The Beach Couple Who Knew I Was Watching

We’re from the south, from that strip where the sun bears down without asking permission and work is as scarce as shade. Every summer, my partner and I used to go down to a hidden cove outside Caleta Honda, a beach that didn’t appear in any guidebook and that was exactly why I liked it. It wasn’t fully nudist, but it didn’t impose rules on anyone either. There, everyone stripped off their body and, sometimes, their inhibitions too.

On that sand, there was room for everything: families with umbrellas and coolers, couples baking in the sun without touching, the occasional person strolling around stark naked as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and always, in the back, the lookers from the dunes. When you spend many days in a row there, you start recognizing faces. And, above all, you start recognizing attitudes.

That afternoon, a few years ago now, I got up from my towel and left Marina dozing face down, her back shining with sunscreen. I kissed her on the shoulder and told her I was going to stretch my legs.

—Don’t be long —she murmured, without opening her eyes.

My late-day walk was almost a ritual. The light softened, people packed up, and the shoreline was left to the few of us who knew how to wait for the best moment of the day. I walked slowly, with nothing but my own nakedness for company and the sound of the water licking at the sand.

About a hundred and fifty meters from our umbrella there was another stuck in the sand, with a couple in their forties sunbathing. She had a generous body, wide hips, and big breasts that spilled out to the sides when she lay down. Her legs were half bent and open, without shame, letting the sun touch every part of her. Up to there, nothing I hadn’t seen a hundred times.

What stopped me in my tracks was her hand.

As I passed by them, I saw her slowly sliding it over her husband’s cock, already hard and firm against her belly. He was broad-shouldered, powerfully built, lying with his legs apart and his head thrown back. Neither of them tried to hide it. They were doing it in full view, like someone applying sunscreen, with that kind of naturalness that makes the scene a hundred times hotter.

I kept walking because I didn’t want to make them uncomfortable, but every few steps I turned my head. I can’t just stand here gawking like a fool. My body, on the other hand, had other ideas, and I started feeling my own reaction accompanying me on that walk.

I decided before reaching the end of the cove: on the way back I wouldn’t go along the shoreline. I’d return from behind, through the dunes, where the low scrub and little mounds of sand offer a comfortable hiding place for anyone who wants to watch without being pointed at.

***

I turned around when the sun was already brushing the water and turning everything copper-colored. I climbed up the high side, stepping carefully between the dry brush, and approached the area from above. I wasn’t the only one who had the idea.

There were two other men crouched at some distance, each on his own dune, keeping their eyes fixed on the couple. We looked at one another for a moment, without greeting each other, and understood the rules without needing words: each to his spot, nobody bothers anybody, nobody goes down onto the sand. A silent pact between strangers who shared the same thing.

And down below, the show had already truly begun.

She was half sitting up, propped on one elbow, and leaning her head over his lap. She was giving him a slow, generous blowjob, stopping every so often to look him in the face. He stroked her hair and answered with a deep moan that the wind brought me in fragments. Every now and then, she would look up and glance to the sides, as if measuring how many people were watching. She didn’t seem afraid. Quite the opposite.

I could barely breathe. I felt the warm sand under my knees and my heart pounding with a mix of filthy excitement and shame I hadn’t felt in years. What was in front of me wasn’t a movie or a fantasy: it was two real people, a few meters away, enjoying the fact that they were being watched.

After several minutes, she let herself fall back onto the towel. He got on top of her, separated her legs with one knee, and entered her without hurry, setting a slow pace that made her arch her back. She began to move with him, hunting for him, digging her heels into his lower back.

And then something happened that I still remember with a shiver.

He lifted his head, turned his neck toward the dunes, toward where the three of us were hiding, and smiled. It wasn’t a look of surprise or annoyance. It was a smile of complicity, the kind given by someone who knows perfectly well he has an audience and appreciates it. He knows. He knows we’re here.

He brought his mouth to her ear and whispered something. The woman made a slight gesture, as if peeking out, spotted the silhouettes among the scrub, and instead of clamming up, started moving faster. He lifted her legs over his shoulders and sped up, driving into her with an intensity that no longer tried to hide anything.

They came almost at the same time, she biting her lip to stifle a cry that escaped anyway, he collapsing onto her chest with a tremor I could see from far away. They stayed like that for a long while, embraced, while the sky finished darkening.

One of the lookers couldn’t hold out and broke the protocol: he went down toward the beach. The other and I held our ground a little longer and, when we finally headed back, we crossed paths walking in opposite directions. We exchanged a look that was both wary and complicit, the look of two accomplices to a secret that didn’t need explaining.

The couple, by contrast, carried on as if nothing had happened. They sat up, went down to the water, cooled off a little, and went back to their towel to chat quietly, like any other holidaymakers. That normality, after what I had just witnessed, was what finally threw me off completely.

***

From that afternoon on, my walks stopped being a whim and became almost an obsession. I’d go down to the shore with the excuse of stretching my legs, but in truth I was looking for that umbrella. Days went by and I didn’t run into them again.

What I didn’t expect was to recognize them somewhere else.

At the time I used to frequent a local forum, one of those corners of the internet where people share their stories and photos without showing their faces. One night, browsing through threads, I stopped on an image that seemed strangely familiar to me. It was a woman from behind, naked, looking at the sea. I recognized those hips, that mane of hair, and above all I recognized the striped umbrella stuck in the sand.

It couldn’t be a coincidence. It was them.

They were from around here too, they spent their afternoons on my same beach, and to top it off, they had their own thread on the forum that I had been reading for months without knowing it. I laughed to myself, in the dim light of the living room, at how small the world gets when you least expect it.

I left a comment on the photo and, almost without thinking, sent them a private message. I wasn’t expecting much of a reply. To my surprise, they answered that very night. They gave me an email address and invited me to chat for a while; they were curious to know who I was and exactly what I had seen.

I added them right away. When I opened the conversation, he was already online.

—Who are you? —he cut straight to the chase.

—A beach walker —I replied.

—Ha, ha, ha.

—We like your cove too.

—Yes, we already saw that the other day —he wrote—. What exactly did you see?

—I saw a couple enjoying a good summer afternoon. And, by the way, making a few dune-side observers enjoy themselves too.

—Wow. And you? Did you enjoy what you saw too?

—Of course. The first time, when I passed by and saw you up close. And then, when I couldn’t get the image out of my head and went back up the dunes, where I ran into two fellow workers who, I assure you, had just as good a time.

—Ha, ha, I’m glad. The truth is it happened that way, without planning it. We didn’t think about what we were doing and, once we were in it, why stop? It was a horny impulse. I don’t think it’ll happen again.

—What a shame —I wrote, and I meant it—. Honestly, it’s one of the hottest things I’ve ever seen there.

—Thanks… I think —he replied, and I could almost hear him laughing on the other end.

We kept chatting for quite a while, about the beach, about the walks, about that forum thread that I still didn’t know was full of neighbors from the sand. She, according to what he told me, was a mature woman, a little overweight and with a body that could turn your head inside out, but above all with an incredibly filthy mind, capable of turning any afternoon into something memorable.

That conversation was the beginning of something neither they nor I had been looking for. A friendship made of emails, of complicit glances when we ran into each other again on the cove, of confidences that over the years grew into places we had never dreamed of.

Almost twenty years have passed since that walk. The cove is still there, just as discreet, just as generous to anyone who knows how to wait for the last light of the afternoon. And I still can’t walk along the shore without looking toward the dunes, in case luck once again decides to put something in front of me worth remembering.