I Sat on the Promenade and Let Them Watch Me

It was an unremarkable Tuesday in September. Marcos had been away on work for four days and the apartment had gone from being a shared space to something like a waiting room with no clear destination. I had cleaned twice, I had watched an entire series, I had cooked for one person with ingredients for two. For four nights I had slept in the middle of the bed and for four nights I had been slipping my fingers into my cunt before sleeping because his empty side wouldn’t leave me alone. At five in the afternoon I looked out the window and the sky had that low orange tone the end of summer has, when it no longer burns but hasn’t yet turned cold, and I thought that if I stayed on that sofa one minute longer I was going to go crazy.

I decided to go out for a walk along the promenade.

I took a quick shower, dried my hair without much care, and put on a long sand-colored cotton dress, the kind that looks like an oversized shirt falling to the knees. It’s one of my favorites for the heat: it hangs well, it’s cool, it’s light. I opened the underwear drawer and closed it without taking anything. I don’t know exactly why I did it. It was an impulse, a decision made before I had fully thought it through. I left it at that and took my keys. Before leaving the bathroom I ran one finger between the lips of my cunt just to check, and withdrew it gleaming: I was already wet from thinking about it.

In the elevator I realized what I had just done and felt something in my stomach. It wasn’t shame. It was something closer to anticipation. I pressed my thighs together and felt them sticking damply on the inside, the fabric of the dress brushing against my swollen clit with every step.

***

The promenade at that time on a weekday has something liminal about it. By day it’s full of families with children and colorful umbrellas. At night it fills up with couples and nighttime runners. But in that six o’clock window, when the sun is going down but hasn’t disappeared yet, there are few people and those who are there walk slowly, with no obvious purpose. An older couple on a bench. Two girls with a big dog. A man reading the newspaper folded in half.

I started walking slowly north, toward where the walkway opens onto the rock and the wind comes straight in from the sea.

The first gust of breeze hit me when I passed the railing, in the most exposed part of the walk. The dress lifted back and I felt the air on the inner part of my thighs. It reached all the way up to my naked cunt and stole my breath for a second. I stopped, as if checking that what I thought had happened had really happened. The fabric fell back down. I kept walking with my ass and cunt still tingling from the cold air.

I’m not the kind of person who usually does this sort of thing. I’m thirty, I work from home, and my life has more routine than surprises. I don’t complain about that. But there are moments when the body asks for something different, something off-script, and that Tuesday in September my body was very clear about what it wanted: it wanted cocks looking at me, it wanted someone to see my cunt, it wanted the wind to keep lifting my dress until somebody noticed.

I kept walking. The wind kept doing its thing.

The hem of the dress lifted behind me with every gust. It wasn’t anything exaggerated, not movie-style exhibitionism. It was that millimeter between being covered and not being covered that turns something mundane into something completely different. In one stronger gust the fabric rode up to my waist from behind and I knew, without needing to check, that my whole ass had been out for two or three seconds. I passed a group of boys sitting on the steps down to the beach. None of them said anything. One of them kept his eyes on me longer than necessary, his gaze fixed on the lower part of the dress. I kept walking as if I hadn’t noticed, but I had noticed. Of course I had. And I also noticed that my cunt had started to gush, that the wetness was already running down the inner side of my left thigh, a thin hot line the wind was cooling.

My heart was beating a little faster than normal.

Keep walking. Don’t think too much.

But thinking was exactly what I was doing. I thought about the boy on the steps, the direction of his gaze, the possibility that he had seen something. I wondered whether he was telling the one next to him at that very moment, whether they were still looking in my direction, whether his cock was getting hard inside those shorts. I didn’t turn around to check. I liked not knowing better. I imagined the scene: him putting his hand in his pocket to adjust himself, his friends laughing, one of them saying, “dude, that one’s not wearing anything underneath,” and that only made me squeeze my thighs harder as I walked.

***

There’s a stretch of the promenade where the railing gives way to a low wall of dark stone, like a wide step facing the main avenue. People sit there to wait for the bus, watch cars go by, finish a phone call. That day there were four or five people scattered along the wall. I sat at the far end, right where an old streetlamp still hadn’t come on.

It was starting to get dark. The light was that orange-and-blue mix that lasts exactly twenty minutes before everything turns the same color.

I sat with my back straight, my hands resting on the edge of the wall on either side of my hips, and looked out toward the avenue. Then I let my legs open. Slowly. With the same naturalness as when someone settles in after standing for a while. I spread them an inch, then another, then a little more, until I felt the dress give way completely between them and fall inward, forming a valley of fabric that left everything else exposed. My cunt open, my lips swollen, my clit peeking out hard as a pink button, and the cold air hitting everything directly.

I felt the cold air on the lips of my cunt and closed my eyes for a moment. I was so wet that when I shifted my hip slightly I heard, or thought I heard, that tiniest sound moisture makes when it separates from skin.

There’s a huge difference between being naked in a private space and being like this in a public place. It’s not nudity itself, it’s the possibility of being seen. It’s knowing that anyone who passes might lower their eyes at that exact moment and see exactly what you’re showing: an open, wet cunt, waiting. That possibility, that open window of chance, is what turns something physical into something that affects the whole brain. The risk is not danger, it’s the threshold. Being right on the boundary between secrecy and visibility, with your clit out and the avenue full of cars and people.

I heard footsteps coming closer.

I didn’t look. I kept my eyes ahead, on the cars passing with their headlights already on. The dress had ridden all the way up in front. I knew it without having to look. I felt the air on my open cunt, I felt the soft cold of the stone against the back of my bare thighs, I felt the wetness collecting between my lips and starting to drip slowly onto the stone beneath me. I felt the weight of what I was doing.

The footsteps slowed as they passed near me. Two men. They were walking together. They slowed down, then stopped outright three or four meters away, pretending to look at their phones. I kept my gaze fixed ahead but out of the corner of my eye I saw the one on the right lower his head slowly, saw his gaze lock between my open thighs, saw him stay there. I heard him say something softly to the other, a single syllable, and the other one looked too.

I didn’t hear any comment. No whistle. Just that shift in rhythm that says everything. And that, just that, was enough to make something tighten in the center of my belly in a way that was anything but accidental. My cunt clenched all the way, once, twice, as if it were asking for something I wasn’t going to give it.

I breathed slowly. Kept looking ahead. Don’t move. Don’t break the moment. But I opened my legs another inch, because I wanted them to see well.

***

Several minutes passed like that. The dress kept doing whatever the wind made it do. I kept sitting without moving much, except to slightly adjust the angle of my legs when I felt the fabric threatening to fall back down. It was a silent game between the wind and me, and I was determined not to lose it. The two men had sat down on a bench eight or ten meters away, diagonally, and from there they had a privileged view. Another one had arrived behind them. There were three now, looking at my cunt in silence, pretending not to, and I letting myself be watched pretending not to notice.

At some point I noticed that my nipples had hardened from the cold air. The cotton of the dress brushed them with every tiny movement, and that constant friction had an accumulative quality, like carrying a pebble in your shoe: small, insistent, impossible to ignore. I undid the highest button of the neckline. Just one. I did it slowly, with two fingers, as if I were adjusting something uncomfortable. The fabric opened an inch and the air reached me there too. I lowered my chin slightly and saw the hard tips of my tits showing through the thin fabric, the nipples outlined like two small bones pushing outward.

I started rubbing my nipple through the fabric with the pad of my index finger.

Nipples are one of those parts of the body that respond before the brain processes the signal. Mine hardened even more in less than three seconds. I pinched it gently, then harder, twisted it between my index finger and thumb as if I wanted to tear it off, and felt the current run straight down, with no stops, to the center of what the wind was still caressing from below. My cunt clenched again and I felt a new thick drop of wetness slip between my lips and fall onto the stone. I switched to the other breast. Repeated it. Pinch, release, twist. My small tits had gone completely hard, not just the nipples, and every touch tugged on an invisible thread that ended directly in the clit.

My eyes were half-closed. I could hear the cars, the dull sound of the sea behind me, the distant conversations of people passing along the walk. I wasn’t looking at anyone. It was like being inside a bubble where everything outside had become background noise for something that was happening between my body and the night.

But it wasn’t just between my body and the night. That was exactly the point.

I lowered my hand from my breast very slowly, dragged it over the fabric of the dress at belly height, and let it fall to my thigh. From there, without lifting the hem, I slid it underneath as one would reach for something inside a handbag. My fingers found my soaked cunt in less than a second. I ran my middle finger between the lips, gathered wetness, brought it up to the clit and started rubbing slowly, in small circles, without taking my hand out from under the dress. From the outside nothing could be seen except that I had my hand in my lap. But I knew I was making myself come in public, in front of three unknown men with their eyes fixed on me, and that idea alone pushed me to the edge in thirty seconds.

I heard someone else stop nearby. Then another. No voices, no words, just that absence of movement that tells you someone has decided to stay where they are. I knew there were at least five or six people watching me without needing to open my eyes all the way. I felt it. There are things you can feel even when you can’t see them, a kind of weight in the air, an attention with its own temperature. I imagined them all with hard cocks inside their trousers, some of them with a hand discreetly over the bulge, looking at my cunt and looking at my hand under the dress and putting two and two together.

That was what took me over the edge.

***

It wasn’t a movie orgasm. There were no convulsions or moans someone could have heard from a distance. It was more like a long wave coming up from below and spreading upward, a pressure that opened slowly and then released all at once at the exact center. I came with my finger pressed against my clit and my cunt closing in spasms around the void, drop by drop, emptying over the stone of the wall. I stayed completely still while it happened, with my fingers still soaked between my legs and the other hand on my nipple and my gaze lost toward the cars on the avenue, breathing carefully so as not to give myself away. Only a longer exhalation than usual escaped me, a tremor in my lower lip, and a small jolt of my hip that the dress hid.

I pulled my hand out from under the dress slowly. My fingers gleamed in the yellow light of the streetlamp that had finally come on. I rested them for a second on the wall, wiped them against the rough stone as if by accident, and put them back on my lap.

When I opened my eyes all the way, I looked straight ahead without turning my head. From the corner of my eye I counted six silhouettes that had stopped or were still lingering near where I was. I don’t know how many of them had seen anything. Probably most of them. Probably all of them, judging by the stillness with which they stood there. It didn’t matter at that moment. What mattered was that the possibility had been there, real and concrete, for several minutes, and that had been more than enough. On the stone of the wall, between my thighs, a wet stain the size of a coin had been left behind. There it would dry slowly, with its own story.

I straightened my dress calmly. I brought my knees together, let the fabric fall, buttoned the button. I stood up as if I had sat down to rest for a moment and it was time to keep walking. I felt a new thread of wetness sliding down my thigh, slow, and let it run. Nobody said anything. One of the men nearby exchanged something in a low voice with another and the two of them chuckled softly, but I was already walking in the opposite direction, toward the southern end of the promenade, with my cunt still throbbing and my nipples still hard beneath the fabric.

The wind was still blowing. The dress was still moving.

That’s how it should be.

***

I walked to the end of the promenade and came back slowly. The body felt relaxed in that specific way it has after something that has kept it tense for a good while. The mind, on the other hand, was still alert and clear, going over the details like someone reviewing the photos from a trip: the exact moment the footsteps had slowed, the pressure of the wind between my open thighs, the sensation of my finger slipping between the lips of my cunt while I listened to the outside world go on with its normal life, the face of one of the guys when he had lowered his gaze and frozen there. The distance between what they saw and what I felt. That space between the two was where everything had been. Walking, I realized that my cunt was still soaked and that with every step I got a little jolt in my swollen clit, still sensitive from having come ten minutes earlier.

I stopped at a kiosk on the promenade and ordered a soda. I drank it standing up, leaning on the aluminum counter, looking out at the dark sea. By then you could no longer tell where the water ended and the sky began. There was only a line of white foam far away, intermittent, appearing and disappearing. The kiosk boy looked at my tits twice and the second time he kept staring at the obvious bulge of my nipples pressed against the dress. I smiled at him. I paid. I left.

Mundane things taste different when there’s something behind them that’s anything but mundane.

I got a taxi at the corner where the promenade meets the main avenue. The driver put on some radio station I didn’t recognize and I leaned against the window and watched the streets go by with their yellow lights. In the back seat I spread my legs as much as the space allowed and let the air-conditioning reach my naked cunt under the dress. I saw the cabbie glance at me a couple of times in the rearview mirror, his eyes looking for my legs in the dimness. I didn’t close them. It was almost nine-thirty. Marcos had texted me that morning saying he’d be back on Friday. Three more days.

At home I took a long hot shower. Under the stream I touched my cunt again with my soapy hand, two fingers inside and my thumb up on the clit, and came a second time standing up, pressed against the tiles, my forehead against the wall and biting my lip so I wouldn’t scream. I washed myself slowly afterward, parting the lips of my cunt with my fingers so the water could reach inside me, feeling how everything was still sensitive, how any touch made me clench a little.

I sat on the edge of the bed with my hair wet and took the vibrator out of the nightstand drawer, one of those air-pressure models that make little noise and suck on the clit instead of vibrating against it. I turned it on at the lowest setting and placed it over my already swollen, throbbing clit. The first suction ripped a loud moan out of me that broke the silence of the room. I increased the intensity one level. Then another. I lay back with my legs open and let the memory of the wall and the wind and the silhouettes that had stopped work on its own, without needing to add anything new. I imagined the guy on the steps coming closer, pulling his cock out right there, asking me to suck it in front of his friends. I imagined the two from the bench coming to take turns fucking me against the wall, one in front and one behind, pounding my cunt and ass at the same time while the others watched. I imagined myself soaked in someone else’s cum running down my legs while I still sat on the stone, unmoving, letting it cool in the sea air.

It took me less than four minutes. I came with the vibrator pressed against me and the other hand squeezing a tit until it hurt, my hips lifting off the bed, a long dirty moan escaping me whole because there was nobody near enough to pretend for.

Afterward I lay in the dark with the white ceiling above me, listening to the noise of the street through the half-open window, with my legs still spread and my cunt throbbing slowly, emptied out. I thought that Marcos was coming back on Friday and that he was going to fuck me three days in a row without letting me breathe. I thought that Thursday afternoon the weather was still supposed to be good according to the forecast I had seen that morning. I thought that the sand-colored dress was still hanging in the closet and that the promenade was still the same place, exactly the same, waiting for the next unremarkable weekday afternoon.

I fell asleep with that. With my hand still between my legs.