The Afternoon I Let Myself Be Watched on the Seafront

This is for those who asked me how it all began. For those who tell me they don’t believe it. For the couple who sent me that photo a few months ago and made me understand I’m not alone in this.

It was September. That time of year that isn’t quite summer or autumn, when the heat eases but the sky still holds on to some light until eight in the evening. My husband had been away for work for four days and the flat had gone large and silent on me, with that kind of silence that starts to weigh on you. Four nights sleeping alone, with my hand between my legs and my cunt soaking wet, without any orgasm ever quite soothing me all the way.

I decided to go for a walk along the seafront. I didn’t have a concrete plan, I just wanted air and movement. But as I was getting dressed, something stopped me in front of the underwear drawer.

Not today.

I don’t know where that thought came from. I had it and I didn’t argue with it. I closed the drawer, put on a long sand-coloured dress, one of those in thin fabric that look like an oversized man’s shirt, and went out into the street with my cunt bare underneath, feeling the air already beginning to slip up the hem of the dress and lick my thighs.

***

The Chipiona seafront has a particular light at that hour. The sun is no longer hitting straight on but from the side, and people walk more slowly, as if they’d all made the same decision not to be in a hurry. There are couples, retirees, the odd straggling runner, families with children who really should be sitting down to dinner already.

I got off the bus at the north entrance and started walking south, towards where the pine trees come close to the shore and there are stone walls where people sit and watch time go by.

The wind came almost immediately.

It wasn’t a strong wind, but it was constant, the kind that comes in off the sea heavy with salt and gets through any light fabric. I felt the dress moving against my skin and realised, with a clarity that surprised me, how different that sensation was with nothing underneath. The air moved up my legs until it brushed my cunt lips, in and out, and after just a few steps I could tell I was getting wet without doing anything, without thinking about anything, just from the simple fact of walking with my vulva exposed to the wind.

Every step. Every gust of air.

I’d walked about a hundred metres when I noticed my nipples had hardened. The fabric brushed them with each movement and made them more sensitive, and the more sensitive they were, the more aware I was that they were showing through the dress. I looked down for a moment. Yes, they showed. Two hard points pushing the fabric outward as if asking someone to bite them.

I could cross my arms. I could fold in on myself. I could do something.

I did nothing.

I kept walking, my thighs rubbing together at every step and a warm dampness beginning to slide down the inside of my right leg.

***

There’s something that happens when you decide not to hide: the world doesn’t change, but you perceive it differently. Suddenly you’re conscious of every person coming towards you, of the eyes that drop for a second and then lift, of the ones that don’t drop but don’t quite leave either. An older man with a small dog looked at me twice and kept his gaze fixed on my outlined nipples. A young man on a bicycle slowed down and turned his head as he passed, with an expression he couldn’t quite hide; I saw his cock outline itself beneath his shorts a second before he rode off.

It wasn’t fear I was feeling. It was something else, more like electricity. A specific heat in the clit, throbbing, asking.

I reached the wall area and sat on one facing the promenade. From there you could see the main road, people walking in both directions, the occasional car passing slowly. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes for a moment.

The wind was stronger sitting down. With my legs slightly apart, the dress began to move in a way that was no longer accidental. I felt it lift at the front, felt the cold air reach where nothing stopped it, felt it slip between my cunt lips and raise goose bumps on every millimetre of wet skin.

I opened my legs a little more.

Just a little. Just enough for the wind to do whatever it wanted. Just enough for anyone looking towards the wall to see what was under the dress: a shaved cunt, swollen, shining with wetness under the light of eight in the evening.

***

I’m not going to pretend it was something that happened to me by accident. I wanted it. That’s what took me the longest to admit: that it wasn’t the wind, it wasn’t chance, it was me who made the decision to spread my legs on that wall with people passing five metres away.

I wanted to be seen. I wanted some stranger to get hard from the image of my cunt open to the air. I wanted to feel like a filthy whore in public, even if only for ten minutes.

With my eyes closed, the experience intensifies in a way that’s hard to explain. You stop controlling what other people see. You can no longer calculate whether someone is looking or looking away. All you can do is listen: the footsteps on the asphalt, the conversations coming and going, the noise of cars, some distant whistle that could have been for me or for someone else or for nothing at all.

The uncertainty was part of the arousal.

I felt the fabric flip completely with a stronger gust. I knew, without needing to look, that I was exposed from the waist down, my cunt fully visible to anyone passing in front of me. I didn’t move my legs. I didn’t change position. I took my hand to the top button of the dress and undid it slowly, unhurriedly, as if it were a completely normal gesture while sitting on a public wall. Then the second button, and the third, until the fabric opened and left one breast out, exposed to the air and to any eye.

With the tip of my finger I found the nipple.

I touched it first gently, just to feel how sensitive it was. Very. Too sensitive for how little attention I’d paid it all the way there. I pinched it between my forefinger and thumb, softly at first, then more firmly, pulling until it stretched, and the heat that ran from there down to my belly made me squeeze my legs together for an instant by reflex.

I opened them again. More than before. And I brought my other hand down.

I slid it over my belly, over the hip bone, and between my thighs. I found my cunt soaked, so wet that my fingers slipped effortlessly straight to the clit. It was swollen, throbbing, and just brushing it sent a spasm racing down my whole back. I started massaging it in small circles, very slowly, controlling every movement so it wouldn’t be too obvious from afar, so that only someone less than two metres away could clearly see what I was doing. I pushed one finger inside. Then two. I pulled them out wet, sliding, and brought them back up to the clit to smear it with my own wetness.

***

I heard footsteps stop. Not close, not close enough to feel threatening, but close enough for me to notice. I heard a low voice, almost a murmur, and another voice answering just as quietly. Two people, at least. I didn’t want to open my eyes.

That would have broken something.

As long as I listened to faceless voices, as long as footsteps were just sounds and not specific people with faces and judgments, I could stay in that in-between state between reality and what I wanted reality to be. They were gazes without an owner. It was the abstract desire to be seen, not the specific and sometimes complicated thing of having someone particular look at you.

I kept my eyes closed.

My hand on my nipple, tugging, twisting it. The other hand working its fingers into my cunt and back to my clit. The dress lifted at the front and open at the top. The cold air between my legs mixing with the heat rising from inside me. The footsteps, the voices, a whistle from farther away that reached me like an echo.

I heard a breath closer. Someone — a guy, from the tone — muttered «fuck» so quietly I barely caught it, and that word was followed by an unmistakable sound: a zipper slowly coming down, and then the wet, rhythmic rustle of a hand moving over a cock. He was jerking off while looking at me. Three metres away. Without saying anything to me. Without touching me. Just looking at my open cunt and masturbating in the same rhythm as I was.

That was what finally broke me open inside.

I shoved three fingers in and started fucking my cunt hard, no longer bothering to hide it, while my thumb kept working my clit. I could feel my own juices running down my arse and staining the stone of the wall. The orgasm came slowly, built on those long minutes of gathered tension, and when it came it wasn’t explosive but deep, like something releasing from the inside and spreading outward in slow waves that clenched my cunt around my fingers again and again. I bit my lip so I wouldn’t moan. The boy’s breathing sped up at the same time, quicker, broken, and I heard a muffled groan and a different wet noise: he’d just come on the ground, a couple of metres from my feet, without either of us touching once.

I felt myself getting soaked all over and that yanked me out of the state I was in all at once.

Enough. That’s enough.

I buttoned my dress back up, my fingers still shining with wetness, and discreetly wiped them on the inside hem. I climbed down from the wall with the same naturalness with which I’d climbed up. I straightened the fabric and started walking the other way, back towards the bus stop, feeling the other man’s semen probably still warm on my back and my own wetness sliding down my thighs with every step.

***

Out of the corner of my eye, without turning my head all the way, I counted at least six boys between twenty and thirty still there, standing or sitting on nearby walls, looking towards where I’d been. One of them had his phone in his hand. Another still had a bulge marked under his jeans. I don’t know if anyone recorded anything. At the time I didn’t care.

I cared when I got home.

I showered slowly, with hot water pounding my swollen cunt and my nipples still sore from all the pinching, I sat on the bed with the towel still on and spent a while staring at the wall, wondering whether I should feel ashamed. I tried. I couldn’t manage it. What I felt was something else: a kind of lightness, as if I’d left something heavy on the wall and come home with my hands free.

I finished the night with the vibrator I’d bought weeks earlier. I opened my legs on the double bed, set it against my clit at full power and came twice more thinking about the boy with the zipper, about his cock I never saw but imagined as thick and red, and about the stain of semen he’d left on the ground because of me. But that was only the end of the ritual. What had happened on the seafront was something else, something that needed no one else and no toy: only the wind, the fabric, the sound of someone else jerking off three metres away, and the decision not to hide.

***

Since then I’ve gone back several times. Not always to that same wall, not always with the same result. Sometimes nothing special happens and I go home with tired feet and nothing more. But other times the wind is at exactly the right angle and people pass in exactly the right way and I’m in exactly the right mood, and then it happens again: fingers in my cunt, a stranger jacking off nearby, and that silent load that leaves me clean on the inside for days.

What took me longest was finding the right name for it. It isn’t exhibitionism, or not only. It’s something closer to the need to be perceived in a state in which normally no one perceives you. The intimacy of something that’s supposed to be private, but done in public. The thrill doesn’t come from being seen, exactly, but from the fact that you could be seen and you know it and you do nothing to stop it, and from the fact that sometimes someone gets hard and comes because of you without ever touching you.

The difference is subtle, but it matters.

A September afternoon on a stone wall facing the sea taught me more about what turns me on than years of ordinary nights at home. Sometimes all it takes is closing the underwear drawer and stepping outside.

The wind does the rest.