What the Garage Stranger Saw That Morning

Imagine it like this, because it’s only a fantasy and nobody here is judging you. You’re a thirty-four-year-old woman, you rent a flat in a quiet housing estate on the outskirts of Cártama, and you have your own parking space in the basement garage, the one where you park the car every morning before heading off to work.

That Tuesday you go down earlier than usual. The lift smells of damp concrete and cold petrol, and when the doors open on the second underground level, the garage is dim, with those ceiling lights that flicker before coming on properly. Not a soul can be heard. Only the distant hum of an extractor motor and your own heels on the concrete.

It’s a place you know by heart and yet, at this hour, it becomes something else. The empty spaces seem bigger. The yellow columns cast long shadows that cross over the floor. There’s something about going down alone, before the building wakes up, that has always made you a little nervous and a little alert, as if the silence were holding something that hasn’t happened yet.

You’re wearing a long dress, the kind you like for summer: a wide pleated skirt that reaches almost to your ankles and moves on its own with every step. You slept terribly and left without breakfast, with nothing but a strong coffee in your body. And halfway to your car, without warning, you’re hit by a tremendous need to pee.

I won’t make it. I’m not going back up two floors and wet myself.

You stop dead. You look one way, toward the exit ramp, and see nothing. You look the other way, toward the row of yellow-painted columns, and nothing there either. The garage seems deserted, full of sleeping cars and shadows. You tell yourself it’ll only be a moment, that nobody comes down at this time, that the dress covers you more than enough.

So you do it. You slip between your car and the column, hitch your skirt up with both hands, pull your white panties down to mid-thigh, and squat. The relief is immediate and almost embarrassing, that physical relief that makes you close your eyes for a second.

What you didn’t see, because you didn’t look properly, was that two spaces away, inside a dark car with tinted windows, there was someone there. A man. And that man had been watching you for a while without your noticing.

***

You notice too late. A movement at the edge of your vision, a reflection in the polished bodywork of the car next to you. You turn your head and then you see him: a guy sitting behind the wheel of a grey sedan, his window down and his gaze fixed on you. One hand is busy in his lap, moving slowly, and he makes no attempt to hide it.

Your breath catches. You’re still squatting, still not finished, and the need won’t let you straighten up all at once. You try to stand, to tug your skirt down, but your body won’t obey and you stay half-frozen, caught between urgency and shame.

The sedan’s door opens. The man gets out unhurriedly, tall, with his shirt hanging out over his trousers and an expression you can’t quite read. He doesn’t look threatening. More curious, hungry, like someone who’s found something unexpected and has no intention of letting it go.

By the time you manage to get to your feet, he’s already on top of you. The distance between the two cars disappears in three steps, and before you can say anything, his hand brushes your cheek and his other hand is busy pulling down the zipper of his trousers.

And then you think it, fast, with that twisted logic that only shows up in the middle of fear and desire.

I’m not going to waste an opportunity like this. Things like this never happen twice. And besides, the guy’s packing something that makes you think twice.

As that thought crosses your mind, your mouth is already open. He doesn’t need to push you. His cock slides between your lips and you take it as if you’d been waiting for it all morning, sucking slowly at first, measuring it, that thickness forcing you to open wider than you thought you could.

For some reason you remember the lollipop candies you used to eat as a child, the ones that lasted an entire afternoon. Only this is much thicker. Much hotter. And much more forbidden.

Between one suck and the next, you look up at him. You need to know before you go on.

—Hey —you murmur, your voice rough—, you’re not going to do anything weird to me, are you?

—No, woman —he replies, almost laughing—. If you want, we’ll fuck. Nothing else.

And your world opens up. Because all the tension of the last few minutes, that knot of thinking he’d come down with bad intentions, comes undone all at once. His intentions were to ask if you wanted to. That’s all.

—Well of course I want to —you answer, with a swagger you didn’t know you had in you.

***

You straighten all the way up. You pull off your white panties, which have ended up lying in a tiny puddle on the concrete, and leave them there, forgotten. You don’t care. A moment ago you were dying of embarrassment at the thought of someone seeing you pull them down in secret, and now you’re going to fuck in full light, on the floor of a garage, with a complete stranger. Your mind can’t quite keep up with your body, and for once you decide not to force it. You take hold of him with one hand, firm, and guide him as he lets himself fall back onto the cold garage floor, his shirt crumpling under his weight.

You straddle him. You feel the rough concrete under your knees, the scrape of the pleated dress falling over your thighs like a curtain, and you lower yourself in one hard push, taking him all the way inside you. The moan that escapes you isn’t elegant. It’s the real thing.

For an instant you stay still, sitting all the way down on him, feeling him throb inside you. Your head spins with the absurd mix of the situation: the cold floor, a Tuesday morning, a man whose name you don’t know, the smell of rubber and oil in the garage and you, open on top of him as if you’d been doing this for years. You had never felt so exposed. You had never felt so free.

And then you start moving. A frantic rocking, shameless, hips dropping and rising at a pace neither of you controls anymore. He grips your waist, setting the rhythm, and you brace yourself with open palms on his chest to drive yourself harder.

The sounds multiply in the empty garage. The echo bounces off the columns, off the cars, off the low concrete ceiling, turning every gasp of yours into something enormous, impossible to hide. At that moment, you’re not even aware you’re crying out.

Every now and then you open your eyes and look around, toward the ramp, toward the lift, almost hoping someone will appear and catch you. And to your own surprise, you discover the idea doesn’t stop you. On the contrary. The possibility of a neighbour coming down for the car and finding you like this drives you to move faster, to sink harder, to chase the end with a urgency you don’t recognise in yourself.

He holds out. He holds out in a way that surprises you, hard as a rock and ready for what later you’ll estimate was at least half an hour, letting you set the pace, stopping just when you were about to come, then starting again. You sweat. Your hair sticks to your forehead. The dress has slipped off one shoulder and you don’t even bother pulling it back up.

When you finally come, you come with your whole body, with a shudder that folds you forward over his chest. And that heat of yours, that sudden clench that envelops him, is what finally breaks him. He comes with one last thrust, deep, like the pop of a champagne cork that’s been shaken for too long.

Only this isn’t champagne. It splashes onto the hem of your dress, your thighs, the pleated fabric you love so much, and you stay there on top of him for a moment, panting, laughing without quite knowing why.

***

Days later you find out the other part. Your neighbour Marisol from the fourth floor tells you while you share the lift and she glances at you sideways with a strange smile.

—Hey, didn’t you go down to the garage early on Tuesday? —she blurts out suddenly—. Because the racket could be heard all the way up to my floor. Panting, shouting… I thought it was a movie playing at full blast.

You blush, but she doesn’t seem to be reproaching you anything. On the contrary. She confesses, lowering her voice, that the noise had caught her alone at home, with her husband at work, and that she couldn’t help slipping a hand inside her clothes and finishing what you had started two floors below.

—I didn’t even know who you were —she says, shrugging—. But thank God someone in this building is doing something. My husband hasn’t touched me in months. Always with that miserable face, as if he had his period every day of the year.

And you laugh, because you don’t know what else to do, and you think that, without meaning to, you’ve done half the estate a favour.

***

That morning left you one more thing, besides the memory and a dress you had to take to the dry cleaner twice. Before going upstairs to change, still with your legs trembling, you gave your mobile number to the stranger in the grey sedan.

Just in case, you told him half-jokingly, you ever need someone to help you push the car.

Or me.

Tell me, you asked him. And I’ll come down to the garage right away. Without panties, this time on purpose.