The Night I Discovered the Pleasure of Watching

There are memories the body never forgets. This is one of them: the first time I caught myself watching, still, unable to tear my eyes away even if I had wanted to. I didn’t know then that there was a name for that, or that it would change something inside me.

Diego and I had been together for a little over two years when Lucía and Marcos passed through the city. They were old friends from university, the sort who disappear for long stretches and reappear as if no time had passed. We invited them to dinner at our place, and they accepted at once.

I spent the afternoon cooking: leek cream soup to start, roast chicken with herbs, warm lentil salad. I also had a cheese board in the fridge, olives, ham, and a chocolate tart I’d ordered from the bakery without telling Diego.

He came into the kitchen in the late afternoon and wrapped his arms around my waist from behind, burying his nose in my neck.

“It smells incredible,” he said.

“The chicken or me.”

“Both, but I’d prefer you for dessert.”

I hit his arm and moved away laughing. But it took him a moment to let go of my hip, and I noticed that.

I got dressed quickly: a dark green velvet dress, low heels, my hair loose. Nothing extravagant. But I felt good in that dress, and that was what mattered. There are nights when you feel exactly as you want to feel, and that was one of them.

They arrived at eight on the dot. Lucía came into the apartment first, wearing one of those short, tight red dresses that only she can wear without looking like she’s trying. Marcos was behind her, sleeves rolled up on his white shirt, carrying a bottle of red wine that he handed to Diego with a handshake.

“Valeria, you look gorgeous,” Lucía said, hugging me hard.

“Just as always,” Marcos added, kissing me on the cheek.

“To eat you up, I’d say,” Lucía said, looking me up and down with that shamelessness of hers that made me laugh more than I intended.

“You two are still as crazy as ever,” I said, moving toward the kitchen.

Dinner was long and warm. We finished two bottles before dessert, with plenty of laughter and stories from university that sounded more and more exaggerated with the distance of the years. Lucía told us she’d gotten into event photography and hated every second of it, but it paid well. Marcos designed custom furniture and was setting up his own workshop. They’d been living together for three years. They were doing well, you could tell: that quiet contentment of couples who have truly chosen each other and don’t regret it.

“And you two?” Lucía asked, looking at Diego and me.

“We survive,” Diego said, squeezing my hand under the table.

“That’s all you need,” she replied with a smile that wasn’t entirely innocent.

I was glad to know that things were going well for them. We had lost track of each other for almost two years, each of us absorbed in our own life. That night reminded me how much I missed this kind of evening: good food, good people, conversation that takes no effort.

When we finished dessert, we moved to the living room. Diego put an arm around my shoulders as we sat on the sofa and I leaned back against him without thinking. There was something in the air that I couldn’t name at the time. A current. One of those things everyone feels but nobody mentions.

“Do you remember the party at the end of senior year?” Lucía suddenly said, smiling like someone bringing something up on purpose.

“Vaguely,” I replied.

“Vaguely. I saw you two kissing for five minutes out on the terrace. Everyone was watching.”

“You’re exaggerating,” I protested.

“Not even a little. Marcos, tell her.”

“It was pretty memorable,” Marcos confirmed calmly.

Diego laughed. I felt heat rising up my neck.

“Let’s see if it still is,” Lucía said.

Diego took my chin between two fingers, slowly, and when our lips met the kiss was long, languid, utterly unconcerned that two people were watching us. His tongue slipped into my mouth without haste, searching for mine, and I sucked on it for a moment before letting him suck on mine. His hand moved from my shoulder to my chest and squeezed one breast over the velvet, with no attempt at subtlety, knowing they were watching. For a moment I forgot where I was. When we parted, Lucía and Marcos were looking at us with expressions that were not exactly surprise.

“Good,” she said. “Exactly.”

“Now you two,” Diego said.

Marcos took Lucía by the nape and kissed her. It wasn’t a showy kiss. It was a real kiss, the kind you don’t stage for an audience, with tongue and his hands sliding down her back until he grabbed her ass over the red dress and squeezed it with both hands, completely shameless. I had to look away because something about it felt too intimate to witness. Or too disturbing. I wasn’t entirely sure of the difference.

“I’ll get the last bottle,” I announced, getting up.

In the kitchen I leaned against the counter and waited for my heart to return to something approaching a normal rhythm. The wine, I told myself. It’s the wine. But I knew it wasn’t just that. My panties were soaked and my cunt was throbbing like a second pulse, and no wine was to blame for that.

Diego appeared a moment later.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Perfectly. I was looking for the wine.”

“The wine’s here.” He pointed to the bottle on the counter.

“I see that.”

He came closer and wrapped himself around me from behind, pressing against my back. I felt his weight, the warmth of his body, and I noticed his hard cock pushing against the fabric of his pants, fully outlined against my ass. His lips brushed my neck, just below the ear, and his hand went up to squeeze one breast over the dress.

“What do you want to do?” he asked in a very low voice.

“Take the wine to the living room.”

“Just that?”

I didn’t answer. I pushed my ass back without thinking, and he answered by pressing even closer, rubbing his hard cock along my ass crack over our clothes.

That was when I looked toward the living room and saw what was happening.

Lucía was on her knees in front of the sofa. Marcos had his eyes closed and the back of his head against the cushions, one hand in her hair. He had pulled his pants down to his knees and a thick, long cock, glistening with saliva, was sliding in and out of Lucía’s mouth. She was sucking it with calm concentration, holding the base with one hand while she worked it with her tongue laid flat, taking it deep to the back of her throat on the way down and drawing it out slowly on the way up. You could hear her swallowing. You could see the saliva hanging from the corner of her mouth and dripping in threads over the naked breasts that had spilled out of her neckline. She was tending to him like someone who knows exactly what she’s doing and enjoys it as much as the other person does.

I froze.

It wasn’t shame. Not exactly. It was something much more physical: a heat that rose from my belly to my throat, and a low, very precise pressure that made me grip the edge of the counter with both hands. I could feel my cunt throbbing on its own, untouched, as if someone were sucking me instead of Marcos.

Diego, without saying a word, kept doing what he was doing. His lips on my neck, his hand moving slowly along my side, down to my stomach, and then lower, flattening the fabric of the dress against my cunt. As if he knew perfectly well what I was watching.

Marcos opened his eyes.

He looked at me. And he did not look away. With Lucía taking him to the back of her throat, he looked straight at me, and that look was like being fucked with his eyes while another woman sucked his cock.

My chest rose and fell at once. I wanted to move and couldn’t. I wanted to look away and couldn’t either. There was something about that circuit — being seen while watching — that left me completely helpless.

Lucía slowly took him out of her mouth, spat the slick off him clean, and licked him again from the balls to the tip, with her tongue sticking out so we could see. Then she stood up with the fluidity of someone who had everything planned. She pulled off her dress in one motion and let it fall to the floor. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. Her breasts were high, her nipples hard, and her pussy was shaved and shining with how wet she was. Marcos got to his feet and began taking off his clothes without rushing. He had a broad, solid body, and an erect, thick cock that he made no attempt to hide; he took it in his hand and stroked it slowly a couple of times, never taking his eyes off me.

He sat on the sofa with his legs stretched out and his stiff dick pointing at the ceiling. Lucía climbed on top of him facing us, her hands on his shoulders. She grabbed Marcos’s cock with one hand, rubbed it through the split of her wet pussy two or three times, and then began lowering herself onto it slowly, inch by inch, until she sat all the way down. When she took him fully inside, the sound she made was small and honest, almost a sigh of relief, and that was the most erotic thing I’d heard in a long time.

Diego slid his hands to the hem of my dress.

“Keep going?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, and I barely recognized my own voice.

He lifted the dress slowly, his hands spread wide over my thighs. He yanked off my soaked panties in one pull, without asking permission, and let them fall to the kitchen floor. He opened my pussy lips with two fingers and ran his knuckles through the middle, up and down, soaking them. He touched my clit with the pad of his thumb, in small, precise circles, and I bit my lip to keep from making a sound.

“You’re dripping,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “It’s running down your thigh.”

I didn’t answer because I had nothing smart to say. I just opened my legs a little more and pressed my forehead against the edge of the cupboard.

Lucía was moving on Marcos with a slow rhythm, no hurry, staring straight at me as she rose and fell on that cock. Not provocatively, but with something harder to name: a kind of complicity, as if she were offering me something I didn’t yet know I needed. Her hips set the tempo, Marcos’s dick was bright and slick with her juices every time she rose, and I felt every one of her movements echoing somewhere in my own body.

Diego slid one finger inside, then two, to the knuckles. He curled them inside me, searching for the spot he knew would make me tremble, while his thumb kept working my clit. His lips stayed on my neck and shoulder. I was breathing in short fragments and struggling to remain standing, which was becoming less and less possible. I could hear his fingers going in and out, a wet, obscene sound that competed with the splash of Lucía’s cunt on Marcos’s cock.

“Don’t stop looking,” he whispered in my ear. “Watch them fuck each other.”

I had no intention of stopping.

Marcos picked up the pace. He grabbed Lucía’s tits with both hands, squeezed them, and took one nipple into his mouth while he pounded up into her from below. Lucía threw her head back and clenched her eyes shut. He put his hands on her hips and guided her firmly, driving into her from below with hard thrusts that made her breasts bounce, and she answered with her whole body, back arched, a muffled sound escaping between her teeth.

“That’s it,” she gasped. “Like that, you motherfucker, fuck me hard.”

I came without warning.

A clean, overwhelming orgasm that clenched down on Diego’s fingers inside me and bent me forward over the counter, Diego’s name spilling from my mouth in a thin thread of a voice I hadn’t planned. I felt the wave run down my thighs, wetting me to the knees. He wrapped his arms around me from behind and held me while my body finished deciding what to do, not pulling his fingers out, keeping them still inside me as I clamped down on them in spasms.

“I want to fuck you,” he said, his mouth against my ear. “Here. Now. Let them see us.”

“Yes. Come on.”

He pulled his pants down to his ankles. I heard his belt hit the floor. He lifted my dress to my waist, bent me over the counter with one hand on my back, and with the other guided his cock into me from behind. He entered in one go, all the way to the hilt, and I had to bite my forearm to keep from crying out. I felt him fill me completely, wide and hot, and I went still for a second, taking in the fact that he had shoved it all in at once.

Then he started fucking me. For real. With his hands on my hips and thrusts that made the counter knock against my belly with every stroke. The sound of his thighs slapping against my ass mixed with Lucía’s increasingly unmasked moans from the living room.

We repositioned a moment later, because I wanted to see him. Diego turned me around without fully pulling out, sat me on the edge of the counter and spread my legs. He looked me in the eyes and slid back into me, now facing me, slowly, so I could watch him go in and out. I wrapped my legs around him and clutched his shoulders. I dug my nails into him. In the living room, Lucía and Marcos had changed position: she was lying back on him, with her back against Marcos’s chest and her legs open toward us. Marcos had parted her thighs with his hands and was going in and out in full view, in a slow cadence that let us see everything: the gleaming cock, the opened cunt swallowing him whole, his fingers dropping down to play with Lucía’s clit while she watched us pant.

No one was looking in only one direction.

“Suck my tits,” I told Diego, and pulled down the neckline of my dress to free them.

He lowered his head and caught one nipple in his mouth, biting it softly, tugging it with his teeth while he fucked me harder and harder. He moved to the other one, then sucked both at once, squeezing them with his hands, never stopping fucking me.

“I’m going to cum again,” I told him in his ear. “Don’t stop.”

“Come. Let them see you come.”

And I came. With Marcos watching me from the sofa, with Lucía smiling at me with her mouth open while he drove into her. I came clenching Diego’s cock with my whole cunt, feeling each of my spasms drag a more guttural gasp out of him. Diego picked the rhythm back up little by little afterward, and when he finished I felt him tense and shake, and I heard my name in his mouth as if it were hard to say. He filled me completely. I felt the pulses of his cock inside me, spur after spur, and then the heavy heat of semen seeping inside me when he slowly slipped out. A white thread ran down my thigh to the back of my knee. Diego bent down, gathered it with two fingers, and brought it to my mouth. I sucked it off his fingers without taking my eyes from his.

Silence.

The kind of silence that is not empty but full of something without an exact name. All you could hear were the four of us breathing and, from the living room, the slow, wet slap of Marcos still inside Lucía, finishing his own climax too with a low grunt while she arched and told him in a hoarse voice to leave it all inside her.

Lucía was the first to speak, from the living room, with a hoarse voice and a playful edge:

“Is there any wine left?”

I laughed. A real laugh, the kind that comes out on its own when the body is completely relaxed. Diego laughed too against my hair. I opened the bottle, we filled our glasses, and the four of us went back to the living room, still half-naked, still leaking semen, and for another hour we talked as if nothing had happened and as if everything had happened at the same time. Because that was exactly what had happened.

That memory still has the power to move me.

The first time I discovered the pleasure of watching.