What I Saw in the Gym Showers That Morning

Few people know what a gym has to offer if you know how to look. I’m not talking about exercise, though that’s fine too. I’m talking about everything else, about what happens when a woman undresses in front of others as if it were nothing and lets the steam confuse everything.

I go to a large complex downtown, one of those places that seem like a small city. When you enter, there’s a reception desk and, behind it, three corridors. The middle one leads to the weight machines and free-weight area. The one on the right leads to the men’s locker room, which I’ve never seen and never will. The one on the left, the one I’m interested in, leads to the women’s locker room.

The locker room is a huge, square room, with cream-colored tiled walls and nearly a hundred lockers painted a muted burgundy. In the center there are long benches to sit on, and in one corner a massage table nobody uses. Two doors lead out from there: one goes to the pool, which is mixed, and the other to the showers. The shower room is what I like most about the whole place.

Forty showers, ten to a wall, without partitions or curtains. If you go in there, you’re forced to let everyone else see you. In the center, a sauna glazed on all four sides, with dark wooden benches inside. It’s an aquarium turned inside out, I thought the first time. The person inside doesn’t look out, but in. And whoever’s outside, if their eyes are in the right place, sees everything: open pussies when someone sits with her legs apart, nipples stiffened by the contrast between the steam and the air, asses pressed against the wood, leaving sweat marks.

The day I want to tell you about, I went first thing in the morning. I usually go in the morning because there are fewer people, which is an elegant way of saying that the few who are there are at their best: relaxed, absorbed, unhurried. I spent an hour with the weights, sweated enough to have an excuse, and went into the locker room. I undressed in front of my locker and, instead of putting on my swimsuit for the pool, wrapped myself in a small towel and went into the showers.

When I went in, there were six bodies scattered around the room. I counted before calculating anything else. It’s one of my habits.

Four were women around sixty, together in one corner, commenting on other people’s lives with the naturalness you only have once you’ve lived long enough not to be ashamed of anything. I didn’t look at them too much. I don’t mean that maliciously: bodies like that don’t attract me, they don’t stir anything in me. They didn’t care about anyone’s gaze, which, deep down, is what I envy most.

The fifth was a brunette around thirty, tall, with long, wet hair clinging to her chest and covering her nipples like two strategic curtains. When she turned toward me, she smiled. I returned the smile with the bare minimum of politeness, but I kept watching her back while she soaped herself. She had a small tattoo on her hipbone that I couldn’t decipher, and when she bent down to pick up the shower gel, her ass opened just enough for me to see her pussy from behind, with swollen lips and a pink slit shining beneath the water.

The sixth was the only one my age. Blonde, tall, with her hair tied up in a loose bun from which strands escaped in every direction. I looked at her once. Then again. And then I decided, without thinking too much about it, to take the shower beside hers.

—Hi—I said, turning on the tap.

—Hi—she replied, neither surprised nor trying to hide herself.

Her name was Aitana. She had honey-colored eyes, not an ordinary brown but that amber shade that changes with the light. Her mouth was small and full, with a lower lip slightly thicker than the upper one. She bit it when she listened to me. Her tits were larger than I’d expected on such a slender body, round, with small pink nipples that hardened as soon as the water stopped falling over them. She kept her pussy hair completely shaved, and when she leaned over to look for the shampoo, I saw between her thighs a perfect, symmetrical line, with her inner lips barely showing, pink and glistening with water, inviting a tongue to run over them from top to bottom.

If you kissed me now, I wouldn’t say anything. If you opened my legs and put your tongue right there, neither would I.

I thought that and immediately frightened myself by having thought it. I’m twenty-two and I’ve never been with anyone, man or woman. Not out of conviction, but because a mixture of shyness and bad luck has turned me into a professional spectator of other people’s lives.

We talked for a long time. Aitana was studying Fine Arts at the public university, lived with two friends in a shared apartment near the faculty, and apparently had no trouble at all telling people what she did when she went out. She told me about a guy she fucked twice a week with no strings attached—“His cock curves upward, and he touches me exactly where he needs to,” she said, laughing, while water streamed between her tits—about a classmate she’d had something with for an entire semester—“We ate each other’s pussies until our tongues went numb”—and about a party where she’d ended up in a bathroom with two people she barely knew, one sucking her tits while the other fucked her from behind against the sink. She told it all the way someone describes what they had for breakfast: without showing off, without filters, without lowering her voice even though the older women in the corner could hear her perfectly.

—And you?—she asked me.

—I don’t have much to tell.

—Nothing?

—Absolutely nothing. Not a cock, not a pussy, not a tongue. Nothing.

She laughed, not mockingly but with the kind of tenderness only someone who has lived enough can show, knowing that inexperience is an interesting thing too. She ran her hands through her hair, rinsed off the last of the soap, and as she did so, arched her back in a way that lifted her tits toward me, her nipples pointing straight at me. She turned off the tap and looked at me for one moment longer than necessary. Her eyes traveled down my body, stopped at my tits, continued to my pussy, and slowly climbed back up, as if she were taking my measure. I could barely breathe.

—If you ever want to start with something—she said—you know where to find me. I come almost every morning. And I promise you, you never forget the first time someone eats your pussy.

She wrapped herself in the towel, smiled again, and went back to the locker room.

I stayed under the spray a while longer. My skin had turned red, and not because of the water. I was so turned on it physically hurt, like a cramp in the middle of my lower belly, and I could feel my pussy swollen, soaked with something that was no longer water. Without thinking too much, I stepped out of the shower, crossed the two steps separating me from the sauna, and went inside.

***

The glass was already fogged on the inside. I closed the door behind me and felt the hot air wrap around me like a blanket. I sat on the upper bench, leaned my back against the wood, spread my legs as wide as my body allowed, and let the steam do the rest. The wood burned my ass a little, but I liked the heat underneath me. I could feel sweat and something thicker gathering in the crease of my thighs and slowly running down.

First I thought about the brunette with the tattoo, about the way her hair fell over her nipples and how she had bent down to soap her thighs, revealing that swollen, pink pussy from behind. I imagined burying my face in it, eating her from behind while she braced herself against the tiles, moaning softly so the older women wouldn’t notice. I thought about Aitana, her small, full mouth, the clean line of her shaved pussy, the possibility of running my tongue over it without asking permission, just because I could, because she had suggested it without quite suggesting it. I imagined her kneeling between my legs, looking up at me with those amber eyes, spreading my pussy lips with her fingers before spitting on me and lowering her tongue to lick.

I brought my right hand to my pussy. It was soaked, and it wasn’t the steam. At first I ran my fingers over it, from top to bottom, feeling how swollen everything was, how open I already was without having done anything. I started with two fingers, slowly, drawing circles over my clitoris until my breathing stopped. With my other hand I squeezed one tit, pinched the nipple, twisted it until the sting went straight to my belly. I closed my eyes. Through the fogged glass, I could make out figures moving in the shower room, naked shadows going from one tap to another, and I imagined all of them watching me, seeing me do what I was doing, seeing a stranger spread her legs in a sauna at nine in the morning and push her fingers all the way inside.

I lowered my hand, pressed my middle and index fingers together, and thrust them in. I felt them slide in to the knuckles, tight and slippery. I began pumping them slowly, pulling them almost all the way out and sinking them back in, my thumb resting on my clitoris. The bench creaked every time I moved my hips. A quiet moan escaped me, barely more than a breath, but enough to frighten me.

That was what first brought me to the edge. The idea of being watched. Not the reality, not yet, only the possibility that someone, anyone, might press her face against the glass and see me with my fingers buried inside, fucking myself like a bitch in the gym sauna.

And then the sauna door opened.

***

Five girls came in at once. Five. I counted without opening my eyes, by the sound of towels dropping onto the benches. They were more or less my age, whispering excitedly about a birthday party the previous weekend, someone who had gotten involved with the wrong person, another person who had ended up in the emergency room after mixing pills with whiskey. I pulled my fingers out of my pussy with the urgency of someone snatching her hand away from a flame, then lowered my arm slowly, praying nobody would smell what had stuck to my skin.

They smiled at me when they saw me, unaware of what they had interrupted. I returned a tense smile, crossed my legs to hide what was impossible to hide—the red, swollen pussy dripping between my thighs—and focused on watching the drops roll down the glass.

The problem was that the arousal didn’t disappear. On the contrary. Being surrounded by five young, naked bodies, with tits of every size spread across the benches, shaved pussies and hairy pussies half a meter from my face, smelling the coconut shampoo all twenty-year-old girls use mixed with the sweat of their armpits, hearing the water running in the showers in the background and, above all, knowing that three meters away there were still four older women, a ceiling, and nothing else, left me on the edge of something difficult to hold back. One of the girls, a brunette with short hair, was sitting directly opposite me, her legs slightly open, and from where I was I could see her pussy perfectly, her dark inner lips showing between the outer ones like a half-open flower. Every time she laughed, her tits bounced.

I stayed inside for another ten minutes. I timed it by the clock on the wall, which was barely visible through the steam. The girls kept talking, now about a trip they wanted to take in the summer to a small island in the south. Sitting on the upper bench, my palms pressed against the wood and my clitoris throbbing like a second heart, my pussy so swollen I could feel the blood pumping down there, I knew I wasn’t going to last.

I stood up, opened the sauna door, and stepped out.

***

The older women were still in their corner. They had moved from talking about their children to commenting on the rising electricity bills, which seemed like a reasonable transition to me. None of them looked at me as I crossed the room naked, the towel hanging from my arm instead of wrapped around me, my tits bare and a bright thread running down the inside of my right thigh. But all four of them were facing the sauna glass, and I stopped exactly between them and the girls inside.

I leaned my back against the cold tiled wall. The contrast with the steam clinging to my skin made me sigh. I spread my legs, braced one foot against the wall, bent my knee, and left my pussy completely exposed toward the sauna, toward the older women, toward anyone who wanted to look. And then, without thinking any further, I pushed my fingers inside.

There were three this time. They went in without resistance, all the way, accompanied by such a clear wet sound that I was sure the older women had heard it. I pulled them out and pushed them back in, curling them upward, searching for that inner spot I’d read about a thousand times online and never found by myself. With my other hand I rubbed my clitoris in quick, tight circles. My head fell back and struck the tiles, and I didn’t care. A moan escaped me, this time hoarse, long, impossible to disguise.

I moved them once, twice, three, four, five times, and everything crashed over me in a contraction that shook me from my heels to the nape of my neck. I felt my pussy clench around my fingers, squeezing them, almost forcing them out, and felt hot liquid escape between my thighs, staining the tile floor. It wasn’t a gush like the ones I’d imagined while reading things online, but it wasn’t only the moisture of pleasure either. It was something in between, warm and thick, running down my leg to my ankle and leaving a small puddle at my feet. Enough. Enough for anyone looking to know exactly what had just happened.

I stayed like that for a moment, my fingers still inside, breathing with my mouth open, feeling my pussy throb around them with the last spasms. I slowly pulled them out, glistening, and without realizing it brought them to my mouth. I sucked my own taste in front of the older women.

When I opened my eyes, all four were looking at me.

One of them, the shortest, with white hair pulled into a tight bun, raised an eyebrow and smiled. It wasn’t a scandalized smile, or a reproachful one, or even a conspiratorial one. It was the smile of someone who understood exactly what she had just seen and who, thirty years earlier, had probably done the same thing in another sauna against another tile.

—Darling—said another, the one in the green sarong—look at you young girls. And what a good hand you’ve got, sweetheart.

The other two chuckled under their breath. Not maliciously. With a kind of nostalgia that almost made me feel tender.

I picked up the towel from the floor and wrapped myself in it as best I could—though the fabric immediately stuck to my soaked pussy—and walked toward the locker-room door on trembling legs, feeling something still trickling inside me. Before crossing the threshold, I turned around one last time. Inside the sauna, the five girls were still talking about the trip to the island. They hadn’t seen anything.

And that, I discovered a little later, while drying my hair in front of the mirror beneath the locker room’s harsh lights, was exactly what bothered me most.

***

Aitana was waiting for me by the lockers, already dressed, her hair still wet and wearing an oversized navy-blue sweatshirt. When she saw me come out of the showers, she looked up from her phone and nodded toward me.

—I waited for you—she said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

I held her gaze for a second longer than my usual shyness would have allowed. Something inside me had changed over the previous twenty minutes. Something small, but enough.

—You took longer than usual—she added, without accusation.

—I had to finish something.

She smiled, and this time the smile was different. Her eyes dropped to my crotch, where the towel had opened slightly as I sat down, then rose again. She knew. I don’t know how, but she knew.

—Alone?—she asked softly.

—Alone.

—Next time, you won’t have to be.

My throat tightened. She wrote her number on a napkin she took from the bottom of her bag, handed it to me, and stood up to leave. As she passed in front of me, she leaned down, moved my wet hair away from my neck, and whispered in my ear, her lips brushing my skin:

—Next time, I’ll eat you. Slowly. Until you can’t even close your legs.

She ran her tongue over my earlobe, very briefly, almost by accident, and pulled away as if nothing had happened.

—Tomorrow, same time—she said from the door.

I nodded without saying anything, my pussy throbbing again beneath the towel. When she left, I looked at the napkin. Her number was written in blue ink, and beneath it, one word: “whenever you want.”

I tucked the napkin into the bottom of my backpack, closed my locker, and sat on the bench for a moment. The women with the bun and the green sarong passed behind me on their way out. One of them touched my shoulder as she went by, just for an instant, just to tell me:

—Don’t be ashamed, darling. That’s beautiful too. And with company, even more so.

And they left.

I stayed sitting on the bench a while longer. The locker-room lights hummed faintly, and the muffled laughter of the five girls could still be heard in the sauna. I thought about Aitana, her tongue brushing my ear, the napkin, tomorrow. I thought about what would happen if I called her and what would happen if I didn’t. I thought about her small mouth opening over my pussy, her fingers entering where only mine had entered, the first foreign tongue I would taste inside me. I thought that I had spent twenty-two years as a spectator and that perhaps the time had come to cross to the other side of the glass.

But first, yes, there would be tomorrow. And tomorrow, knowing what I knew now, I wasn’t going to stay inside the sauna. Tomorrow I was going to let Aitana kneel me wherever she wanted.