That night, the women of the village were left alone

It had been six years since I’d last set foot in Robledillo. I came back for the Night of the Spinners, not out of nostalgia or for my mother —who has rested since 2021 in the cemetery on the hill—, but because my cousin Adela insisted on the phone until she wrung a promise out of me to take the car on a Friday in February.

—It’ll do you good, Marta. One night among women. Down here, everything’s still the same.

And everything was, in fact, still the same. The village nestled between two bare hills, with its dark stone houses and slate roofs shining with frost, and the square with the iron fountain where, as a girl, I used to soak my shoes up to the ankles. What had changed was me. Or so I thought, until I saw her.

Lucía was standing by the door of the Town Hall, wearing a red shawl and her hair pinned up as she had always worn it in high school. We had shared a desk from age nine to eighteen. Then I left to study in Salamanca, she stayed, and that had been almost a decade ago.

—Marta. —Her voice came out higher than she’d meant—. They didn’t tell me you were coming.

—I wanted to surprise Adela.

We hugged awkwardly, as if our bones had forgotten where to go. She smelled of firewood and something sweeter I couldn’t identify.

—And your husband? —I asked.

Something shut down in her face.

—Ramón is home with the kids. Tonight it’s our turn.

The Night of the Spinners has worked like this since before there were records. Once a year, in the middle of winter, the men of the village retreat to their homes with dinner ready and the hearth lit, and the women take over the square until they feel like going back. There’s no mass, no priest, no written rules. Just hot wine, chestnuts, songs, and a bonfire that burns until dawn.

My mother took me for the first time when I was sixteen. I remember that night seeing the vet’s wife slip her hand under the doctor’s skirt in the darkness beneath an arcade, and the next day my mother explained to me, with the calm with which one explains the lunar cycle, that on this night each woman looked for what she lacked the rest of the year. I didn’t give it much importance then. My cunt did, twelve years later.

***

By ten, there were already more than forty women in the square. The bonfire was burning high and bottles were being passed from hand to hand without asking permission. Adela dragged me from one cluster to another, introducing me to the new generation, the ones in their early twenties who were already raising children.

Lucía appeared and disappeared at the edge of my gaze. Every time I caught her smiling, her smile lasted a second too short. She had two small children, Adela told me in my ear, and a husband whom the village valued for his discretion and for nothing else.

—She’s sad —I said.

—She’s been sad for years —Adela answered—. That Ramón hasn’t fucked her since the second one was born, I’ll sign it. But tonight she’s likely to be cheerful, you’ll see.

Asunción, the matriarch, took the first official drink after eleven. She is seventy-eight, wears black since she was widowed, and runs this village more than the mayor does. She climbed up onto a low ledge and raised her glass.

—To the ones who are here —she said— and to the ones who are no longer. To the ones who married gladly and to the ones who didn’t. To all of you, my daughters.

We drank. A woman whose face I didn’t recognize started singing an old song, one of those my grandmother used to hum without ever finishing, and other voices joined hers. Lucía sang without looking at anyone, her eyes fixed on the embers, and I watched her without understanding why it was so hard to stop.

—You’ve got something —I said when I went over to her with a freshly filled glass.

—What?

—You sing like it hurts.

She took a while to answer. She accepted the glass and took a long drink. When she lowered it, her hand was trembling.

—Don’t ask me tonight, Marta. If you ask me, I’ll tell you everything, and tomorrow I’ll regret it.

—Then I won’t ask.

At last she smiled for real. It suited her to smile like that.

***

After midnight, the mood of the party shifted. Pilar, from the tobacco shop, started talking louder than was necessary. She’d been with her husband for twenty-three years and, according to her, she’d been bored in bed for nineteen of them.

—He puts it in me, comes in four thrusts, and goes to sleep —she said without lowering her voice—. Nineteen years like that. Now I just crank one out in the bathroom and that’s that.

Mercedes, a young widow, laughed and said that at least she had no one to disappoint, that she’d been fucking the dildo in the underwear drawer for three years and it had never let her down. Another woman I didn’t know said softly that with her husband she had never known what it was to come for real, that she had only ever faked it, always, since the wedding night.

—Come of what? —asked Inés, a twenty-year-old girl joining the bonfire for the first time.

The laugh that answered that question lasted a full minute. Asunción, from her corner, looked at her with tenderness.

—My girl, if you have to ask, it’s because you still haven’t come in your fucking life. And if you still haven’t come, find someone to teach you with licks, but don’t wait for it to be a man, because most of them don’t even know where your clit is.

Lucía, beside me, gave a soft laugh. I felt her arm brush mine, then not brush it. And then brush it again, this time on purpose. The pad of her fingers slid up the inside of my wrist and stopped right where my pulse gave me away.

—I’m going to get more wine —she said.

—I’m coming with you.

The Town Hall was wide open. The communal wine was stored in a small cellar at the end of the hallway, a room of cold stone where the demijohns rested on wooden shelves. We went down the two steps and the noise from the square became a distant murmur. The door didn’t close all the way; it remained ajar, letting in a yellow strip of bonfire light.

Lucía picked up a jug and set it on the bench. She didn’t move to go back.

—Marta.

—Yes?

—Why did you leave the village?

—Because I was suffocating.

—Yeah.

She leaned against the shelf. Yellow light fell across half her face and left the other half in shadow. A vein stood out in her neck and I surprised myself by looking at it, imagining my tongue over it.

—Do you know what it’s like —she asked— to want to be somewhere else for ten years and not be able to? Do you know what it’s like to get into bed every night beside someone who touches you as if he’s cleaning you and to hold back the urge to scream?

—I know the reverse. I left and I still don’t know whether it was worth it.

—I stayed and I know it wasn’t. It’s been three years since I last came with anyone, Marta. Three.

The silence that followed wasn’t awkward. It was the kind that warns you. I took a step toward her without deciding to, and she didn’t step back.

—Lucía.

—Marta.

—We’re not going to do this.

—No.

And we did it.

***

The first kiss was so slow it felt like an experiment. I touched her cheek with the tips of my fingers, not pressing, and she tilted her face to fit into my hand before I even moved it. Her lips were cold on the outside and hot within, and they tasted of the night’s sweet wine. I opened her mouth with my tongue and she answered by sucking on it as if she’d been thirsty for years, turning her head to get deeper inside, with a wet sound between her teeth that sent a jolt straight to my cunt.

—I’ve been thinking about this for years —she said when we stopped to breathe—. Since you came back for your mother’s funeral in the summer. I’d get into bed beside Ramón and imagine your mouth, Marta, your mouth down here. And I’d touch myself in silence so he wouldn’t hear me.

—Fuck, Lucía.

—I hadn’t let myself think about it —I lied, because I had, in Salamanca, more than one night, alone with my hand between my legs.

—Then think about it now. And do it.

I kissed her again, this time without the slowness of the first attempt. I held the back of her neck with my left hand and let my right slide under the shawl until I found the curve of her waist. Under the wool, her body answered with every breath, sinking against mine in a wordless question. I dug my fingers into the flesh at her side and she let out a muted moan into my mouth.

Don’t go back. Not tonight.

Lucía gently pushed me toward the back wall, where the shadows were thicker. She took my jacket off without stopping kissing me, and I let her. When her hands reached my waist, under my shirt, I jerked not from cold but from habit, from the surprise of a contact my skin had forgotten.

—Cold? —she whispered.

—No. Something else.

—I know.

I pulled her shawl aside. Underneath she wore a turtleneck, and under the sweater a body I remembered without ever having seen naked: the structure of it, the narrow shoulders, the way she breathed when she concentrated. I pulled the sweater up until a white cotton bra was exposed, simple, domestic, and yet the most erotic thing I had seen in a long time. Her nipples pressed hard against the fabric, two dark points asking for a mouth.

—I didn’t think to put on anything pretty —she said with a soft laugh.

—No need. You make me harder like this.

I slid one strap down with two fingers and then the other, and I freed her breasts in one tug downward out of the bra, leaving them resting atop the cotton like on a tray. They were smaller than I’d imagined, white, with pink nipples, very erect. I pressed my lips to the hollow under her collarbone, and from there I went downward, measuring every centimeter by the noise her breathing made. When I brushed her nipple with my tongue, the sound that came out of her throat was so restrained and so exact that I understood what Asunción had said an hour earlier.

I sucked her nipple in full, taking it all the way to the roof of my mouth, nibbling it with my teeth until Lucía dug her nails into my neck. I moved to the other one and worked it the same way, tugging at it, spitting on it, sucking it again while with my free hand I squeezed the other breast until it went red. She wriggled against the stone and panted through her teeth.

—Marta, I’m going to lose my mind —she whispered—, fuck, suck them, suck them harder.

This. This was what had been missing.

My hands kept going on their own. I lifted her skirt to her hip and found her thigh, skin warm from the wool rubbing over it, and higher up the elastic of her stockings and then the wet cotton of her panties. They were soaked, so much so that the slit of her cunt could be made out through the fabric. Lucía looked at me and nodded once, saying nothing, and that was all the permission I needed. I moved her panties aside with my finger and found her already ready, swollen, dripping, throbbing against my fingers as if she’d spent years waiting for someone to ask if she was still alive. The wet hair stuck to my fingertip, and the smell —hot, sharp, intimate— rose all the way to my mouth.

—Slowly —she whispered.

—Slowly.

I learned her by heart. First two fingers, not entering, tracing the edge of her lips, going up to the hard clit and down again, and she, braced against the stone wall, held herself up with one hand on my shoulder and the other on the shelf. I pressed the pad of my middle finger in circles over her clit, and Lucía threw her head back, knocking it against the wood. Her face shifted through several grimaces until it found an expression I didn’t know, a mix of laughter and sorrow and something deeper that had no name.

When I finally penetrated her with two fingers, she did part of it herself, opening her legs to welcome what my hand offered, pushing her hip down to swallow them whole. She was so wet you could hear it inside, a low, obscene slosh that made me clamp my thighs together by reflex. Her moan was so short and so clean that I had to clench my teeth not to answer with my own.

—Marta —she said—, fuck, Marta, deeper, shit, deeper.

—I’m here.

—Please, don’t stop. Don’t stop.

I didn’t stop. I slipped in a third finger and she hissed through her teeth, biting her lip, opening wider. I held her against the wall with my other arm, my forehead resting against her neck, and I moved her at a rhythm she herself was setting with her hips. I curved my fingers inward, searching for that spongy part at the ceiling of her cunt, and when I found it Lucía folded forward as if struck by a cramp.

—There, there, there, don’t stop there, you fucking bitch, there.

I kept the fingers inside and sank down to my knees on the cold stone. I lifted one of her legs and slung it over my shoulder, and with my free hand I pulled her panties all the way aside. Her open cunt shone in the yellow light, pink, wet, with my fingers still buried inside. I dragged my tongue from bottom to top, tasting her, and Lucía convulsed, pressing my head against her with both hands.

—Oh God, Marta, oh God, oh God.

I sucked her clit with my lips, drawing it in, tugging at it, and at the same time I kept moving my fingers inside, working that spongey spot over and over. She started fucking my face uncontrollably, pushing her hips forward, rubbing herself against my mouth, eyes closed and mouth open, and every so often she let out a word unfinished, half name, half affectionate insult.

—I’m coming, Marta, I’m coming, don’t let go, don’t let go, fuck.

When she came, she did it almost silently, biting down on her fist so hard I thought she’d draw blood, and her whole body tightened all at once over my face, her cunt pulsing around my fingers in long, thick spasms. I felt a warm spurt run down my wrist, and she folded over me trembling, supported by my head as if without me she’d collapse. For the first time in years, she had remembered she existed.

I pulled my fingers out slowly, shining, and sucked them while I watched her. She let out a sound halfway between laughter and tears.

After that we stayed still for a while, her face buried in my shoulder, me breathing in her hair. Through the ajar door came the song outside, the laughter, the crackle of the bonfire. Nobody was looking for us yet.

—Marta.

—Yes?

—I want to eat you out. I’ve spent the whole night imagining how you taste.

—Then eat me out.

We changed places. She braced me against the shelf and knelt on the shawl that had fallen to the floor. She unbuttoned my jeans with clumsy hands, pulling them down to my ankles along with my panties, and I was left with my ass pressed to the cold wood and my thighs trembling with anticipation. She lifted her face to look at me, mouth slightly open and eyes shining, and only then did she pry my thighs apart with both hands.

—You’re soaked —she said.

—I’ve been like this for hours because of you.

She licked me slowly, with the same attention with which my grandmother threaded a needle. The first stroke was a single, long, flat pass from bottom to top, and it shook me through and through. Then she started sucking on my lips one by one, nibbling them, parting them with her fingers to lick deeper inside. When she found the clit she stayed there and worked it with the tip of her tongue, fast, in little flicks, and I had to clutch the edge of the shelf not to go down.

—Fuck, Lucía, like that, like that, don’t stop.

She put her tongue inside me, as deep as she could, and fucked me with it for a long while while her fingers kept rubbing my clit. Then she came back up and licked me all over, open-mouthed, noisy, shameless, swallowing everything I gave her. She slid two fingers in and then three, and curved them the way I had curved mine in her, hitting me against that spot until I felt the floor drop away.

She had years of imagining it and hands that knew what they wanted, and all I needed was to close my eyes and let that night, for once, occupy all the space I’d been saving for it. I buried my fingers in her hair and pushed her face against me, moving my hips against her mouth without a shred of shame. I could feel her tongue working my clit, her fingers going in and out with a wet sound, and her hot breath on my thighs.

—I’m coming, Lucía, I’m coming, don’t move away.

When I came, I did it half in silence too, biting the wool of the sweater that had fallen over my shoulder so I wouldn’t scream. The orgasm rose from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head, in waves that clenched my cunt around her fingers again and again. She didn’t pull away, she stayed there licking me softly while I shook, until I shoved her face back because I couldn’t take the friction anymore.

She stood up slowly, her mouth shining, and kissed me. She kissed me with my own taste on her lips, and laughed softly in my ear like someone laughing at an old joke someone has finally understood.

—You taste like what I was thinking about —she said.

—What?

—Everything I was missing.

We dressed slowly, with stifled laughter, adjusting each other’s clothes. I wiped the corner of her mouth with my thumb. She set my hair straight. Before we went back up the two steps, she slipped her hand inside my coat and pinched one of my nipples over my shirt, saying nothing, just to make it clear to me the night still wasn’t over completely.

***

We returned to the square after three. The bonfire had died down but not gone out. Adela looked at me over her glass and asked nothing; she just lifted one eyebrow, smiled, and went back to talking with Mercedes.

Asunción motioned for me to come closer. When I did, she took my hand in hers, cold and bony, and squeezed it with unexpected strength. She smelled my fingers discreetly and smiled without showing her teeth.

—Did you learn anything, girl?

—I think so.

—Better late. —She let go of my hand—. And tell Lucía we love her here. That she shouldn’t suffocate herself too. That she shouldn’t go another three years without coming, damn it, life is only four days long.

I didn’t know what to answer. I nodded.

Lucía and I didn’t say goodbye in public. We looked at each other over the fire, once, and with that look we had already said everything. Before dawn, she left me a folded slip of paper in the pocket of my coat, without anyone seeing, with a number and a single word written beneath it: when you can.

I drove back to Madrid at seven in the morning, with my cunt still throbbing under my jeans and Lucía’s smell on my fingers no matter how much I’d washed them at the fountain. In the rearview mirror, the village grew small between the two hills. For the first time in six years, I felt that I wasn’t suffocating as I drove away. I even felt that somewhere, in the pocket, I was carrying a piece of the village rolled up in a scrap of paper.

I called her on Tuesday. She answered on the second ring, and I knew, without either of us saying it, that the Night of the Spinners had gone on beyond February, and that we weren’t going to wait until next year to fuck each other again.