That Siesta When I Let the Neighbors See Me

It was several summers ago now, but every time I go out into the yard and see the old stationary bike against the back wall, the whole image comes back to me: the white midday light, the sweat on my back, and the short, frightened breathing slowly turning into something else.

I live in a small inland town, the kind where if you cross the square twice in the same day, people notice. My house is the last one on the block, on a dirt road that ends in an empty lot. Behind the garden is my grandfather’s old workshop, a tin-clad shed that covers the entire west side of the lot and gives us almost island-like privacy. That sheet-metal wall was my shield that afternoon.

It was January. We’d been having temperatures above forty degrees for almost two weeks, and the ceiling fan barely stirred the hot air. I’d showered in the morning after watering the plants, and at one-thirty I got back under the cold water because my blouse was clinging to my chest. When I came out, I didn’t even dry myself completely. I stood in front of the bedroom mirror, towel in my hand, looking at the outline of my body covered in droplets.

There’s an exact point in summer when the heat starts to feel like something else. It’s not discomfort, it’s a kind of impatience that runs under your skin. I knew it well, but that siesta I felt it differently. More insistently. As if it were pushing me to do something I had never done inside my own house. My cunt, without my permission, was already dripping between my thighs.

I closed the bedroom door, even though I knew no one was home. My mother was at my aunt’s, my brother at the club pool. The house was mine until night.

The first thing I did was fling the bedroom curtains wide open. The front ones, the ones facing the dirt road. I know it sounds reckless, but I know the town: at two in the afternoon, in the middle of January, nobody crosses that block. The neighbors stay inside with the air conditioning or sit in the back garage, far from the window. And if someone did pass by, they’d have to pass exactly when I was standing in front of the glass. The odds gave me just enough room to be scared and turned on at the same time.

I stood naked in the light, with droplets still running down my collarbones. I felt the green reflection of the ash tree in the garden against the bedroom ceiling and the back of my neck prickled. I walked slowly to the bed, lay back on the edge, and spread my legs, looking straight at the open window. At first I touched myself over my belly, slowly, with my palm flat, as if I were trying to get to know myself. Then I lowered my fingers to my pubis, opened the lips of my cunt with my index and ring fingers, and rested my middle finger right on my clit. It was more swollen than usual, throbbing like a newly sprung little bud. I started drawing circles, very gently at first, and felt a warm thread slide down from inside me to the fold of my ass.

I slid two fingers into myself. They went in without resistance, all the way, and I pulled them out shining. I passed them over my clit, pushed them back in, pulled them out again. With my other hand I grabbed one breast and pinched the nipple until the pain blurred with the need. The bed began to creak faintly, a low rhythm that synced with my breathing.

Let them see me.

The thought didn’t come to me like a decision, it came like a current. Instead of closing my legs, I turned over. I pressed my face into the sheets, lifted my hips, and left my ass pointed toward the glass. If anyone had passed at that second, they would have seen the whole picture, no disguise: my cunt open and dripping, my asshole tight, the shiny trail running down to my knee. I pushed three fingers in from behind, wrist bent, and started fucking myself with my hand at the same rhythm as I imagined a man behind me. I could feel my own fingers opening me from the inside, scraping that rough wall you only touch when you’re very hot. With my wet thumb I pressed lightly at my asshole, not pushing it in, just touching, and my whole body jerked.

I touched myself like that, on all fours, biting my lip every time a distant car changed gears. None stopped. None slowed down. But I imagined they did, that one pulled up at the corner, that a stranger walked to the window and stared at me while I slid my fingers in and out of my cunt for him. I imagined him pulling out his cock on the dirt sidewalk, jerking off while watching me. And that was enough to make everything inside me clench so hard I had to yank my fingers out at once so I wouldn’t come.

I stayed in that position for a long while. Until the burn in my knees and the sticky air forced me to stop before I finished. I didn’t want to come yet. I wanted to stretch the game a little longer.

I got up without putting on my robe. I walked down the hallway naked, barefoot on the cold tiles, feeling my body change temperature with every step. My thighs were sticking together, sliding against each other with every stride. The living room faces the other side of the house, toward the side garden, where there’s a large picture window looking out onto the neighbor’s lot. Domingo’s house, the retired man who lives with his son Andrés, is about thirty meters away, separated by a row of palms and a huge eucalyptus tree. But the living room window is tall and wide, and at that hour it reflected the clean midday sky.

I know very well that from their veranda you can see my couch. I know because more than once, sitting there clothed with my mate, I had looked up and seen Andrés mowing the grass bare-chested. A big man, thick arms, with a pronounced bulge in his work shorts that I had looked at more times than I was willing to admit. If I could see him, he could see me.

The couch is a three-seater, old, with massive wooden armrests upholstered in fabric. I put one knee up, then the other, and sat astride the armrest on the window side. The wooden edge pressed right where it needed to, between my open lips, squeezing my clit against my pubic bone. I started moving, slowly at first, feeling the rough fabric scrape the inner skin of my thighs. The friction lit me up. Every push opened my cunt a little more against the wood, and my juice seeped into the upholstery, marking a dark teardrop-shaped stain.

I brought one hand behind me and grabbed a cheek of my ass, pulling it open. With the other hand I sucked on two fingers, got them nice and wet, and ran them over my tight asshole while I kept riding the armrest. I closed my eyes and imagined Andrés standing behind me, his cock out of his shorts, pressing it right between my cheeks, warming it against my skin before he shoved it in.

There was a moment when I heard Domingo’s dog barking. I froze, heart racing, staring at the picture window without blinking. I didn’t see any shadow. I didn’t see any movement. But the possibility was there, beating like a second pulse. I imagined it in detail: Andrés’s head appearing at the end of the dirt path between the palms, his hand over his eyes to block the sun, his silhouette trying to make out what was happening on the other side of the glass. Seeing me riding the armrest like a bitch, tits bouncing and mouth open. I let out a whimper against the back of my hand and moved again, faster now, almost furious, rubbing myself so hard against the wood that two red lines were left on my thighs.

***

When I got down from the couch, my thighs were red and trembling. The stain on the upholstery was the size of my open hand. I still hadn’t come. I didn’t want to come yet. The adrenaline had opened another door for me, and behind that door was the kitchen.

The kitchen opens onto the back patio through an aluminum sliding door. It has a half-broken screen and a light curtain my mother never closes properly. I leaned in from inside, my body still sticky, and looked through the glass.

The patio was a simple square: smooth cement floor, a gallery with a fiber-cement roof, a couple of stacked plastic crates, two garden chairs, a coiled hose, and, at the end nearest the workshop’s tin wall, the stationary bike. My mother had bought it two winters before with a promise she never kept. It was there, rusted in places, the vinyl seat cracked, waiting.

The problem was the opposite side. The eastern neighbors didn’t have a wall, only a low privet hedge. If the people at that house were on their veranda — and they were always on their veranda at midday — they could see everything. It took only one of them stepping three paces to the left, toward the grill area, to have a clear view of my whole patio.

I stood for several minutes pressed against the doorframe, calculating. I heard the distant clink of cutlery, an unintelligible conversation, a woman’s laugh. They were eating lunch. They were distracted. The odds were back on my side, but this time by only a very small margin.

I took the towel I had left on a living room chair, clutched it against my chest as if it were going to give me courage, and opened the sliding door. The outside air hit me like an oven. The cement, at that hour, burned under my feet; I had to walk on tiptoe, almost sideways, until I reached the shade of the gallery.

I dropped the towel on the crates. My whole body was in the sun, exposed at an angle I had avoided for years even dressed. My tits bare, nipples standing up like thorns, my soaked cunt shining between my legs.

Don’t stop now. If you stop, you’ll never do it again.

I crouched down facing the hedge line, squatting with my knees spread wide. I opened the lips of my cunt with two V-shaped fingers, without touching my clit, offering myself to the empty space between the privet bushes. The sun hit me right there, warming the pink inside, and I felt a fat drop of my own juice break free and fall onto the cement between my feet. If someone had taken those three steps, they would have found me like that, in the pose of a heat-crazed animal, my cunt gaping wide open and dripping in full view. I ran my tongue over my upper lip and pushed a finger inside me all the way, never taking my eyes off the hedge, imagining that behind one of those worn leaves there was an eye watching me.

No one took those steps. The woman’s voice kept talking about the oven, the heat, a recipe. No one moved. And instead of calming down, I felt disappointed. I wanted someone to see me. I wanted someone to have seen me from the start. I wanted a man to jump the privet with his cock out and ram it into me right there, squatting over the boiling cement.

***

I straightened up slowly. The bike was a meter and a half away, against the sheet-metal wall. I walked to it without looking at the hedge, as if refusing to look at them were a punishment. I gripped the handlebars with both hands and swung one leg over the frame. The vinyl seat, warmed by the sun, burned my cunt at the first touch. I bit my lip so I wouldn’t complain out loud.

I sat on the edge of the seat, just barely, letting the plastic bulge sink between my open lips. The tip of the seat pressed right on my clit and the rest of the vinyl buried itself between my ass cheeks, hot, already slick with my own juices. I started rocking back and forth, not pedaling, using the seat as a point of friction. My skin was already so slippery the plastic felt soft, deliciously firm. Every push forward scraped my clit against the edge; every pull back pressed my asshole against the base of the seat. The two pleasures met in the middle and tied themselves into a hot knot in the pit of my stomach.

One hand stayed on the handlebars. The other rose to my right breast and started squeezing the nipple with just enough force to make it hurt a little, that pain that is really something else. Then it slid down, ran over my belly, and found my clit with two fingers over the seat. I rubbed it in fast circles while I kept moving my hips against the vinyl. I was masturbating and riding at the same time, tits bouncing in the sun, mouth half open, a drop of saliva slipping from the corner of my lips.

My nipples hardened like two hot marbles. My hips started moving on their own, in smaller and smaller circles, faster and faster. I was out in the sun, in the yard, at midday, riding my mother’s bicycle, with the neighbors having lunch fifteen meters away and a dirt road open behind the shed. I didn’t care about anything. I let myself drop onto the seat with all my weight, opened my legs wider, and rubbed until my breathing began to break into pieces.

I imagined Andrés again. I imagined him standing in the shade of the workshop, watching me, with his hand inside his shorts jerking off to my rhythm. I imagined him coming up behind me, grabbing my hips, and driving his cock all the way in with one thrust, pushing me against the handlebars so I couldn’t get away. I imagined him splitting my cunt with hard, dry pounding, while the bicycle creaked beneath us and my tits shook to the rhythm of his hips. I imagined the hot load spilling inside me, running down my thighs, drying in the sun.

I felt the orgasm rise from my thighs, slowly, clinging to every inch, until it exploded at the base of my spine and forced me to grab the handlebars with both hands so I wouldn’t fall. My cunt clenched in waves around nothing, squeezing the vinyl, leaking over the seat until a thread dripped onto the cement between the wheels. I let out a low, held-back moan that mingled with the buzz of a fly in the fiber-cement roof. I stayed trembling, forehead resting between my hands, listening to my own heart and feeling the pulse still beating inside my cunt, slower and slower.

When I looked up, I saw the hedge untouched, the neighbor’s house untouched, the sky untouched. As if nothing had happened. As if everything I had felt were mine alone.

And maybe it was. Or maybe it wasn’t. I’ll never know.

***

I got off the bike with weak legs. The seat was left shining, with a small puddle on top that began to evaporate at once. I picked up the towel, wrapped it under my arms, and went back into the house through the sliding door, leaving wet footprints on the cement that the sun erased in less than a minute. I closed the door behind me, drew the curtain, and leaned against the kitchen wall laughing to myself, still with my pulse racing and my cunt throbbing under the towel.

I drank a glass of water from the fridge, slowly, feeling the cold slide down my throat. I looked at my hands: they were shaking. I looked at my thighs: they were marked with the vinyl’s pattern and shining with my own juice all the way to my knees. I touched my chest and felt my heart still pounding too hard for an ordinary siesta.

That afternoon, after dressing, I went out to the patio with a pitcher and watered the plants. I greeted the neighbor to the east over the hedge when I crossed paths with him carrying bags. He looked at me the same as always. Smiled the same as always. Maybe he hadn’t seen anything. Maybe he had seen everything and preferred to keep it to himself. Maybe I had offered him a scene he, without knowing it, would remember for the rest of the summer every time he jerked off in the shower.

In any of those three ways, I won.

The stationary bike is still there, against the sheet-metal wall. My mother never used it. As for me, I still wonder why I don’t use it more often.