That Night on the Dune I Stopped Being Innocent

Helena had grown up being the least striking girl in her group of friends. Beside Lorena, a brunette with precociously curvy lines, and Camila, who led the pack with a natural magnetism that opened every door for them, she always faded into the background. Adolescence had felt endless for her, between braces, thick-rimmed glasses, and unruly hair she could never quite tame.

Something changed the summer before she turned eighteen. She got her braces off, discovered contact lenses, and let her hair grow out until the sun lightened it to a blond shade. By the time she started university, she was a different girl. Lithe, fine-featured, with a mouth that smiled without her meaning it to. Her friends looked at her at first with surprise and then with pride, as if they had uncovered a secret they had been guarding for years without even knowing it.

She had been with Lucas for six months, a fellow student two years older than she was. They made the perfect café couple: he was tall, polite, with the easy smile of a good guy; she hung on his arm as if she had been invented for him. The others joked about how sickeningly sweet they were, but Helena didn’t care. She was in love for the first time and it seemed enough to fill an entire life.

Lucas was the first. One night of drinking, after months of putting it off, they left the bar on some improvised excuse that nobody believed and parked on the top floor of a shopping center. The air inside the car felt heavy. Helena had never seen Lucas so shaky, or so quiet.

—Are you sure? —he asked, his hand spread open over her thigh.

She nodded without speaking. Her mouth was dry and her pulse was beating in places where she had never known it lived before.

They kissed in the back seat until their clothes started to get in the way. He slipped the straps of her dress down awkwardly, unclasped her bra, and sucked her nipples one by one, tugging them with his teeth until Helena arched her back against the steamed-up window. He slid his hand under her skirt, pulled her panties aside, and brushed her cunt with two fingers. She was soaked through. She had never been that wet in her life. Lucas groaned when he felt it and she bit her lip not to scream when he pushed his fingers into her to the knuckles.

—Fuck, Helena —he murmured against her neck—. You’re dripping.

She fumbled for his zipper. She pulled his trousers down to his knees and took out his cock, hard, hot, thicker than she had imagined in the nights when she touched herself thinking of him. She held it clumsily, not really knowing what to do, and Lucas guided her hand until he showed her the rhythm. When he pulled away to get a condom from his wallet, Helena saw for the first time the naked body of a man so close. She felt curiosity, fear, and an urgency she couldn’t name.

It hurt. It was hard. She asked Lucas to stop, to wait, to go slower. He kissed her forehead between each thrust and kept telling her he loved her, to relax, while he carefully opened her legs and pushed the tip of his cock against a cunt that had never been fucked before. When he finally entered her all the way, Helena stayed very still for a few seconds, listening to the car’s air conditioner and the frantic pounding of her own body. So this is it, she thought. This thing everyone talks about so much. Lucas came quickly, with a muffled groan against her shoulder, and she felt his cock throbbing inside the condom. She didn’t come. She didn’t yet know she could.

***

After that night it was like opening a door that could no longer be shut. Lucas and Helena fucked in any corner where they could have privacy: in the car, at his house when his parents went out, on a friend’s sofa, on a staircase at the university on a Friday at nine at night with her panties in his pocket and her skirt hitched up to her waist. Helena discovered that her body responded greedily, that the fear of the first time had turned into hunger, and that hunger had a name and an owner. She learned to suck him off in the passenger seat without choking, to ride him with her back to the steering wheel while he dug his fingers into her hips, to come on his tongue with a cushion bitten between her teeth so the neighbors wouldn’t hear her.

—You’re unbearable —Lorena would tell them when she saw them kissing at the bar table—. Seriously, get a room.

Helena laughed. She knew it showed on them: the glassy eyes, the hands reaching for each other under the table, the hurry to leave when they finished the first drinks. She was convinced Lucas was the man she was going to marry. She believed it with the naive certainty of someone who had not yet met anyone else.

***

The Sitges plan was born in July, on a terrace, amid laughter and shared phone screens showing maps. Four friends, one week of camping, sun and long nights. Lucas stayed in Valencia looking like an orphaned child, and Helena kissed him on the forehead, promising video calls every night. The farewell was as always: clothes on the floor, kisses that went on too long, one last caress at the car door.

The campsite was a step away from the beach. Helena, Lorena, Camila, and Adriana pitched the tents amid the clumsy laughter of people who had never done it in their lives. Before they were even finished, they had company: five boys, three Italians and two Americans, who helped them with the ropes and pegs without anyone asking. Lorena and Camila exchanged a conspiratorial look. The weekend promised.

Helena kept to the side. She went over the list of reasons she had to behave in her head: Lucas, the promise, the affection, her word. But Tyrone sat down next to her in the sand, with a caipirinha in his hand, and all her arguments began to tremble.

He was huge. A university student, a basketball player from some city Helena couldn’t remember the name of. Almost two meters tall, broad shoulders, sculpted arms, and a slow smile that seemed meant only for her. His skin was dark and warm; hers, pale and sun-kissed. When they laughed together for the first time, Helena felt heat settle under her navel and knew, with a clarity that would scare her later, that she was in trouble.

—You look at me too much —Tyrone said to her, with Spanish that was barely chewed.

—You look at me too —she answered without thinking.

They spent the afternoon on the beach, playing volleyball, talking in a clumsy mix of three languages, brushing against each other as if by accident. Helena forgot to call Lucas. When she realized it, it was already night and the nine of them were in a beach bar with a band playing covers of Dire Straits, the Eagles, U2. The music, the drinks, and the looks did the rest.

***

Around one in the morning, someone suggested going down onto the sand. One of the Italians pulled a guitar from nowhere and started strumming chords. Another handed out shots of Jack Daniel’s that went from hand to hand. Helena drank without measuring herself. She didn’t want to think.

Tyrone brushed her arm every time he laughed. Helena could tell the way he looked at her and how she wasn’t quite able to meet his gaze. When the opening chords of Sweet Child o’ Mine started playing in the distance, he offered her his hand and she took it without speaking. They walked barefoot along the shoreline, not saying where they were going because they already knew.

The water was warm. They stripped off among the waves, laughing, frightened by their own audacity. When Helena’s bikini drifted away and she moved closer to Tyrone’s huge body, she felt his hard cock against her stomach for the first time and lost her breath. It was different. It was more. It reached almost to her navel, thick as her wrist, the broad tip throbbing under the water. She lowered her hand, wrapped her fingers around it, and couldn’t close them all the way. Tyrone gave a rough moan into her hair.

Lucas, forgive me, she thought, knowing there was no turning back now.

She knelt at the water’s edge, with the surf breaking against her hips, and took him into her mouth. It was hard to open her jaw wide enough. She licked his glans, circling it with her tongue, salty with sea and with him, and when she tried to swallow him whole she choked and had to let him go between coughs and laughter. Tyrone held her head with both hands, with enormous care for a guy so big, and gradually slid his cock all the way to the back of her throat, a centimeter at a time, until Helena learned to breathe through her nose while he fucked her mouth. She grabbed his balls with one hand and with the other she touched her cunt under the water, feeling her clit swell until it throbbed.

—Get up —he murmured, pulling her away before he came—. Not yet.

They went back to the sand, lay down on a towel behind the dunes, and Helena gave herself over to what she had been refusing all day. He trailed his mouth over her skin, bit one nipple gently and then less gently, tugging at it until she cried out. He spread her legs with his huge palms and buried his face in her cunt. He licked her lips from bottom to top, slowly, as if he were learning her. He slid his tongue inside her and then pressed it against her clit with a precise point Helena hadn’t known existed. He fingered her with two fingers, then three, curling them upward, all the while sucking her clit without pause. Helena came for the first time with Tyrone’s mouth on her cunt and her thighs squeezing his head, biting into her forearm so she wouldn’t wake up the campsite.

—Slow —she asked when she saw him position himself over her, remembering the first night with Lucas, remembering the pain—. Slowly, please.

Tyrone obeyed. He took his cock by the base, ran it up and down over the lips of her cunt, wetting it with her flow, and pushed the glans in. He entered her with measured slowness, a centimeter and a pause, another centimeter and a breath, filling her in a way Helena had never felt before. This wasn’t in the manual, she thought. Nobody told me about this. The first thrust all the way in tore a scream from her that was lost in the sound of the waves. She felt the tip hitting something inside her that sent currents down her legs. It hurt and she liked it at the same time, in a mixture she hadn’t known was possible.

—Give it to me —she told him, gripping his nape—. Give it to me hard. Fuck me however you want, fuck.

Tyrone gave her the night of her life. He flipped her onto her back and started driving his cock into her all the way with long strokes, pulling almost all the way out before slamming back in, making a wet sound that mingled with the waves. He grabbed her ankles and put her legs over his shoulders to fuck her deeper, folding her in half. Helena felt his weight, the sweat dripping onto her chest, his cock reaching places she hadn’t known she had.

—Turn —he growled.

He turned her onto all fours on the towel, smacked her ass once, making her moan involuntarily, and shoved his cock into her from behind again. He grabbed her hair with one hand and her hip with the other, and started fucking her as if he meant to break her apart. Each thrust lifted her breasts off the ground, each withdrawal tore a guttural moan from her. Helena reached down and found her clit with two fingers while he skewered her, and came a second time, clenching her cunt around Tyrone’s cock until she heard him curse in English.

—Fuck, girl, fuck —he panted—. So tight.

He lifted her off the ground, grabbing her by the hips as if she weighed nothing, set her on his thighs while he knelt and impaled her slowly, letting her sink down under her own weight all the way to the bottom. Helena threw her head back, leaning against his shoulder, and started moving herself, riding him in the sand while Tyrone squeezed her tits and bit her neck. He put three fingers in her mouth and she sucked them as if they were another cock, drooling over them, and then he took her hand and lowered it to her clit so she could touch herself while he kept fucking her from below.

Helena lost count of the positions, lost count of the moans, lost count of her own name. She had already had two orgasms before she understood what was happening to her, and a third, devastating one, shook her when Tyrone sank all the way in, grabbed her hips and crushed her against him, and came inside her with a long growl, pulse after pulse, filling her with a thick warmth Helena felt sliding down her thighs as soon as he withdrew. In a moment of post-alcohol clarity, it occurred to her that she had completely forgotten the condom, that she had spent half the night with another man’s semen dripping from her cunt into the sand. She couldn’t stop to think about it any more. Tyrone was hard against her ass again before the trembling had passed, and he fucked her once more, slower, dirtier, with two fingers between her lips and his mouth against her ear telling her filthy things in English that Helena understood perfectly.

***

They fell asleep on the towel, their skin sticky with salt, sweat, and dried semen between her thighs. At seven in the morning, the sound of the beach bar packing up woke her. Tyrone was still holding her, breathing slowly against her nape, his cock still soft and tucked between her buttocks. Helena got up carefully, picked her dress up off the sand, and walked barefoot to where her friends were sleeping. It was hard to walk. Her cunt was throbbing as if it had a life of its own.

Back at the campsite, the four of them gathered at noon, all with the same face, all with the same awkward silence and the same smile slipping out without permission. Camila handed Helena a sandwich and messed up her hair.

—Don’t punish yourself —she said, with no further explanation.

Helena didn’t answer. She lay down on her towel, closed her eyes, and let the sun erase the traces of the night. But her body was still throbbing in places Lucas had never reached.

***

Back in Valencia, Helena sat with Lucas on a bench facing the river. She had spent three days rehearsing the conversation and yet, when he came up to her with a huge smile and a coffee in his hand, her voice nearly broke.

—I can’t keep going —she told him.

—Why? —he asked, not understanding anything—. Did I do something?

—You didn’t do anything. You’re the one who didn’t do anything wrong —she held the cup with both hands so he wouldn’t see the trembling—. It’s me. I met someone.

She didn’t give him details. She didn’t want to destroy him with the image of a cock that wasn’t his forcing its way into her on a beach. Lucas cried. Helena did too, but for reasons she couldn’t explain to him. She cried for the girl she had been six months earlier, for the girl who had fallen in love with her first time as if it were the last. She cried for everything that was about to come crashing down on her, including the late period piling up in her head like a sentence.

That night on the dune had not only changed the way she loved. It had changed what she herself knew about who she was. And that, for better or worse, could no longer be undone.