The Nude Beach Where We Weren’t Quite Alone

The idea was Tomás’s. We’d been talking about it for months with laughter, like something impossible and mischievous, until one January dawn he shook my shoulder and said that today we were finally going. He’d studied the map, read a couple of reviews, knew the cove was small and that in summer it filled up, but that at dawn it belonged to the people bold enough to get there before the sun.

We left home with the light still blue. In the car we barely spoke. I watched through the window the yellow fields, the motionless cows, the rusted signs pointing toward the coast, and felt my heart beating too fast for someone who was only going to the beach.

“Are you nervous?” Tomás asked without turning his head.

“A little.”

“If you want, we can stay dressed until more people show up.”

I shook my head. I hadn’t driven forty kilometers to hide behind a towel.

The path down was cobbled and damp. The first light slipped between the pines and painted warm patches on the ground. When the sand and the sea came into view, I stopped for a second to look. The cove was exactly as I’d imagined it: a short horseshoe, wedged between two huge crags, with a strip of large stones at the shore and, beyond that, a tongue of pale sand that the wind had combed during the night.

There was absolutely no one there. No lifeguard, no dogs, no footprints. Only the sound of the sea.

We left the towels in the shade of the northern crag, where the sun still hadn’t reached. Tomás yanked off his T-shirt and flung it over the backpack. Then his pants, without ceremony, as if he’d done it a thousand times.

“And you?” he asked, in his underwear, looking at me with that smile I knew all too well.

I put my hands on the hem of my dress and hesitated for an instant. Then I pulled it up. The morning air touched my breasts at the same time as Tomás’s gaze. I wasn’t wearing a bra. I took off my panties too, left them on top of the dress, and stood there barefoot, with the cold sand still slipping between my toes.

“You’re the loveliest thing I’ve seen this morning,” he said.

“You’re a sap,” I answered, but I laughed.

We walked together toward the southern end of the cove, where the sand grew finer and the stones gave way to a small dune. It was the perfect little corner. Protected by a wall of rock behind us and by the crag to the left, so we could only be seen from the sea. And the sea, at that hour, was empty.

Tomás sat down on the sand with his legs stretched out and his elbows back. Never taking his eyes off me.

“Come here,” he said.

I knelt in front of him. The sand was still cool and clung to my knees, tiny grains working into every crease. I looked up at him from below, with the light gilding his chest and shoulders, and felt that strange thing that happens with him when everything is right: the exact blend of tenderness and desire.

I ran a hand over his thigh, slowly, upward. He was hard before I even touched him. I kissed his stomach, just below his navel, and heard his breath catch. I moved a little lower. I licked him from the base to the tip, once, slowly, and lifted my head again to look him in the eyes.

“Please,” he murmured.

I took him all the way into my mouth. His skin tasted of salt and dawn sun. I closed my eyes and started moving with a slow rhythm, using my hand too, unhurried, listening to the sound of the sea and his, that low sound he makes in his throat when he’s holding back. My legs were open and the sand crackled beneath him every time he shifted.

The sun finished passing over the crag and hit us full on. I felt the heat on my back, on my shoulders, on the nape of my neck. I was already sweating, without having done much at all. I let him go for a second to breathe, kissed his groin, ran my tongue over his balls. He took my hair in one hand, not to push me, just to gather it up and be able to look at me.

“You’re beautiful like that,” he said, almost voiceless.

I smiled with my mouth full. I didn’t answer him. I slid one of my hands between my legs and touched myself while I kept at him. I was soaked. My skin was burning. The idea of doing that there, with the whole cove to ourselves and the open sky above, had put me in a state I don’t remember ever feeling in any hotel or any bed.

The first orgasm hit me by surprise. I quickened my hand, squeezed the base with the other, sucked him harder than I meant to. Tomás sat up abruptly.

“Stop,” he said, laughing. “Stop or I’ll come right now.”

I let him go. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and let myself fall back onto the sand, laughing too. He leaned over me and kissed me. He tasted of salt, of me, of the morning air.

“Turn over,” he said in my ear.

I rolled without thinking. I planted my knees and elbows in the sand, rested my face on my forearms, and looked toward the sea. From there, the cove seemed bigger. The water was flat, almost no waves at all. A seagull crossed the sky with a long cry.

***

Tomás held my hips and entered me slowly. Slow enough to make my breath catch. He did it in two movements, as if he wanted to make sure I was okay, and only then did he start thrusting for real.

“Like that,” I begged, my voice strange.

He grabbed my hair, wound it around his hand, and made me arch my neck. His other hand stayed on my waist. Each thrust shoved me a little forward; the sand scraped my knees, dirtied my face, worked its way where it shouldn’t, and even so I didn’t care.

I could hear him behind me, breathing hard, letting out stray words that were neither sentences nor filthy talk, just sounds. I was screaming. For the first time in a long while I was screaming out loud without remembering the neighbors, without measuring the volume, without thinking about anything. I was screaming because I could.

The second orgasm was longer than the first. I felt myself falling forward and he held me with his arm around my belly, never coming out, never stopping. The third came almost without pause. Something broke in me then. I didn’t know whether I was laughing or crying. Both, probably.

And then, while Tomás kept going and I tried to catch my breath, I saw him.

A small white flash, high on the northern crag. I lifted my head just a little. And I saw it again. A figure, seated among the rocks up there, with something reflecting the sun. Binoculars. Or a phone. I didn’t know. I only knew someone was there and had been there God knows how long.

The first thing I felt was shame. The second, a different shame, one that made me clamp my knees against the sand and push my hips back toward Tomás, harder. I didn’t recognize myself in that reaction. But there it was, on all fours, on the sand of a deserted cove, with a stranger watching us from above, and the only thing I wanted was for him to see everything.

“Tomás,” I said, without turning, without taking my eyes off the crag. “They’re watching us.”

He took a second to answer. He slowed down. Looked up. Then he laughed, softly, right behind my ear.

“Do you want us to stop?”

“No.”

He started thrusting again, harder. So hard he pushed my face into my forearms. I held the stranger on the crag in my gaze, or at least the silhouette I could make out, and felt how each thrust shook me and how up there the figure didn’t move. Didn’t hide. Didn’t leave. Stayed still, watching.

The fourth orgasm hit me like a wave. I gripped the sand with both hands as if I could hold on to something. I screamed, this time without hiding it, knowing the cry traveled across the cove and up toward the crag and into the rocks. Tomás came just after. I felt it in the sudden pressure of his hand on my waist, in the way he sank all the way in and stayed there, his thighs trembling against mine.

We stayed in that position for several seconds. Ragged breathing, hearts racing, sand stuck everywhere. Slowly, he pulled out. I felt his heat slide down the inside of my thigh, mixed with sweat. I let myself fall onto one side on the sand, panting, laughing without knowing why.

“Look up,” I told him.

Tomás raised his eyes. The flash on the crag was gone. The silhouette was gone too. Only the sky, now completely blue, and a couple of seagulls circling far away.

“There’s no one there,” he said.

“There was someone.”

“For a long time?”

“I don’t know. I saw him at the end.”

He lay down beside me, on his back, one arm under his neck. He looked at me without saying anything for a long while. Then he smiled.

“And did it bother you?”

I thought about the answer. Really thought about it. Not the first blush of embarrassment or the second rush of arousal, but the one that was left now that my heart was starting to settle and my skin was cooling in the breeze.

“Not as much as it should have,” I replied.

He laughed. He ran his hand over my waist and drew me to his chest. He smelled of salt, sweat, and sun.

***

We swam after that. The water was icy and made each of us cry out when we waded in waist-deep. Tomás picked me up in his arms as if we were two teenagers and let me drop into a small wave. The salt burned on my scraped knees. It felt like the cleanest I’d felt in years.

We went back to the towel and dried off in the sun. Around eleven, other people started arriving. An older couple, a man alone with a book, a group of four who set up on the other side of the cove with an orange umbrella. All naked, all calm, all nodding as they passed. There was nothing strange anymore about being like that. Tomás was reading. I watched the sea and, every so often, the northern crag.

I never found out who it was. Whether it was a hiker coming down along the ridge who got stuck at the edge. Whether it was someone who knew exactly what he was looking for up there. Whether he’d followed us from the path or had spent the whole night waiting for someone to appear. I turned it over for weeks. Sometimes, in bed, I told Tomás about it again, with a new detail, a different suspicion, and he listened without interrupting and laughed at the end.

“You liked it,” he would always say.

And I never quite managed to answer him.