The Nights of Confinement That Awakened My Hidden Side

What I’m going to tell you happened a couple of years ago, in the middle of lockdown, when the world shrank to the size of my apartment. At first I didn’t worry too much, like almost everyone else. I thought it would be a few weeks, a month at most, and then life would go back to what it had been: going out, bars, the encounters I never told anyone about.

My name is Renata, and until then I’d never had trouble finding what I needed outside. But from one day to the next, all of that shut down. My days were reduced to a routine with no cracks in it: taking care of my kids, handling work from the kitchen table, cooking, washing, repeating. There wasn’t a single gap left for me, and my body started demanding it.

The horniness became enormous, a dull pressure that wouldn’t go away. Masturbating helped for a while, a few hours at most, and then that restlessness came back in my lower belly as if I’d never done anything. I waited until night, until I was sure the kids were sleeping deeply, to lock myself in my room, put a video on my phone, and give myself some pleasure.

I wasn’t demanding about what I watched. I’d go onto the site, look at the first thing that came up, and choose anything that caught my eye. The problem is that after doing that every night for weeks, you reach a point where not even the images turn you on. The body gets used to it. I needed something else, though I still didn’t know what.

One of those nights I came across a different video. A girl was masturbating slowly, and every so often she would place clothespins on her skin. On her breasts, on her nipples, on the lips of her vagina. Her face was twisted with pleasure, as if she were somewhere else, outside herself. A stab of envy hit me seeing her so surrendered.

What if I could get there too?

I got out of bed almost without thinking, went to the laundry room on tiptoe, and took the little bag of plastic clothespins I used for hanging out the sheets. I came back, locked the door, and settled in again against the headboard, with the phone resting on the pillow beside me.

I followed the video while I caressed myself. I touched myself outside first, slowly, then the clitoris in slow circles, then one and two fingers inside. When I felt wet enough, I took a clothespin and clamped it onto one of my labia. At first it was only discomfort, a nuisance that then quieted down. Honestly, I didn’t like it all that much. I didn’t hate it, but I expected something more intense, and down there I barely felt a strange tingle.

I took off the clothespin and moved my hands to my breasts. My breasts had always been my weak point; I knew it from the first time a man touched them the way he should. I pinched my nipples, stretched them from side to side, moistened them with saliva until they became hard and sensitive. And then, my heart pounding in my throat, I clamped a clothespin onto one of them.

That was when I exploded. I had to bite my lip to keep from letting out a moan that would wake up the whole house. It was a current that shot up from my nipple to the nape of my neck, a small pain transforming into something else entirely. I stayed still for a few seconds, taking it in, unable to believe that something so stupid had done that to me.

Without taking off the first one, I grabbed another clothespin and did the same to the other nipple. By then I was already lost. I moved the phone away from the bed to give myself more room, shifted back and forth on the sheets, slipped in three fingers, four, while the burn in my breasts set the rhythm. I closed my eyes and imagined that the pain was being caused by a man. Sometimes he was a stranger from the supermarket, sometimes the guy from the garage where I left the car, sometimes no one in particular, just hands using me however they wanted.

I finished in an orgasm that left the sheet damp beneath me. And when I released my nipples, the sensation that there had been something pinching them there was almost as delicious as the moment I’d put them on. My skin pulsed on its own. It was exquisite, different from everything before.

That night it was hard to sleep. Not because of guilt or shame, but because of something new that had awakened inside me and still didn’t have a name. I had always considered myself a practical woman, one who knew what she wanted in bed and asked for it plainly. But this was different. This was a territory that belonged only to me, with no man deciding it, with no one to please. I fell asleep thinking about how far I could push that boundary.

The next day I caught myself looking at myself differently in the bathroom mirror, while the kids were having breakfast in the kitchen and the morning went on as usual. Outwardly I was the same as every day: the tired mother, the employee answering emails in pajamas. Inside, I was keeping a secret that made me smile to myself, and I liked that double life more than I was willing to admit.

***

I repeated that routine every night for weeks. The clothespins became part of the ritual, just like switching off the light or checking twice that the door was locked. Until one dawn I found another kind of video, and everything shifted one step further.

It was another woman, but this one didn’t use clothespins. She used needles. She masturbated with her fingers and, when she was already on the edge, she took a fine needle and barely stuck it into the skin of her breast. Then another. She kept touching herself between each one, until she came in gushes, shaking all over. Part of me thought that was already too much, that there was a line there that shouldn’t be crossed.

You tried the clothespins and loved it. What if this is even better?

That voice won. The next day, while I was doing the essential shopping, I stopped by a notions shop that sold yarn and knitting supplies, and asked for a little packet of pins. The woman at the counter handed them over without looking at me twice, and I walked out of there with the packet hidden at the bottom of my purse as if I were carrying something forbidden.

At home I put a little cup of water on the burner and dropped the pins in to boil and sterilize them. While the water bubbled, I realized I was aroused just by the waiting, by knowing what I was going to do that night. I let them cool on a clean piece of paper and forced myself to go on with the day as usual, even though my head was already somewhere else.

When the house was finally silent, I repeated the usual beginning. I caressed myself without rushing, indulged myself slowly, waited until I was properly hot, until I couldn’t stand being still anymore. I took a pin in one hand and with the other held one of my breasts. I closed my eyes. I pushed it in just a little, not all the way, just enough for it to stay there, unmoving.

The sensation was incredible, and at the same time much less dramatic than it looks. On the outside it seems brutal, but inside it’s a tiny pinch, like a miniature, precise clothespin. I stayed like that, masturbating and sticking pins into myself one after another, dreaming that it was a man in my bed deciding where and when, treating me like his thing, like something that belonged to him. That idea turned me on more than the pain itself.

I came at the end biting the pillow so I wouldn’t make a sound, shaken by a long pleasure that didn’t want to end. What was hard after that was taking out the pins one by one, carefully, and seeing when I turned on the lamp how my breasts looked, marked, bruised in a way that gave me a strange pride. I fell asleep smiling. After a long time, I felt truly satisfied.

***

That experience left me thinking for weeks. I started looking up information about nipple piercings, reading how they healed, what aftercare they needed, how much they hurt. I turned it over during the day, in the dead moments, while washing dishes or hanging out the laundry. The idea of having something there permanently, a cold piece of metal running through me right in the most sensitive place on my body, would not leave me in peace.

Then one good day everything lined up. The kids would spend the weekend with their father, I had no pending work, and for the first time in months the house was going to be entirely mine. I took the car keys, some money, and drove to a studio I’d seen highly recommended, without telling anyone, determined before I could change my mind.

I’d like to say I didn’t get aroused while they were doing it, that it was all clinical and cold. The truth is I did get aroused. The sting of the thick needle, the pressure, that second when the metal crosses the skin and your whole body tightens, waiting for the worst, which never quite comes. I pressed my thighs together on the table and took a deep breath so it wouldn’t show on my face.

Back home I spent almost the whole day with my torso bare. Partly because the fabric rubbed against my newly pierced nipples and burned, and partly, mostly, because I couldn’t stop looking at them. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and saw myself differently, as if those two points of metal were telling a story only I knew, the story of all those nights alone discovering what I was capable of.

That was the experience with which I began exploring new ways to give myself pleasure, without depending on anyone, without asking permission. Confinement forced me to look inward, and what I found there turned out to be more interesting than anything I had ever looked for outside. There’s more, of course. Things I tried later and still find hard to admit out loud. But I’ll tell you those another day.