What I Imagine Every Night When I Walk Home Alone

There are things a woman doesn’t tell anyone. Not the friends she shares Sunday coffee with, not the man I sleep with, and certainly not the woman who looks back at me in the mirror every morning. This is one of those things. I’m writing it because I need to get it out, because I’ve been keeping it inside for too long and I don’t know where else to put it.

My name is Carmen, and I work in a bar in downtown Valencia. I get off late, almost always after midnight, when the streets have emptied out and the last tram stopped running long ago. I live fifteen minutes away on foot, along a wide avenue that’s full of people during the day and becomes something else at night. A dark mouth. A passage between two rows of lowered shutters.

And that’s where my fantasy begins, right there.

I don’t know exactly when it was born. Maybe one of those nights when I was tired, my feet swollen and my apron still smelling of beer, and I met the gaze of a man leaning against a wall. Nothing happened. He looked at his phone, and I kept walking. But something stayed inside me, an unfinished question: what if he had followed me?

Ever since then, I’ve looked for him. Not so it can really happen—that terrifies me; I’m not stupid—but to feed what already lives in my head. I walk more slowly than I should. I look at the doorways. Sometimes I hold a stranger’s gaze for one second too long, long enough to imagine that he notices, that he understands, that he decides.

I know it’s wrong. And yet it repeats itself, night after night, like a film rewinding on its own.

***

It always starts the same way. I’m walking with my head bowed, my purse slung across my chest, my keys between my fingers as my mother taught me. The avenue is deserted. There’s only the hum of a flickering streetlamp and the echo of my own heels on the concrete.

I don’t hear him arrive. That’s the part that sends the biggest shiver through me: the silence. Suddenly a broad, hot hand covers my mouth from behind, and before I can scream I’m pressed against his body. I feel his other hand climb up my waist, spread over my breast, and squeeze it through my blouse with a confidence that allows for no argument.

The fear is real. I feel it in my stomach, in my knees going weak. But there’s something beneath the fear, something I don’t dare name in daylight and that rises inside me at night like a tide. I feel his hard cock against my ass, thick and swollen, marking me through the fabric like a warning of what he’s going to put inside me, and instead of struggling I stay still. Still and, to my shame, dripping between my legs.

“Looks like you were in the mood, slut,” he tells me softly in my ear, almost tenderly. “You can see it in the way your ass moves when you walk alone.”

It isn’t a question. It’s a sentence. And the worst part, the thing that makes me squeeze my thighs every time I reach this point, is that he’s right.

His breath brushes my neck, my ear, that spot beneath the earlobe I didn’t even know existed until he finds it. His hand moves down from my breast to my stomach, yanks open the button of my skirt, slips beneath my underwear, and spreads the lips of my cunt with two fingers, without asking, without beating around the bush. He finds how soaked I am and lets out a low laugh against the nape of my neck.

“Look at this. You’re a goddamn fountain. So much talk about being a decent girl, and you’re walking around with your cunt like this.”

He pushes in one finger, then two, all the way, and starts moving them inside me while searching for my clitoris with his thumb and squeezing it. My knees buckle. If his other arm weren’t holding me against his body, I’d fall to the ground. He drives me with his hips into the recess of a doorway, out of the streetlamps’ reach, where the darkness swallows us both. No one would see us even if someone passed by. No one ever does.

He keeps thrusting his fingers into me hard, with a wet sound that makes my face burn with shame in the silence of the doorway. When I’m about to come, he stops dead, pulls out his glistening fingers, and holds them in front of my mouth.

“Suck. Taste yourself.”

I part my lips and lick his fingers. I taste myself, something thick and salty, and he watches me do it with a calmness that humiliates and arouses me at the same time.

“Good girl. Now get on your knees,” he orders.

And I, who argues over the price of bread in real life, obey. I lower myself slowly, feeling the cold ground through my skirt, his hand still tangled in my hair, guiding me down. It’s that contradiction that drives me crazy: being the one who gives herself and, at the same time, having no choice. Wanting it and being forced in the same gesture.

***

In my head, the stranger never has a face. Sometimes I give him a rough jaw, a deep voice, big hands. But his features change, blur. The only thing that remains the same is what he makes me feel: small, desired, used in a way I don’t dare ask for when I’m awake.

Because that’s the secret, isn’t it? In real life I’m the one who organizes, the one who sets the limits, the one who says enough. I make the decisions at home and at work. And perhaps that’s precisely why, somewhere deep inside me, there’s a place that only wants to let go. To stop deciding. To have someone decide for me, even if only for a moment, even if it’s invented.

I think about it as I walk, and my mouth goes dry. I think about it in the shower, water running down my back and my fingers between my legs, imagining they’re his. I think about it, I confess, lying beside my partner, my hand beneath the sheets and my breathing held so he won’t notice that I’m touching myself while thinking about a cock that isn’t his.

***

I return to the doorway. I always return.

I’m on my knees, and he opens his pants in front of my face. When he pulls out his cock, the air escapes me. It’s thick and dark, the tip already glistening, and he presses it straight against my lips before I have time to do anything. He holds my face with one hand, almost gently, and with the other he grips himself at the base and drags it over my closed mouth as if he were painting it with saliva.

“Open,” he tells me.

I do. I do it as though I’d spent my whole life waiting for someone to ask me that way, without beating around the bush, without asking twice for permission. He pushes it in slowly, resting it on my tongue, and makes me close my lips around it.

“Suck properly. With enthusiasm. Let it show that you like having it in your mouth.”

I start slowly, almost tasting him, feeling how he fills my mouth, the taste of hot skin, the vein pulsing against my tongue. I run my tongue along the underside, over the tip, take him all the way in until he hits my throat and I have to pull back, gagging. He lets me recover for a second, grabs my hair with both hands, and sets the pace himself.

He drives himself all the way in, again and again, as far as I can take him, until my eyes fill with tears and I feel short of breath. Drool spills from the corner of my mouth, runs down my chin to my cleavage, and he doesn’t ease up. He fucks my mouth as if it were a cunt, both hands holding my head so I can’t move, and right at that exact limit, he pulls out and lets me breathe. Then he goes back in. And again. As if he were measuring precisely how much I can endure.

“That’s it, slut, slowly,” he murmurs. “Learn.”

The word pierces me. Learn. As if I were something raw he was shaping. And the most disturbing part is that, in the fantasy, I want to learn. I want to be good at this. I want to swallow his cock whole and make his eyes roll back. I want him to be satisfied with what I do.

He pulls it out, drags it over my face, my cheeks, my swollen lips, and spits into my mouth before pushing it in again. He holds me by the nape and forces me to look up at him while he drives down my throat, and that look—his, calm, almost bored, as if this were what I deserved—is what makes me squeeze my thighs there on the ground, trying to ease the pressure between my legs.

When he finally pulls away, he’s completely slick with saliva and with me in the half-light. He lifts me by the arm without effort, as if I weighed nothing. And then he does what I find hardest to admit I want.

***

He turns me around. He presses the palms of my hands against the cold wall of the doorway and spreads my legs with a short kick of his knee. I feel him yank my skirt up from behind, pull my panties down to the middle of my thighs, leaving them there, not taking them all the way off so I can’t close my legs.

His hand slips between my thighs and confirms what he already knows.

“Look at you,” he says, and there’s a smile in his voice. “You’re dripping. It’s running down the inside of your thigh. Did you know that? You fucking slut, this is what you wanted when I saw you walking alone.”

I can’t deny it. I don’t want to deny it. His fingers push in hard, without preamble, three at once, and a hoarse moan escapes me that I don’t recognize as my own. He thrusts them in and out noisily, opening me wide with them, while his other hand smacks my ass so hard it leaves my cheek burning.

“Shut up. If someone hears you, I’ll walk away and leave you like this, ass out. Do you want that?”

I shake my head no. My cheek is pressed against the cold glass of the door, my mouth open, saliva sticking my hair to my face. He whispers things in my ear, things that would offend me during the day and that, on this invented street, in this darkness that protects me, set me on fire. He calls me his. He calls me a slut, a whore, a wet cunt; he tells me what I am to him on this nonexistent night.

He spits into his hand, runs it over his cock, and spreads my ass cheeks with his thumbs. And with one thrust, without warning, he’s inside. All of him. All at once. Deep inside.

I scream against the glass, and he covers my mouth with his hand.

“Shhh. Take it. You can handle this.”

And he fucks me. He starts fucking me against the wall with long, deep thrusts that lift my whole body each time and make my tits knock against the glass. The doorway gives me back the reflection of my face fogged by my own breath. My lips are parted, my cheeks flushed, my eyes vacant, a strand of saliva hanging from my chin. I don’t recognize myself, and at the same time I’ve never felt more like me.

He grips my hips and thrusts harder and harder, with a rhythm that never lets up. The dull slap of his pelvis against my ass, the wet squelch of his cock entering and leaving, my panting escaping between his fingers pressed over my mouth. One of his hands travels up my back, tears the buttons from my blouse one by one, pulls one breast out of my bra, and pinches my nipple between two fingers, tugging and twisting it until I scream into his palm.

“That’s it, that’s what you like, isn’t it? Say it. Take your hand off her mouth and say it.”

He releases my mouth. And I, the woman who in real life would never say these words, say them. I tell him between broken moans while he keeps splitting me open against the wall.

“Yes… yes, like that… harder… don’t stop, please, don’t stop…”

“Harder? You’re such a dirty whore. Go home after this and tell your boyfriend. Tell him a stranger fucked you against a doorway just like you deserved.”

Pleasure and humiliation blend together until I can’t tell them apart. Every thrust drives me into the wall, the cold stone against my breast, the heat of his body against my back, his cock filling me to a place I never knew existed. He reaches around in front of me, finds my clitoris, and starts rubbing it in circles while he keeps fucking me from behind.

“Come. Now. Come on my cock.”

And I come. I come so hard my legs buckle, my vision clouds, and the moan rises from my stomach; I don’t care if the whole neighborhood hears me. My cunt trembles around his cock inside me in waves while he keeps pounding me mercilessly, taking advantage of every shudder to drive himself deeper.

***

This is where the fantasy always speeds up. Where I stop controlling it, where it controls me.

I feel him swell inside me, feel him lose his rhythm, become erratic, urgent. He digs his fingers into my hip so hard that in the fantasy he leaves marks, the kind that would be impossible to explain the next day. He grabs my hair, pulls my head back, forces me to arch my back so he can thrust into me from an even deeper angle.

“Inside. You’re going to swallow it inside. All of it.”

And he empties himself inside me, all the way, with a deep growl against the nape of my neck, jerk after jerk, while I come apart with him, trembling, held up only by his body and the wall. I feel his cock pulsing inside me, feel him filling me, hot semen soaking me from within until it overflows and begins running down my thigh when he slowly pulls out.

He stays behind me for a second, breathing heavily. Then he spreads my ass cheeks with his thumbs, looks at what he left, and gives me another short smack on the ass, almost as an afterthought.

“Good girl.”

And then, in my head, comes the detail that makes it unbearable and perfect at the same time: he leaves.

Without another word. He doesn’t even pull up my panties. He straightens his clothes and fastens his belt as he walks away down the avenue as if nothing had happened, leaving me there against the doorway, my skirt still raised, one breast out, semen running down the inside of my thigh, my legs trembling. There is no aftermath. No tenderness, no name, no phone number. Only the echo of his footsteps fading away and me, alone again, trying to pull myself back together, pull up my soaked panties, and button the blouse missing its buttons.

It’s the abandonment that finishes me. The idea of being desired with that intensity and, one second later, meaning nothing. Used, filled, and returned to the night like something disposable. I don’t understand it. I don’t need to understand it.

***

And afterward, always afterward, I open my eyes and I’m in my bed, or under the shower, or standing at the traffic light on my real avenue, waiting for it to turn green while a car passes by. The street is empty. There’s no stranger. Only me, heart racing, my panties genuinely wet, and a mixture of relief and something resembling disappointment that I prefer not to examine too closely.

I keep walking. I reach my doorway—the real one, lit up, with its worn doormat and the mailbox that doesn’t close properly. I put in my key, climb the three flights, and wash my face. Then I lie down beside the man who loves me, who would never treat me that way because he’s good, because he respects me, because things between us are warm and safe. Sometimes, if he’s asleep, I slip my hand between my legs and finish what the avenue began, biting my lip so I won’t wake him, coming silently while I think about the cock of a faceless man.

Sometimes I think that’s the trap. That precisely because my life is safe, my imagination needs danger. That I don’t want it to happen for real: I want the shiver of imagining that it could. The difference between the two is all that keeps me sane, and every night I hold on to it on that dark avenue, between who I am and what I allow myself to desire when no one can see me.

Tomorrow I’ll leave the bar after midnight again. I’ll walk slowly again. I’ll look at the doorways and hold some stranger’s gaze for one second too long. And I know, with a certainty that frightens me a little and makes me laugh a little, that the film will start playing again on its own, exactly where I left it.

Because there are things a woman doesn’t tell anyone. And this one, now that I’ve let it out here, is still mine.