The Night the Forest Bore Witness to My Secret

There are outings you take for granted. This was one of them: three days in the mountains with a group of ecology and agronomy students, taking samples, recording wildlife, setting up camp with no greater ambition than completing the semester’s practical hours. The bus was twenty minutes away, and no one was going to truly freeze. A textbook field trip.

My name is Valeria, and at the time I was twenty-three and in my third year. I dressed appropriately: olive cargo pants, a cream linen shirt, a vest with plenty of pockets, and the mid-calf boots I reserved for occasions like this. I also wore a fabric thigh holster strapped to my right thigh, where I kept the essentials: a lighter, a small flashlight, wet wipes, feminine protection, and, theoretically, lip balm for the mountain cold.

Theoretically.

I had been careful with the preparations. I had just finished my period that week, so I decided not to shave my pussy. A classmate who had been on several field trips had recommended it: when you know you’re going to piss outdoors on difficult terrain, less exposed surface means less discomfort. It’s a practical trick few women admit to knowing, even though most of them use it.

The first day was exactly what I expected. Divided into groups, the ecology students took soil samples and set up camera traps beside the stream and among the oaks. The agronomy students, myself included, collected vegetation-cover data and recorded the tracks of medium-sized mammals in the mud along the bank. Ordinary, everyday fieldwork.

At dusk we set up camp. The tents, the communal bonfire, the smell of burning wood mixed with pine. And, as was predictable on any university outing, alcohol appeared without anyone officially calling for it. The professor in charge saw it, chose not to intervene, and withdrew to the park ranger’s cabin with a warning that he didn’t want any scandals.

No one caused a scandal. Or not the kind of scandal he had imagined.

I had a couple of drinks. Maybe three. The mountain cold drops sharply when night falls, and the cheap wine someone had stuffed into a backpack is a convincing argument when you’ve been walking for hours. I started chatting beside the bonfire, and at some point my bladder began demanding attention.

I went to the tent to get the flashlight. The moon was high and almost full, bright enough to find my way among the trees without artificial light, so I left it in the outside pocket of my backpack and went out alone.

I walked toward the stream. I had seen it that afternoon and remembered a large rock on the bank that would serve as a natural windbreak. You could hear the water before you saw it. Fireflies appeared almost immediately, flashing among the ferns where the ground was wetter. I stood there for a moment, watching them. They’re scarce nowadays. Seeing so many of them felt strange, as if the forest were guarding something the rest of the world had lost.

I squatted beside the rock and pissed. The relief was immediate and considerable, as always after holding it longer than I should have. When I finished, I searched for the wipes in the holster, feeling for them in the usual order: lighter, flashlight, wipes.

My hand didn’t find them.

I stood up with my pants still halfway up so I could open the holster better with both hands and look inside in the little available light. The lighter, the flashlight, the feminine-protection packet. And a small cylinder of metallic plastic that I assumed was my lip balm until I pulled it out and held it up to the moon.

It wasn’t my lip balm.

It was my vibrator. The small one, the one I had bought after a friend told me that the ones disguised as cosmetics were best when you traveled and didn’t want to explain yourself. I had put it in the bedside-table drawer. Or so I thought. Apparently, sometime during one of the previous nights, I had taken it out and used it until I came twice, biting the pillow, and when I packed for the trip I had mistaken it for lip balm because the two were exactly the same size and had the same golden finish.

I stood there for a moment looking at it in the palm of my hand, my ass literally bare, beside a stream in the middle of a forest, with the fireflies putting on their show three yards away.

Why not?

There was no one around. The camp was far enough away that the noise of the bonfire and the conversations would cover anything that might come from among the trees. The moon cast a soft, cold light, the kind that flattens contours and makes everything seem to exist slightly outside reality.

I sat on the large rock. Its surface was cold through the fabric, and the contrast awakened something directly between my legs, a dense tingling that made me squeeze my thighs by reflex.

I turned on the vibrator. The hum was discreet, barely audible over the stream. I ran it over my blouse, across my breastbone, and the vibration came through muffled. That wouldn’t do. I took off my vest, folded it over the rock, and pulled my bra out from beneath my blouse without needing to remove anything else, one of those automatic movements all women make without remembering when we learned them.

I pulled my blouse up to my neck. My tits were exposed beneath the moon, white, their nipples already erect from the cold, so hard they hurt a little. I placed the tip of the vibrator against my left nipple. The current shot straight to my stomach and dropped to my pussy all at once, like an electric cable. I held it there, gritting my teeth, until I felt the nipple throbbing on its own. I switched to the right. The same thing. Then I ran the vibrator through the valley between my breasts, drawing circles, squeezing them with my free hand and kneading them, tugging my nipples between my forefinger and thumb until they tore a hoarse moan from me.

I closed my eyes for a moment. The rock beneath me, the cold air on my back, the sound of the water, the smell of damp earth and pine. I felt outside of time. I wasn’t a third-year student with fieldwork to hand in. I was simply a hot body in the forest, my pussy soaked and my nipples stiff, responding to what the forest brought out in me.

I went slowly. I wasn’t in a hurry. I passed the vibrator from one tit to the other, varying the pressure, pulling it away by an inch and bringing it back to let anticipation do some of the work. My free fingers traveled down the fabric of my blouse, brushing the waistband of my pants. I licked two fingers, ran them over my nipple, wetting it with saliva, and then brought the vibrator down over it. The combination of moisture and vibration made me arch my back.

I spread my legs. The cold air rushed between my thighs, and the contrast with the heat already beginning to build was almost violent. I slipped my hand between my legs and touched myself through the fabric. I was soaked. Not only from what had happened five minutes earlier, but from a different kind of wetness, thicker and stickier, which had seeped through my underwear. I pressed two fingers against the fabric and felt my clitoral bulge respond, already swollen and throbbing beneath the cotton.

I pulled my pants down to my knees. I pulled my panties down too, and they caught on the elastic of my pants, with a dark wet stain in the center so large that the moon lit it like a coin. The moon shone directly onto my open pussy. I carefully slid my fingers between my lips. They were slippery, hot, swollen. A thread of clear fluid ran down my perineum and dripped onto the rock. The pubic hair, which normally wasn’t there, changed the texture, making every movement more conscious, more deliberate. I tugged it lightly, experimenting. I remembered why my ex had made a habit of doing the same thing while he fucked me: that mixture of slight discomfort and pleasure that kept you present, that wouldn’t let you get too comfortable for too long.

I spread my pussy lips with the fingers of my left hand, forming a V and exposing my clitoris, gleaming in the light. With my right, I brought the vibrator closer. I began by circling it, without touching it directly, making loops around it. My pussy contracted on its own, seeking something to take inside. I inserted two fingers and felt how tight and wet I was, how my inner walls squeezed back. I pulled them out dripping, brought them to my mouth, and sucked them. I tasted like myself, like a hot female, like something salty and metallic and utterly mine.

I lowered my hand again. I brought the vibrator to the entrance. I couldn’t insert something that small in any meaningful way, but that wasn’t what I wanted. The vibration right there, at the entrance of my pussy, against the muscle that opened and closed on its own, was a completely different sensation from any other. I had to grit my teeth to keep from letting out a moan that would echo through the whole forest.

I began moving it in short arcs, rising from there to my clitoris and returning, following the rhythm of my breathing. When the vibrating tip struck directly against my clitoral hood, my thighs trembled on their own. When it dropped to the entrance, I couldn’t breathe. Up, down. Clitoris, entrance. Clitoris, entrance. The cold had vanished completely. Only that concentrated point of heat between my legs existed, along with the vibrator’s dull hum and the stream, mingling into something that sounded strangely musical.

With my free hand I pulled my pubic hair harder. The small, sharp pain cut off my breath. I did it again. Then I pinched my left nipple, twisting it. My hips moved forward on their own, seeking more pressure against the vibrator. I licked my lips. I wished I had a cock inside me at that moment. A hard, thick cock, driving all the way in, deep enough to hurt me. I imagined it. I imagined someone behind me, gripping my hair, fucking me on the rock, forcing me to look at the stream while he shoved it into me to the balls. The image made me clench my teeth.

I inserted three fingers into my pussy while the vibrator kept working my clitoris. I began pumping quickly, my wrist bent at an awkward angle, searching for that rough spot on the front wall. When I found it, the world narrowed to that single point. I pressed in circles, squeezing from inside and outside at the same time. I could hear the wet, obscene sound of my fingers going in and out, a small, unmistakable sloshing that the stream couldn’t quite cover.

I hadn’t realized I was so close until there was no turning back. I pressed the vibrator against my clitoris and held it there without moving it, letting the vibration do its work by itself while the three fingers remained buried in the exact spot. The tension rose suddenly, gathering somewhere between my ribs and my stomach, and when it broke, it did so in slow, deep waves that made me bend backward. My pussy throbbed around my fingers in violent spasms, one after another, squeezing and releasing. I let out a sound I hadn’t planned, somewhere between a gasp and a broken moan, cut short by the awareness that I was in a forest with other people two hundred yards away.

And then I felt that specific heat, different from the rest, rising from deep inside. I pulled my fingers out just in time. A short, warm jet burst from me with the second spasm. A little squirt. Onto my boots. The rock beneath me was left with a dark puddle reflecting the moon.

I stayed there panting, my legs still spread, the vibrator buzzing faintly against my hypersensitive clitoris. I moved it away. Every brush made me flinch. I ran my soaked fingers over my pussy lips one last time, almost affectionately, and then brought them to my mouth again, sucking them clean.

***

Reality returned all at once, as it always does afterward. The cold came with it. I realized I had been sitting for several minutes with my pants around my knees on a rock in the forest, in temperatures several degrees below what would have been sensible, my pussy bare and dripping, my tits exposed and my nipples still hard as stones.

I ran a wipe between my legs. It came away soaked and dark. I used another. And another. I pulled up my panties, though they were so wet I no longer cared. I stood up. I looked for the bra I had left on the rock. I couldn’t find it. I searched for two full minutes, moving the vest and looking among the nearest ferns with the flashlight. Nothing. I decided I would look for it the next morning, with more light.

I pulled up my pants, tied my bootlaces, and returned to camp. I went straight into my sleeping bag without speaking to anyone, and it took me quite a while to warm up. Outside, the forest remained the same: the stream, the moon, the fireflies. Completely indifferent to what had just happened.

***

The noise woke me before any alarm went off. Voices, laughter, the kind of laughter no one bothers to disguise because everyone assumes the others are already awake.

I came out of the tent with my eyes still half-closed. The group was gathered around a laptop someone had connected to an external battery. They were reviewing the images from the camera traps the day before.

I walked over.

—Finally, someone said. We thought you were going to sleep until it was time to leave.

—What are you watching?

—Nocturnal wildlife, someone else replied, with a smile that had nothing to do with wildlife. The wildlife last night was very interesting.

Someone turned the laptop toward me.

It was me. On the screen, illuminated by the moon, sitting on the rock beside the stream, legs spread, tits exposed, vibrator between my legs. The camera trap had captured everything from a side angle, perfectly framed. Zoomed in enough that you could even see my pussy contracting when I came.

—Nice lip balm, someone said from the back. What brand is it? I’m asking for my partner.

—And what nimble fingers, another voice added. Three at once and without mussing your hair.

One of the guys waved something in the air. My bra.

—I found it beside the stream. In case anyone wanted to know.

I looked down instinctively. Through the thin T-shirt I had slept in, my nipples were perfectly visible, hard again from the morning cold. I folded my arms.

The professor appeared behind the group. He looked at the laptop, looked at me, then looked back at the laptop.

—Valeria, he said in a completely neutral tone, I think we should talk. Get changed and come see me when you’re ready.

He took the laptop with him.

The conversation that followed was long. And considerably more interesting than anyone would have expected from a talk with a professor first thing in the morning in the forest. But that’s another story.