What I Saw Among the Dunes of That Empty Cove

Cape Almonds, late September. I went down to the cove with my sandals dangling from my fingers and my heart light, as I did every year since discovering that spot. The reed parasols had already been put away in the beach bar’s storage shed, the wooden walkways were half dismantled, and the lifeguard hut was locked up. I had spent three months counting the days, waiting for that moment. Three months enduring a human tide that wasn’t made of water, but of coolers, loudspeakers, and voices that overpowered the sound of the waves until they made it disappear.

That morning, at last, the cove was mine. Or so I thought.

I’m a strange man. People get on my nerves in excess. Not specific individuals, but their accumulation, their clumsy way of occupying space that doesn’t belong to them. That’s why I flee the summer. That’s why I wait for the season to end and only then return, when all that’s left are fishermen with buckets, men with metal detectors, and sometimes not even them. That hidden cove between low cliffs and dry pinewoods was my yearly refuge. I knew it better than my own home.

I walked barefoot across the sand, still cold at that hour. The wind blew gently from the south, carrying the smell of scorched pines, old salt, of something that had been left behind. There wasn’t a single footprint. Not a wrapper, not a cigarette butt. Only the uneven line the night tide had drawn, full of broken shells and brown seaweed. Gulls fought over a crab on the shore, and the intermittent clicking of their beaks was the only thing breaking the murmur of the sea.

I walked to the northern end, where the dunes rose into a small maze before the pinewoods. The beach changed character there. It became more intimate, more enclosed. The sand was finer and sank beneath my feet, and thorny shrubs grew between the dunes as if they wanted to block the way. It was my favorite part. I used to sit for a while, leaning against the soft wall of one of those sand mountains, smoking slowly, letting time pass without asking anything of me.

That was when I heard the first sound.

At first I mistook it for another gull. A chick, perhaps, calling for food. But the cry was repeated, and the second time it sounded nothing like a bird’s call. It was a human sound, high-pitched and cut off short. Then came another, longer one. And another. I stood still, cigarette halfway to my mouth, trying to locate the direction.

It was coming from the other side of the large dune.

The sensible thing would have been to turn back. That’s what I told myself, my palm still warm from the lighter. The sensible thing. And yet I bent my knees and moved forward crouched low, almost on all fours, toward the source of the sound. The instinct making me move wasn’t curiosity. It was something older, murkier. A silent alarm pushing me to stay quiet, to hide, to watch without being seen.

I stuck my head out between the dry reeds.

***

The first thing I saw was his back. His. He was lying on his back on a blue towel too small for both of them, the nape of his neck resting on a backpack and his hands behind his head. He was a large man, broad-shouldered and hairy-chested, with a blurry tattoo on his biceps that I couldn’t make out. She was sitting on top of him. And there was no towel covering anything.

She looked a little over thirty, I guessed. Her hair was tied in a messy bun, strands stuck to the sweat on her neck. She was completely naked. Her small breasts bounced with the slightest delay behind her body, like two pendulums, her nipples dark and hard as stones from rubbing against the air and against his hands whenever they rose to squeeze them. Her hands were planted on his chest to steady herself, and from where I was, I could see perfectly how the guy’s cock—thick, veined, gleaming with her juices—slid in and out of her soaked cunt with a wet smack every time she dropped her whole ass against the man’s hips. How, every time she dropped her weight, she let out a hoarse cry that the wind carried to my hiding place without losing a single syllable.

“More, more, you son of a bitch, give me more,” she said between two breaths, shamelessly, without restraint, her throat wide open. “Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop. Wreck my cunt, you bastard, shove your cock all the way in.”

“Fuck, that’s it,” he grunted underneath her, his jaw clenched. “Ride that cock like a bitch. Feel it all the way up to your throat.”

He didn’t stop. He gripped her hips with both hands, his fingers sinking into the soft flesh until it went white, and helped her rise until only the head remained inside her, then let her drop so she was impaled hard and caught her again. It was a perfect rhythm, a filthy, precise mechanism. I had never seen anyone fuck like that, not even in the videos I paid for on my computer at hours when I knew no one would knock on the door. This wasn’t lovemaking. There was nothing tender about it. It was something else. An urgency that seemed never to end, renewing itself with every drop, every moan, every obscene word spoken aloud as if they were alone in the world.

Maybe they were. There was only one intrusion, and it was mine.

I remained behind the reeds, hunched over, afraid to move. The sand dug into my knees and I couldn’t feel it. My mouth was dry, my ears hot, my pulse pounding inside my temples. And, without knowing how—or when, or with what permission from me—one hand had already slipped beneath my shorts and pulled out my cock, hard as bone, the tip already wet and sticky. My other hand gripped my knee as if I needed to hold on to something to keep from falling. I began stroking it slowly, my thumb sliding over the foreskin, while I watched her ride him.

It wasn’t a decision. It was a consequence.

At some point she leaned forward and bit his lower lip. She bit it hard; I saw him arch his back and heard the grunt that escaped him. Then she straightened again, brought two fingers to her mouth, sucked them slowly until they came out glistening with saliva, and lowered them to where their bodies joined. I watched her spread her cunt lips with two fingers held in a V, letting me see, from my side angle, how his cock entered her raw, red, swollen flesh, how her clitoris emerged between her fingers like an inflamed button. She began rubbing it in slow circles with her middle finger, never stopping her up-and-down motion on the shaft impaling her. She didn’t look up. Neither of them looked up. They only looked into each other’s eyes, with savage concentration, like two animals learning to recognize each other.

“I’m going to come,” she warned him, her voice trembling. “I’m going to come all over your cock, you son of a bitch.”

“Come, you slut. Soak it. All of it.”

And I kept moving my hand.

Stop. Get up. Turn around. This isn’t right.

I thought it somewhere in a very quiet corner of my mind. But the corner was small, and the rest of my body was immense and demanding what it was owed. I squeezed harder. Moved faster. With no rhythm of my own: I copied hers, rising when she rose, dropping when she dropped, as if the three of us were connected by the same invisible thread that I hadn’t put there. I watched her come on top of him, trembling from her thighs to her neck, her cunt clenching around his cock in spasms that made a thin jet spurt out, wetting his balls and soaking the blue towel. She held herself that way for a second, impaled all the way down, then started moving again as if it weren’t enough.

***

At that moment, she turned her head.

It wasn’t a sudden movement or a start. It was slow. Almost lazy. As if she’d suspected for a while that there was a third person and had simply decided to confirm it. Her eyes found me among the reeds and didn’t move away. There was no scream, no shame, no fright. There was something else. A crooked smile lifted the right corner of her mouth slightly. And without taking her eyes off me, without alerting him, she quickened her pace.

Now she was moving for me.

I knew it immediately. Each rise was higher, each descent deeper, each moan a little more theatrical, a little more obscene, a little more directed toward my hiding place among the dunes. He kept his eyes closed, oblivious to the game’s new geometry. Only the two of us knew that there was an audience and that it was me. She pulled away from his mouth for a moment, straightened, arched her back so I could see her whole body: breasts pointing toward the sky, belly taut, pubic hair trimmed into a short, dark line, his cock disappearing inside her again and again as if she were serving it up to me on a platter. She brought one hand to a breast, pinched her nipple, pulled it, stretched it until it turned red, all while staring straight at me. Then she brought the same fingers to her lips, sucked them, and lowered them again to her clitoris.
“Look at me,” she mouthed, forming the syllables with her lips without letting him find out over the sound of his own breathing. “Look at me properly. Watch how he fucks me.”

I couldn’t not look at her. I couldn’t blink. I had the feeling that if I looked away, everything would break: the cove, the morning, my body, the whole summer. My hand sped up without asking me. It felt hot, alien, almost like someone else’s, sliding over my own cock with the pre-cum that kept oozing from the tip. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from making a sound, and even so a small noise escaped me, sounding embarrassing, childish, completely out of place.

She laughed. A short, hoarse, satisfied laugh. And as if that weren’t enough, she pulled away from him for an instant, turned around without getting off, and impaled herself on him again facing backward, giving me her face and the rest of her. Now I could see everything: the guy’s cock disappearing between her spread buttocks, his sack pressed against her ass, her fingers rubbing her clitoris in plain sight, her thighs spread as if she were displaying them to an examiner. She began moving again, this time bouncing, making short, fast little hops without taking her eyes off me. I couldn’t take any more.

“Fill me,” she ordered him, though the words were meant for me. “Fill my cunt with your milk. Come inside me. Now.”

And then everything sped up. The man gripped her hips hard, grunted something through his teeth, pulled her toward him as he sat up, and began thrusting into her from below, with hard blows that made her breasts bounce and tore short cries from her at every thrust. She threw her head back, put two fingers in her mouth so she wouldn’t scream too loudly, took them out, and brought them back to her clitoris. I saw the man’s face, his eyes screwed shut, the vein standing out in his neck, and guessed the exact second he came inside her because she let out a long, broken scream that bounced off the dunes and vanished among the pines, then kept moving slowly on top of him for a few more seconds, milking him, wringing out every last drop, her mouth open and her eyes fixed on my hiding place. I came at the same time, my cock throbbing in my hand, spattering semen over my hand, my thighs, and the dune in front of me in three thick jets, without a single cry because I swallowed it whole as if it were bitter medicine.

For a few seconds, the only sound was breathing. Hers. His. Mine.

Then he let himself fall onto the towel and closed his eyes again, at peace. She remained on top of him for a while, still, her hands resting on his thighs, his cock still inside her, softening, a thick white thread trickling down the inside of her thigh onto the towel. And, without him seeing, she slipped two fingers into her cunt, pulled them out gleaming with mixed semen, brought them to her mouth, and sucked them slowly while looking at me. Then she raised those same fingers toward my hiding place and blew me a kiss. Only then did she get off him, find the T-shirt rolled up beside the backpack, and pull it on without further ceremony, without covering herself completely, letting the fluid continue to run down the insides of her legs onto the sand.

***

I got away from there as best I could. I stood up on numb legs, my cock still dripping inside my shorts, backing across the sand with a sense of shame that had arrived late, like a bus passing after you’ve already decided to walk. I didn’t turn around until I was far from the dunes, and when I did, there was nothing to see. Only the tide line, the gulls, the wind.

I didn’t sleep that night. Nor the following morning. I promised myself I wouldn’t return to the cove for months, perhaps ever again. I told myself it had been an accident, a lapse in my discipline, a weakness that wouldn’t define me.

I lied.

Since that day, I’ve been going down to the cove four or five times a week. Sometimes under the high sun, sometimes before dawn, sometimes at sunset, when the fishermen have already gathered up their gear and gone. I walk to the northern end, sit behind the large dune, smoke slowly, and sometimes, without realizing it, my hand is already inside my shorts before anyone arrives. And I wait.

I don’t know if they were passing tourists. I don’t know if they’ll come back. I don’t know whether I’d recognize them if I crossed paths with them in any supermarket around here. But sometimes the wind still brings me the echo of those moans, of that “wreck my cunt” said out in the open without a shred of shame. And when I hear them, I no longer wonder whether I’m going to stay and watch.

I already know I will.