The Night I Went Out Completely Naked

My body was never a trophy. I’m five foot nine, and I started going to the gym five weeks ago, with no visible results yet. The only thing I’d been proud of since adolescence was the size of my dick: a full seven inches, carefully measured. At twenty-two, I was still a virgin with anyone in the flesh, but I’d long been putting myself on display behind a screen. Messaging groups, cam rooms, chats with strangers. I jerked off for people I’d never see. Sometimes also for guys. I’m not gay, but the idea of anyone watching me made me shiver.

The virtual world stopped being enough. I started imagining the backyard of my house in the dark, the cold air against my skin, the real possibility of someone showing up. I fantasized about it for weeks until the perfect night arrived. My parents went to a birthday party out of town, and only my sister stayed home, two years younger than me, shut in her room since early evening.

It was two-thirty in the morning when I took my clothes off in my room. I folded them on the chair as if I were going to put them back on right away, though deep down I knew it would take me hours. I opened the window because the front door creaks, and I stepped out barefoot through the sill. The concrete was cold, the air too, but my dick hardened as soon as I set foot in the yard.

I moved crouched over to the area where my parents park the cars. There I stood up straight. I was outside, naked, with the moon filling my back. I didn’t know what to do first. I wanted everything.

My two dogs, Coqui and Lobo, barked and came running. I felt a stab in the nape of my neck, thinking my sister might stick her head out. The dogs sniffed me, recognized me, and wandered off without any drama. Still, I crouched down behind my mother’s car. From the living room came the yellow glow of a lamp turning on. My sister opened the sliding door, looked out into the yard in her pajamas, called the dogs’ names, and went back inside. The lock clicked. I waited. Counted to two hundred. Then I came out of hiding.

***

A horrible, delicious idea flashed through my head. Behind the house there’s a low window that looks into my sister’s room. The wall is covered in jasmine vines, and in summer the curtain stays half open. I walked over there pressed against the dividing wall, my dick hanging heavy between my legs like a promise.

She was asleep on her back. The sheet covered her legs but not her torso. She was wearing a white sports bra, her shoulders bare, her face turned the other way, toward the wall. I wasn’t looking at her exactly; I was looking at the silhouette of a woman breathing slowly in a bed, and that was enough. I leaned against the wall, outside the rectangle of light coming through the curtain, and touched myself.

It’s not her, it’s not her, it’s not her.

I repeated it like a mantra. The truth is I didn’t need it to be anyone in particular: I needed the prohibition. The window, the early hours of the morning, the risk that she’d turn over and open her eyes at that exact moment. I touched myself for two, three minutes. When she shifted and started to turn, I took a step back, slid to the corner, and crossed the yard without breathing.

***

Back by the cars, I hesitated. The logical thing was to go back inside. But the iron gate that separates our house from the street had been calling to me for months. I walked toward it trembling, I don’t know whether from cold or adrenaline. The gate has vertical bars and enough space between them for half a body to fit through. I stood pressed against the iron, my dick sticking through one of the gaps, and looked out at the street.

Empty. Of course. It was nearly three in the morning in a sleeping neighborhood.

But the simple thought that anyone—a taxi driver, a delivery guy, a neighbor with insomnia—might appear around the corner drove me to the edge. I came right there, against the bars, splashing the sidewalk on the other side. I fell seated onto the cold tiles. My breathing was whistling.

And then, looking to one side, I saw the bucket.

***

The bucket has been upside down next to the electric meter for as long as I can remember. Years ago my mother hid a spare key underneath it, for emergencies. I knew about it and had never used it. I crawled over on all fours, lifted the bucket, grabbed the cold key with two fingers, and went back to the gate.

I opened it very slowly so the hinges wouldn’t squeal. I stuck my head out first. Then one foot. Then the other. I was outside. I was on the street. Naked in the street.

I walked to the middle of the asphalt and turned in a circle. My shadow drew rings on the pavement under the streetlight at the corner. I got hard again almost immediately. I wanted more. I went half a block with my back to the walls, ready to duck behind the first tree if I heard an engine. There was nothing. Only the hum of a transformer and the distant barking of some dog that wasn’t from my street.

I turned the corner. The perpendicular street was less familiar to me; there were neighbors there I’d never seen in person. That was exactly what I was after.

Three houses down, there was a lit window. One of those flickering lights that give away a television. I walked up very slowly. Through the half-open curtain I saw three people in the living room: two guys my age and a girl with her hair tied back, all of them pressed to the screen with game controllers. They paid me no attention, of course, because they didn’t even look outside. But I walked past their window. Twice. Three times. The third time I stopped for a moment with my dick level with the frame, holding my breath. No one turned their head. I kept going.

***

I was out for almost forty minutes. Another day I measured on a map the distance I covered that night: four hundred and twenty meters. Four hundred and twenty meters of open street, facing the neighborhood head-on. I came twice more along the way. The first time, sitting on the curb outside a house with the shutters down. The second, standing next to a pole, holding the iron with one hand and myself with the other. If someone had looked at me in that second from a dark window, they would never have forgotten that pole.

The voyeur part of me—the part that needed to be seen, not just exposed—started getting impatient. I wanted someone to see me. I wanted to confirm that it wasn’t all some fantasy of mine in the dark. But I also wanted to get back alive and without anyone recognizing me. I needed a stranger, someone who wouldn’t be able to identify me afterward.

I thought of Marisol.

Marisol lives two streets from my house, in a little yellow bungalow. She’s thirty-eight, divorced, and works at a dental clinic. I follow her profile from a fake account she doesn’t know exists. She posts photos by the pool, in a bikini, barefoot on the hot tiles. And yes, I looked at her feet too. Her feet struck me as an invitation too.

I decided she was going to be the chosen one.

I walked to her bungalow. I positioned myself on the opposite sidewalk, hidden behind a parked car, and studied the street. Clean. No eyes. I crossed. I rang the bell once and ran to hide in the vestibule of the neighboring house, where a tall flowerbed covered me up to the shoulders.

***

Twenty endless seconds passed. Then the porch light came on. Then the front door opened.

Marisol came out in a short robe, tying the belt. Her hair was messy, her face bare of makeup, her eyes sleepy. She looked left and right. She stepped one pace beyond the threshold, intrigued.

I hesitated three seconds. Then I came out.

I didn’t run toward her. I walked. I walked slowly, with one hand around myself, showing myself off completely under her porch light. She saw me. Her face made a strange expression: first shock, then disbelief, then something I couldn’t read. She didn’t scream. She didn’t go back inside right away. She put a hand to her chest as if she wanted to close her robe, but she didn’t quite close it. And I kept walking toward her.

Two meters away, I stopped. We looked straight into each other’s eyes for a second. A second is a very long time. Then she stepped back inside, not taking her eyes off me until the last instant, and closed the door. But she didn’t turn off the porch light. And the living-room curtain shifted a second later: she was watching me from inside.

She had seen me. A stranger, an older woman from the neighborhood, had seen me completely. And she didn’t know who I was.

I ran.

***

I got back by parallel little streets, crossing backyards like a cat. When I reached my gate, my hand was shaking so badly I dropped the key twice before getting it into the lock. I closed it with two turns, hid the key under the bucket, and flung myself face-up in the middle of the yard, under the sky that still hadn’t begun to dawn.

I touched myself a fifth time. The fifth of that night. The skin on my stomach was burning. When I came while looking at the stars, I thought of Marisol watching me from behind the curtain and I knew I was going to dream about that curtain for a long time.

I went back in through the same window. I closed it carefully. I put on my boxers, a T-shirt, sat on the edge of the bed. And then the phone vibrated.

It was a message from my sister.

“Are you awake?” it said. Just that. No emoji, no context. Three forty-seven in the morning.

I kept staring at the screen for a long time, not knowing whether to answer, not knowing what she had heard, what she had seen, what she knew. My blood was still pounding in my temples.

And from the street, far away but clear, I heard a door close. I didn’t know whether it was Marisol’s or my own house’s.