My Shy Girlfriend Discovered She Liked Being Watched

Camila had always been one of those girls who seemed not to know the effect she had on people. Short, fair-skinned, with enormous eyes and a way of looking that mixed innocence with curiosity. We had been together for almost four years when all this happened, and even today, whenever I remember it, I’m surprised by how far someone who blushed at the slightest compliment ended up going.

We were twenty-five and twenty-four, respectively. We lived in different cities and saw each other only on weekends, so when summer drew near we started fantasizing about spending ten straight days without leaving each other’s side. We booked a pitch at a coastal campground, one of those cheap places where the tent is only a breath away from the sea and the neighbors find out everything if you don’t learn to keep the volume down.

The detail that matters, the one anyone who has seen her will understand, is her breasts. They can’t be left out when describing her. A 105E bra size on a body barely over five-foot-four. That disproportion, together with her round face and the cheeks that flushed at the slightest hint of nerves, made people stare without even trying to hide it. She pretended not to notice. Privately, I had spent years accumulating a strange mixture of pride and desire whenever some stranger looked her up and down.

I had never suggested anything unusual to her before. Camila was shy, and I respected that part of her. But the fantasy of someone seeing her, even from a distance, had been circling in my head from the beginning. I pushed it down, put it away in a drawer, and the next night it would appear again.

The first four days at the campground were uneventful. We fell into the routine of teenagers who had just discovered sex: bed in the morning, the beach at noon, beers with dinner, and back to the tent. The only thing that left tension hanging in the air was the way the neighbors turned their heads whenever she crossed the campground in her swimsuit.

***

It was on the fifth night that everything began.

It was nearly three in the morning. We had just finished, and Camila wanted to go to the bathroom. The facilities were about a hundred yards from our pitch, and apart from the chirping of crickets, the whole campground was asleep. She sat up naked, looked for her shorts, and I said, almost without thinking:

—Just put a jacket on and go like that. There’s no one around.

Camila stopped with the garment in her hand.

—Without a bra?

—Who’s going to see you? If you run into someone, button it up and that’s it.

She bit her lip. It took her a couple of seconds to decide. Then she slipped the jacket on without fastening it all the way and left. I watched her walk away beneath the streetlights, and my mouth went dry. The fabric barely covered her, and every step made her breasts move with a freedom I had never seen outside our home.

When she came back, I didn’t even let her close the tent’s zipper. She laughed, not understanding why I was hard again so quickly. I pushed her against the mattress, opened her jacket, and showed her what that walk had done to me. I ran my hand along her side, pushed her shirt up until her torso was bare, and bent over her large, white breasts, already hard with arousal. I licked one nipple first, slowly, and then the other, while she gripped my hair with a mixture of nervous laughter and ragged breathing. I made her spread her legs, pulled down my pants, and slipped two fingers inside her to prepare her while I kept sucking her nipples, wet and hard as little stones. When I felt her squeeze my wrist and twist beneath me, I moved her underwear aside and plunged my cock into her, slowly at first, deeper afterward, until she was pinned against the mattress and began moaning with her mouth open. I fucked her in short, firm strokes, feeling her pussy tighten around my shaft, and in less than three minutes she came over me, trembling, her nails marking my back as she came inside with a force that left me emptied out.

Afterward, still out of breath, I sat her on my lap. She leaned against my chest, and I took her breasts in both hands. My fingers looked small against all that white flesh. I ran my thumb over one nipple and felt her skin prickle. Then, almost without measuring what I was about to say, I whispered in her ear:

—Open the tent door.

—What are you talking about?

—Open the tent. You can’t see anything from far away. We’ll only open it a little.

—Are you sure? What if someone comes by…

—If someone comes by, I’ll cover you with my hands.

She took her time. She thought about it. I could feel her heart beating faster against my chest. Finally, she nodded. I leaned forward and pulled the zipper down just enough to let in the night air and a strip of yellow light from the nearest streetlamp.

There we were. I was sitting down, she was on top of me, her breasts in my hands, offered to an opening through which, in theory, no one was supposed to pass. I felt her trembling at first. Then I felt her get wet again, soaking the head of my cock, which was still rubbing between her folds. I ran one hand up her neck and tilted her head back to kiss her, and then we heard footsteps.

A couple. They were heading to the bathrooms or to the car; I never found out. Camila froze. I didn’t move either. They passed three yards from the tent, speaking quietly, and because of the slope of the ground they probably saw nothing more than two silhouettes. But the possibility that they might have seen us was enough to make her come against my hand without my even having to insist. Her thighs trembled, a muffled moan escaped her, and she suddenly squeezed my cock with tremendous force, as if embarrassment had flung open the floodgates of pleasure.

***

The following night we did it again. This time I covered her breasts in massage oil, and we opened the door earlier, around midnight. A couple really did walk past us. Camila saw them before I did. She covered herself as best she could and let out a little sound somewhere between laughter and fright. I thought I had gone too far, that she was going to get angry, that the experiment was over. For a while she remained serious, turning her back to me on the mattress.

—You went too far, she said at last.

—I’m sorry. I thought there was no one around.

She stayed silent for quite a while. Then she turned around, looked at me with those enormous eyes, and kissed me without saying a word. It wasn’t a kiss of forgiveness. It was the kiss of someone who had just experienced herself in a different way and still didn’t know what to do with that information.

The next morning we went to the beach like any other couple. She put on a white one-piece swimsuit that showed every curve. We lay down near the water, in an area where there were plenty of people: families, groups of boys, a few older couples. I noticed right away that two guys from the campground—we had run into them at the pool the day before—were a couple of towels away and couldn’t take their eyes off her.

We went into the water. There was the usual touching, some laughter, a few kisses. But when we returned to our towel, I decided to play a game.

—There are three guys who have been staring at you for half an hour.

—It can’t be that bad.

—They’re staring at your breasts, Camila. It is that bad. Most of the women here are flat-chested, and then you show up, young, pale, and with those.

She blushed. She laughed softly.

—It’s not that bad.

—If you went topless here, one of them would probably have a heart attack. But I already know you don’t have the nerve.

I said it deliberately. I knew her. I knew the quickest way to convince Camila to do something was to tell her she didn’t dare. It worked with almost everything. It worked with this too.

She sat up on the towel. For a while she stared out at the sea in silence. Then she said, without looking at me:

—I’ve never gone topless. But nobody here knows me. I’ll never see them again. If I have to put up with you walking around with your tongue hanging out for three hours, you can put up with it too.

—Don’t act so cocky. I know you wouldn’t do it.

She laughed. She reached her hands behind her back, toyed with the tie for a second, and then offered me one of the straps.

—Help me.

It wasn’t a question. I swallowed, looked around, looked at the campground boys—who had already seen half our conversation—and untied the knot.

Camila took off her top in a soft, almost calm gesture. She folded it and left it beside the towel. Then she lay on her back and slowly began rubbing sunscreen onto her breasts, sliding her fingers over the skin until she covered her nipples too, which hardened at once. I stared at her with a dry mouth, watching her massage her tits without any hurry, with the naturalness of someone who had just crossed a boundary and was still checking whether the ground remained beneath her feet. One of the campground boys swallowed so loudly it almost made me laugh. Camila noticed them, of course she noticed them, and instead of covering herself, she lifted her chin a little higher.

***

I will never forget what happened on that beach over the next two hours. Camila didn’t get up. She didn’t do anything spectacular. She simply stayed lying there, reading, her breasts in the sun, pretending not to realize that half the beach was watching her. But I realized. The campground boys changed positions three times to get a better view. A man of about fifty, who was there with his wife, dropped his newspaper every five minutes. A group of boys went by playing with a ball and lowered their voices as they passed in front of us.

Every stare made me look at her. And every time I looked at her, I noticed something new. It wasn’t embarrassment. It was a strange mixture of discomfort, power, and arousal that I had never seen in her before. At one point she turned her face toward me, held my gaze, and smiled. A small, almost conspiratorial smile. It was the smile of someone who had just discovered herself.

—Are you all right? I asked.

—Yes. It’s strange. But I’m fine.

—Do you like it?

She took a while to answer.

—I like the way you look at me when they look at me.

We returned to the tent almost without speaking. When we went inside and I closed the zipper, we didn’t even get a chance to sit down. I pulled her swimsuit down, pressed her against the mattress, and yanked her legs apart. She was so wet I barely needed to prepare her. I ran my tongue over her pussy to lick away the sunscreen mixed with her own sweat, made her moan against my mouth, and then shoved myself all the way inside her, thrusting hard, driving her hips against the mattress while whispering in her ear what I had seen: how one of the boys had remained standing for far too long, how the man with the newspaper hadn’t read a single line, how surely the whole beach had realized that her tits were out. She dug her heels into my back and came for the first time, pressing my face against her pussy. I gave her no respite. I changed the angle, put a pillow beneath her ass, and fucked her harder, ramming my cock into her angrily, hearing the wet sound of her thighs slapping against me. She came and begged for more, her breathing in tatters, until I felt her empty herself again and I finished inside her with a groan, leaving her trembling and soaked.

***

What came after that day—the following months, the things that happened on other trips, what eventually changed between us—I’ll save for another story. The important thing about this story is what I understood that night, lying on my back in the darkness of the tent while she slept pressed against me, her head on my chest.

Camila wasn’t the girl I thought she was. Or not entirely. Beneath all those flushed cheeks and that shyness was someone who enjoyed being watched, someone who needed a push to discover it, but who, once she had discovered it, wasn’t going to let it go. And I, who had spent years fantasizing about someone seeing her from a distance, realized that night that the real turn-on wasn’t people looking at her.

It was watching her look at herself through other people’s eyes.