What I Imagine Every Night When I Walk Home Alone

There are things a woman tells no one. Not the friends she shares coffee with on Sundays, not the man she sleeps with, and much less the woman who meets her gaze in the mirror every morning. This is one of those things. I’m writing it because I need to get it out of me, because I’ve been keeping it in for too long and I don’t know where to put it anymore.

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

And there, right there, is where my fantasy begins.

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

Since then I look for him. Not for it to happen for real —that terrifies me, I’m not stupid— but to feed what already lives in my head. I walk slower than I should. I look into doorways. Sometimes I hold a stranger’s eyes for a second too long, just 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 that rewinds on its own.

***

It always starts the same way. I’m walking with my head down, my bag slung across my chest, my keys between my fingers like my mother taught me. The avenue is deserted. Only the buzz of a flickering streetlamp and the echo of my own heels on the pavement.

I don’t hear him come up behind me. That’s the part that chills me most: the silence. Suddenly a hand covers my mouth from behind, broad and hot, and before I can scream I’m already against his body. I feel the other hand slide up my waist, spread over my chest, squeeze it through my blouse with a certainty that brooks no argument.

The fear is real. I feel it in my stomach, in my knees going weak. But there is something beneath the fear, something I don’t dare name in daylight and that at night rises inside me like a tide. I feel his hard erection pressed against my ass, separated only by fabric, and instead of struggling I go still. Still and, to my shame, wet.

—Looks like you wanted this —he whispers in my ear, low, almost tender.

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

His breath brushes my neck, my ear, that spot under the lobe I didn’t even know existed until he finds it. He drives me with his body into the alcove of a doorway, out of the line of the streetlamps, where the darkness swallows us both. No one would see us even if someone passed by. No one ever passes by.

—On your knees —he आदेश? no; translation. Let's continue correctly.

—On your knees —he orders.

And I, who in real life argue about the price of bread, obey. I lower myself slowly, feeling the cold of the floor through my skirt, with his hand still tangled in my hair guiding me down. It’s that contradiction that drives me wild: being the one who gives herself over and yet not having a choice. Wanting 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 the features change, blur. The only thing that stays 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 maybe precisely for that reason, 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 an instant, even if only invented.

I think about it while I walk and my mouth goes dry. I think about it in the shower, with the water running down my back. I think about it, I confess it, lying beside my partner while he breathes peacefully, suspecting nothing.

***

I go back to the doorway. I always go back.

I’m on my knees and he holds my face with one hand, almost gently, before running the other over my lips. He orders me to open my mouth. I do. I do it as if I’d spent my whole life waiting for someone to ask me like that, directly, without asking permission twice.

He starts slowly, almost testing me, just slipping in. Then he grabs my hair with both hands and sets the rhythm himself. He takes me to where I can’t take any more, until my eyes fill with tears and I feel short of breath, and right there, at the exact limit, he eases up and lets me breathe. And then again. And again. As if he were measuring precisely how much I can bear.

—Like that, slowly —he murmurs—. Learn.

The word goes through me. Learn. As if I were something raw he’s molding. And the most disturbing thing is that, in the fantasy, I want to learn. I want to be good at this. I want him to be satisfied with what I do.

When he finally pulls away, everything in front of me is shining with saliva in the dim light. He hauls me up 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 plants my palms against the cold wall of the doorway, forcing my legs open with his knee. I feel my skirt ride up from behind, feel his hand slip between my thighs and check what he already knows.

—Look at yourself —he says, and there’s a smile in his voice—. You’re soaked.

I can’t deny it. I don’t want to deny it. His fingers enter hard, without warning, and a sound escapes me that I don’t recognize as my own. He says things in my ear, things that by day would offend me and that in this invented street, in this darkness that protects me, set me on fire. He calls me his. He tells me what I am to him on this night that doesn’t exist.

With one movement he pushes aside the fabric of my underwear. And with one single thrust, without warning, he’s inside. All of it. All at once.

The doorway reflects my face in the glass of the door. My lips are parted, my cheeks flushed, my eyes lost. I don’t recognize myself and at the same time I’ve never felt more like myself. He grips my hips and drives into me harder and harder, while one of his hands travels up my back, finds my breast beneath the blouse and pinches my nipple between two fingers.

Pleasure and discomfort blur together until I can’t tell them apart. Each удар? No, translate properly. Each thrust? Let's continue. Each thrust slams me against the wall, the cold of the masonry against my cheek, the heat of his body against my back. And the sounds: his ragged breathing, the rustle of clothing, my own gasping that I try to stifle for fear someone will hear and that at the same time I don’t want to stifle.

***

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

I feel him swell inside me, feel him lose the rhythm, turn erratic, urgent. He digs his fingers into my hip so hard that in the fantasy he leaves marks, marks that the next day would be impossible to explain. And he empties himself inside me, all the way, with a low growl against my nape while I come undone with him, trembling, held up only by his body and the wall.

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

Without another word. He lets go of me, straightens his clothes and walks away down the avenue as if nothing had happened, leaving me there against the doorway, my skirt still hiked up and my legs shaking. There is no after. No tenderness, no name, no phone number. Just the echo of his steps fading and me, alone again, trying to pull myself together.

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

***

And then, always then, 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 goes by. The street is empty. There is no stranger. Just me, my heart racing and a mixture of relief and something like disappointment I’d rather not examine too closely.

I keep walking. I reach my doorway —the real one, lit up, with the worn doormat and the mailbox that doesn’t close properly—. I put in my key, climb the three flights, wash my face. And I lie down beside the man who loves me, who would never treat me like that because he is good, because he respects me, because between us things are warm and safe.

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 it could happen. The difference between the two things is all my sanity, and I hold on to it every night on that dark avenue, between what I am and what I allow myself to desire when no one is watching me.

Tomorrow I’ll leave the bar after midnight again. I’ll walk slowly again. I’ll look into doorways and at some stranger for a second too long again. And I know, with a certainty that scares me a little and makes me laugh a little, that the film will start up again on its own, exactly where I left off.

Because there are things a woman tells no one. And this one, now that I’ve let it out here, is still mine.