That Night I Discovered What an Orgasm Felt Like

I was always a curious girl, but also far too quiet to ask what I truly wanted to know. I grew up in a small town, in a house with two older brothers and parents who changed the subject whenever something more explicit than they considered decent appeared on television. Sexuality existed, of course, but it always existed on the other side of my parents’ closed bedroom door, or in the jokes my brothers told under their breath in the hallway.

At twelve, I started noticing strange things. When I sat astride the armrest of the living room sofa to watch cartoons, a warm current would rise up my back and go straight to the nape of my neck. I did it without noticing, while channel-surfing with the remote, and I only understood that when I stood up my cheeks were hot and my breathing a little faster.

In the bathroom, I’d gotten used to looking at myself. Not in a lewd way, but with the concentration with which one studies an old map. I knew every mole, every fold, every new hair, but I didn’t understand what my body was doing with all of it.

The exact word came as a surprise, in sixth grade, during a talk they gave in the school gym. A very young psychologist, with a high ponytail and spotless white sneakers, talked to us about menstruation, contraceptives and, almost in passing, masturbation. She mentioned the term as if it were any old word, then kept going with the slides. Beside me, Carolina elbowed me and let out a giggle. I didn’t laugh. I wrote the word down in the margin of my notebook, in tiny letters, so no one would see it.

Masturbation.

I didn’t dare look it up that night. Or the next. Months passed, almost a whole year, before that word reappeared in my life. It was during a break, while Carolina and another classmate, Mariana, were speaking in low voices about what they did when they were alone in their rooms. They were laughing with a naturalness that hurt me. I didn’t understand half of what they were saying and I didn’t want to ask. I went home with curiosity scratching at me from the inside.

That afternoon my mother was at the supermarket and my brothers were at practice. The house smelled of fabric softener lavender and of the bread that had been left to toast in the kitchen. I sat down in front of the family computer in the dining room and opened the browser in an incognito window.

By then I already knew that option existed. I’d learned it in computer class, almost by chance. I typed the whole word, every letter, and the first result was a very long article in a teen magazine. I read it twice. I read it a third time. I learned, almost like studying for an exam, that it wasn’t something bad, that people did it, that you could feel pleasure by touching yourself.

And I learned, above all, that there was something else.

Pornography.

The word appeared twice in the article, among responsible warnings and links to official pages. But I wasn’t reading the article anymore. I was staring at the browser bar with my heart in my throat.

***

I didn’t do it that afternoon. I didn’t have the nerve. I shut off the computer as if I’d stolen something and went to my room to do my homework with clumsy hands. But the idea wouldn’t let me go.

I spent three nights turning it over and over. Three nights of eating dinner with my eyes on my plate, of answering in monosyllables, of going to bed early just to lie on my back and stare at the ceiling. The fourth night, a Friday, my parents went to bed early and my brothers stayed at a friend’s house.

It was eleven thirty. The house was silent.

I got up in my pajamas, locked my bedroom door — something I almost never did — and climbed back under the duvet with my phone in my hand. My pulse was pounding in my neck, my ears were hot, and my mouth was so dry I had to swallow twice before typing anything.

I opened the incognito tab. I typed one word. Deleted it. Typed another. Deleted that too. In the end, without thinking, I let my fingers do it on their own and typed anything that ended with a dot and an extension I only knew by hearsay. The first link that appeared was a dark blue page with grid thumbnails, many of them so explicit I pulled the phone away from my face as if it were burning me.

I tapped a random video. No filters, no searching, no understanding the tiny icons that appeared above it.

What appeared on screen took my breath away.

On the sofa of a clean, overly bright living room, a blonde woman and a brown-haired man were speaking in English. I pressed the ten-second skip button, again, and again, until the conversation ended. Then another man appeared from the left side of the frame. Taller, more serious, his shirt half open.

The blonde slid off the sofa until she was kneeling on the rug. The two men were still seated. When they started unbuttoning their pants, I clutched the phone with both hands so I wouldn’t drop it.

It was the first time in my life I had seen an erect cock. Or rather, two of them.

I stared as if I were watching a natural phenomenon, without blinking. A part of me, the most childish part, thought for a second they had to be fake. That it was all a trick, prosthetics, special effects. The other part, the one that could no longer lie to itself, felt the air in the room change density.

The woman started taking turns between them. She took one into her mouth, pulled away, then the other, then back to the first. She did it with a naturalness that mesmerized me. I had once read the word on a bathroom wall at school and never imagined it would look like that.

And then, for the first time with full awareness, I felt what I had been feeling for years without a name. A low, electric current concentrating itself between my thighs. An urgency. Something asking for the hand to stop resting on the duvet and slide underneath it.

***

It took me two minutes to dare.

First I lowered my hand to the edge of my pajama bottoms, pretending I was only getting comfortable. Then I slid it inside, over my underwear. The fabric was warm and, when I placed the tip of my finger on top, I discovered that it was wet too. I was surprised. I hadn’t connected that dampness with anything I had heard before. It was as if my body had started speaking a language I didn’t yet know how to read.

On the screen, one of the men had moved from the sofa to the floor. The woman was now on all fours. At first he was thrusting into her slowly, then faster, while she kept the other one in her mouth. I didn’t understand how she could breathe. I didn’t understand how she could not choke. And, above all, I didn’t understand why her face, when she pulled away to take a breath, looked like the face of someone who wanted to be nowhere else in the world.

My finger, meanwhile, had learned on its own. It moved in small circles, finding, without needing instructions, a spot that answered with a pulse of its own every time I brushed it. I closed my eyes for a second and opened them in alarm, afraid I might miss something in the video. The sensation grew. I had to bite my lip not to breathe too loudly.

“Jesus Christ,” I whispered.

It was almost the first time in my life I’d said something like that out loud inside my own room, with nobody else there.

I could hear my heart in my ears. My legs were tightening all on their own, as if they wanted to close and open at the same time. On the screen, the woman started moaning louder. Her gasps were so exaggerated that in another context they would have made me laugh. That night, no. That night each one of her sounds pushed me a little closer to something whose shape I still couldn’t guess.

The man fucking her pulled out suddenly. He stood up. He spilled something white and thick over her back and the curve of her ass. The woman laughed, turned her head, opened her mouth. The other man, the one still standing in front of her, also began touching himself quickly. I was just about to break apart inside.

I let the phone fall onto the pillow, almost without meaning to, and focused on what I was feeling. I increased the pressure of my finger. I clenched my thighs. For a few seconds I became a single wire charged with electricity.

The second man emptied himself over the woman’s face at the exact instant something inside me gave way.

***

I didn’t know how to name what happened. Not then.

I felt a heat rising from my pelvis to my sternum, a contraction that bent my knees under the duvet, and a series of throbbing waves coming and going like little breakers that never quite withdrew. I stayed still, eyes fixed on the ceiling, with my finger still where it was but no longer moving, waiting for it to pass.

When it did, I opened my mouth like someone surfacing.

The video was still playing softly. The actors were smiling at each other, saying things in English, getting up from the sofa. I closed the tab. Locked the phone. Set it face down on the nightstand.

I stayed like that for I don’t know how long. Five minutes. Ten. I could feel my own breathing gradually returning to a normal rhythm. I felt each small, residual contraction my body was letting go of like a farewell.

This, then. This was it.

I got up carefully, as if I were afraid of breaking. I went to the bathroom on tiptoe, turned on only the mirror light, and pulled my pajama bottoms down to my ankles. My underwear was soaked, dark at the crotch, and a glossy thread stretched a little when I pulled it away from my skin. I stared at it with the same face with which, years before, I had looked at any new mark on my body in the mirror: with the exact blend of strangeness and pride.

I still didn’t know that it had a name. That it was called lubrication. That it was proof my body had agreed with every single thing I had felt. I would learn that later, reading in secret, asking Carolina clumsily phrased questions, piecing things together.

That night I only knew one thing: that I had just had my first orgasm without really knowing what an orgasm was.

I went back to bed. Pulled the covers up to my chin. I fell asleep with a small, almost guilty smile at the corner of my mouth.

***

The next morning I went downstairs for breakfast as if nothing had happened. My mother asked if I’d slept well and I answered yes, with the naturalness of someone who has just discovered they can lie better than they thought. My father was reading the newspaper. My brothers came home at noon smelling of sweat and cheap cologne.

No one suspected a thing. No one could have suspected a thing. But inside, I was a different person. I had a new secret and, above all, I had a new key. I knew where the switch was. I knew how to turn it on. I knew what to do when the house went quiet and I was alone between the sheets.

That first night was only the beginning. From there my real adventures began, first with myself and much later with other people. But I was never going to forget that Friday at eleven thirty, the door locked, the dark blue browser tab, and the discovery that my body, all that time, had been waiting for me to show up.