What I Discovered Alone with a Cube of Ice

A couple of months went by after that disastrous night with Rodrigo, and the truth is I didn’t regret a thing. That clumsy, cold, mechanical encounter had left me with more questions than answers. The main one: if men did absolutely nothing for me, why did I keep insisting? I was new to this thing of really looking at myself, of listening to myself, and I still found it hard to say out loud what I’d already known for a while.

For as long as I could remember, I’d been attracted to women. It wasn’t something I could explain with pretty words: I simply looked at them more than I should have. I admired feminine beauty with an attention no friend of mine shared. When I watched erotic content, my eyes didn’t go to them. They went to her.

Everything fascinated me. Smooth, luminous skin, the kind that seemed soft even through a screen. I wondered whether it was as firm as it looked, whether that magazine-perfect body was a matter of lucky genetics or hours in the gym. And above all, I was hypnotized by listening to them: those high, urgent moans that, even if they were acted, convinced me that real pleasure was possible, that there existed an ecstasy I still hadn’t come close to.

During those months of doubt I started paying attention to the real women around me. College classmates, the girl who worked at the coffee shop on the corner, a neighbor who watered her plants every morning. Adult women, confident in their bodies, who walked as if they knew exactly what they were worth. For me, there was no greater temptation than long, well-kept hair falling over bare shoulders.

Maybe I’m not confused. Maybe the only confusing thing is what I keep insisting on denying.

Day by day, the doubts weighed less and the certainty weighed more. And meanwhile, I set about studying pleasure in the only way I felt brave enough to then: alone, in my room, with the door closed and all the time in the world.

***

That afternoon I was alone at home. My roommates had gone away for the weekend and the silence was absolute. Seated in front of my desk, I was trying to finish a paper on contemporary history when a familiar heat was born between my legs and spread without asking permission.

—Damn it, now? —I muttered, biting my lip.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to concentrate anymore. The cursor blinked on the screen, waiting for a sentence that wasn’t going to come. I sighed, closed the document, and let myself fall back against the chair.

I was bored of always doing the same thing. My fingers, the same routine, the same predictable rhythm. I wanted something different, something I hadn’t tried, something I hadn’t even seen in a video. My gaze wandered over the desk until it stopped on a glass I’d left there hours earlier, with a couple of ice cubes still intact floating in the remains of some soda.

Condensation ran down the glass in thin threads, leaving a damp ring on the wood. I kept watching it, hypnotized, and then the idea came on its own, clear as day, as if someone had whispered it in my ear.

I took the glass. I caught one of the ice cubes with my mouth and rolled it over my tongue for a moment, removing the sweet flavor of the drink. With my free hand I took off the old T-shirt I wore around the house and let it fall to the floor בלי looking where.

The room’s air brushed my naked skin and I shivered before I’d even begun. I started slowly, stroking my breasts with the pads of my fingers, pausing on my nipples, feeling how they answered little by little to every caress. I had always liked them: large, with pale areolas, sensitive in a way that sometimes surprised even me.

I took the ice out of my mouth and, instead of letting it go, slid it over my cheek. My skin reacted instantly, a sudden shiver that cut my breath short. Without stopping, I brought it down over my cheekbone, over my jaw, to my neck.

There the sensation changed completely. It was no longer a dry cold, but something wet and lingering, like someone else’s touch. Like the kiss of a stranger who knows exactly what he’s doing. The ice left behind a frozen trail that my own skin turned into heat a second later, and that contradiction drove me crazy.

I looked down at my breasts and saw it clearly: the nipples had risen into two firm, taut, expectant peaks. I smiled. For the first time in a long time I genuinely liked what I was looking at.

I brought the cube to one of them and barely brushed the tip. The cold unleashed an electric jolt that shot straight to my clit, clean, brutal, completely new. I let out a gasp in the empty room. I had never felt anything like that, that short between the ice and desire, that way my body responded as if someone else were touching it.

And my body responded, that it did. I felt wetness sliding down between my thighs, treacherous and honest all at once, dampening the inner skin of my legs.

—What if…? —I let out, at an idea that was only just beginning to take shape.

***

I lowered my free hand to my lips, parted them gently, and slid my middle finger inside. I started to stroke myself with a slow, circular motion, a technique I had learned almost by accident reading a novel a classmate had lent me, one of those that hides more than the title promises. I sighed deeply. I knew that sensation well, I had sought it out many times, and yet it still seemed incredible to me.

The ice in my other hand had almost completely disappeared, melted against the heat of my body. My fingers were so cold I could barely feel them. And then it occurred to me: I lowered them too, still freezing, to my clit.

It was another jolt, different from the first. This one started in my shoulders and raced through my whole back before bursting down below and spilling through my legs. I began to massage myself with those frozen fingers and the illusion was immediate, perfect: as if they were someone else’s hands, a woman’s hands, touching me.

I closed my eyes and imagined her. Not a specific face, but a presence: a woman kneeling between my legs, her hair brushing my thighs, her mouth rising slowly. The fantasy was so vivid that I arched in the chair, looking for contact that didn’t exist.

I imagined her talking to me. A low, rough voice, telling me in my ear to relax, that she would take care of everything. I imagined her nails tracing soft lines along the inner skin of my thighs, her warm breath contrasting with the cold I was inflicting on myself. And the strangest thing was that it didn’t make me feel self-conscious at all. On the contrary: the more clearly I could picture her, the more my body let go, as if it had been waiting for years to be given permission.

Then I understood that I had never allowed myself to fantasize like that, without filters, without correcting myself halfway through an image, without forcing a man into a place where I didn’t want one. And everything that had been doubt for months suddenly arranged itself into a single clear sentence, while my fingers kept working.

My breathing turned ragged. The rhythm sped up on its own. I opened my eyes for an instant, saw the glass, and took the second ice cube. I prepared it the same way as the first, rolling it over my tongue, and this time I took it straight, without detours, to the place that was already burning.

It was a crash of contradictory sensations. I traced circles around my clit with the ice while the fingers of my other hand kept parting me, opening me, claiming me. Cold and heat at once, pleasant pain and pure pleasure mixed together until they blurred. I bit my lip not to scream in the empty house.

And then, on pure impulse, I lowered the ice and pushed it just barely toward my entrance. The shiver ran through me from top to bottom, intense, almost unbearable, before the cube finally surrendered completely to the heat of my insides.

I withdrew my fingers, let them recover their temperature against my naked skin, and when they had warmed again I returned to stroking myself from within. My pace had never been so fast. I was breathing in jerks, feeling sweat run down my forehead and between my breasts, my whole body tense like a rope about to snap.

I knew it was coming. I felt it building, rising, concentrating in a single tiny point that was begging to be released.

I let go.

The orgasm split me in two. I let out a rough grunt, my thighs trembled, and I collapsed against the back of the chair, defeated, empty, and full all at once. It took me a long while to open my eyes, to remember there was a world beyond my own skin.

***

When I finally lifted my head, I looked at the mess. The chair was soaked, a mix of melted water and my own juices. On the floor there were scattered drops and even a small puddle by the desk leg. I laughed to myself, exhausted and satisfied, without a trace of shame.

Something had changed, and it wasn’t just the messy room. For the first time I hadn’t needed to imagine a man, or force myself to feel what I was supposedly supposed to feel. I had imagined a woman and everything had clicked into place, natural, obvious, like a key sliding into its lock.

I wasn’t confused. I never was.

Ready to dry myself off, I reached for a towel and got up from the chair. That was when the monitor, which had been left on, blinked with a notification: a friend request. I didn’t know that person —a girl with an open smile and direct gaze in the photo— but by then I had the habit of accepting anyone who found my profile.

I hesitated for a second, still naked, still trembling, with my skin prickled and that new certainty beating in my chest. Then I clicked accept.

And to this day I don’t regret that last decision.