers were doing now.

She inserted one finger. Just one, up to the first knuckle, and pulled it out at once. She put it back in, deeper. She was so wet it slid in without resistance, and the sound—that obscene squelch she hadn’t heard in years—made her moan into the pillow.

“Adrián,” she whispered, and she felt equal parts embarrassed and pleased.

***

There was no turning back. Beatriz planted her feet against the mattress, bent her knees, and opened herself completely. With her left hand she pulled the camisole up to her neck and bared her breasts. They were heavy, a little drooping, with large, dark nipples. She grabbed them, squeezed them, pinched one nipple between her thumb and forefinger until it hurt, and until the pain turned into another current that ran down her belly and converged in her cunt.

With her right hand she inserted two fingers. At first she moved them slowly, searching for the angle, turning them inward and upward, until she found that rough place she had almost forgotten existed. There. She pressed. A long, hoarse moan escaped her, a moan she didn’t recognize as her own.

She began fucking herself with her fingers. At first carefully, almost shyly, glancing toward the bedroom door as if Miguel might come in. But Miguel wasn’t going to come in anymore. Miguel was buried in niche three at San Rafael Cemetery, and she was fifty-two years old, with a body that still responded, and a thirty-seven-year-old colleague who had looked at her that afternoon as if he wanted to eat her against the photocopier.

“Fuck me,” she said to Adrián, addressing the ceiling, aloud, because no one could hear her. “Fuck me already.”

She thrust her fingers all the way in. She pulled them out slowly, glistening, and thrust them back in. Again. Again. The mattress creaked beneath her ass. Her palm struck her clitoris with every thrust, and that wet, blunt impact tore a jolt from her that ran all the way to her toes. She was sweating. Her hair stuck to the nape of her neck, the camisole was bunched beneath her armpits, her thighs were trembling.

She remembered Adrián’s beard scraping her cheek as they said goodbye. She imagined that beard between her thighs, that broad red mouth buried in her cunt, that tongue sweeping her clitoris up and down while two fingers—hers now, his in the fantasy—opened her from within. She imagined grabbing him by the hair. Ordering him not to stop. Feeling his hot breath on her swollen clitoris just before his mouth closed around it and sucked.

“Oh,” she cried. “Oh, fuck, yes, yes.”

***

She no longer controlled anything. Her fingers moved on their own, sliding in and out, twisting, curling against that inner spot. Her other hand moved from her breast to her clitoris and began rubbing it in quick circles, faster and faster, her fingertip slipping through her own juices. Beatriz writhed on the mattress. A nervous laugh escaped between her moans, an incredulous laugh, because she had forgotten that her body could still go this far, get this hard, get this wet.

The fountain ran down her buttocks, soaking the sheet beneath her ass. The air carried the smell of herself, the scent of a solitary, awakened woman she hadn’t detected in years, and that smell drove her even crazier. She brought the fingers that had been rubbing her clitoris to her mouth, tasted herself, licked her upper lip with her own flavor, and lowered her hand again.

Adrián. Miguel. Adrián again. The two men blurred together in her mind, and she no longer cared. She was masturbating while thinking of the guy from the office and also of her dead husband and also of no one, of her own hand, of the squelching sound her fingers made as they entered her cunt, and all three things aroused her at once.

She felt the orgasm arrive like a wave. It gathered first in the soles of her feet, coiled in her thighs, and rose through her belly. Beatriz closed her eyes, clenched her teeth, held her breath for one long second, and exploded.

“Oh! Oh, oh, oh, God!” she screamed into the darkness of the empty house, without a trace of shame. She screamed for Adrián and Miguel and herself and the two years of silence, screamed until she had no voice left.

Her cunt clenched in spasms around her own fingers. Once, twice, three, four times. She felt her hand become completely wet, felt the moisture run down her wrist, felt her forearm end up sticky all the way to the elbow. Her other hand remained on her clitoris, no longer rubbing, barely pressing, prolonging the final waves of the trembling.

When she could, she pulled out her fingers. She looked at them in the lamplight. They were glistening, swollen, with transparent strings hanging from them.

She brought them to her mouth without thinking. She sucked them clean. They tasted of salt and something that was hers, intimate, forgotten.

***

She lay still for a very long while, her legs still spread, the camisole bunched up, her hand resting on her belly. Her heartbeat gradually slowed. Her skin slowly cooled. She began to make out the sounds of the house: the hum of the refrigerator two floors below, the ticking of the boiler, a car passing far away in the street.

And among those sounds, she began to make out her own thoughts. They came cascading in, many of them contradictory. Guilt for thinking of Adrián. Guilt for forgetting Miguel at the climax. Guilt for having felt more pleasure with her own fingers than she had during many of the final years with her husband. And beneath the guilt, stronger than all of it, a strange, almost obscene joy: she was still alive. Her body responded. Desire was there; it had been lying in wait for two years, and now it had stretched awake and wasn’t going to fall asleep again.

She ran her hand over the sheet and found the puddle. Large. Warm. She was going to have to sleep on it or change the sheets at three in the morning. She couldn’t be bothered to get up. She shifted twenty centimeters toward the side Miguel no longer occupied and settled there, with the smell of herself still floating in the room and an idea taking shape in her mind for the following day at the office.

Next time—because there was going to be a next time, that much was clear—two fingers and a tired hand wouldn’t be enough. Next time she was going to need a towel beneath her hips. Or, if she dared—and that night, with the taste of herself still on her tongue, she dared quite a lot—someone else’s tongue. A mouth. A body. The scrape of a beard and hazel eyes looking at her from between her thighs.

She fell asleep with that image, smiling faintly against the pillow.