A Birthday Gift

It happens just after her 35^th birthday. Nothing marks the change. No shift in mood, no breakouts, no heavy period. Her weight doesn’t change. No hot flushes or headaches. The transformation is so unmarked, in fact, that it almost scares her when she first realizes what has happened. Her body has altered. Shifted. Quietly and coolly and without her knowledge.

Now, suddenly, she can come from just the slightest touch.

She’s used to masturbation taking time. Effort. The wand makes it happen, but it takes a long time. She must relax her body piece by piece. Put everything out of her head and ride the slowly-building waves of it until something finally unlocks. Afterwards, usually, she feels almost numb from the vibration, exhausted from holding her breath.

But now she comes just from reaching down and parting the lips of her cunt with her fingers. It’s like a firework – one of those ones that screeches, goes silent, then explodes. She parts the lips of her cunt and there is a moment of rising tension, a moment of silence, and then…

She explodes. Gasping and clutching herself on the bed, stunned by the abruptness of it.

She tries again a little later, thinking it must have been a fluke. That orgasms cannot come so easily, not to her. And it takes a little longer this time, but seconds only. She gets her fingers inside herself, and she’s wet beyond belief, and she comes like that, with her cunt clutching down in spasms on her fingers.

In the first week she tries to refrain as much as possible. She is afraid that if she overuses this newfound ability it will disappear as quickly as it came. And, to tell the truth, she’s a little frightened of it – of how easily she can provoke from her body such a cataclysmic shudder.

In the second week she gives in. She masturbates eight or nine times a day. Before bed. In the morning. After breakfast. In the shower. In the toilets at work. She’s constantly wet – has to take a spare pair of panties with her to the office so that she can change in the middle of the day.

She gets getting off down to an art. She can come by touching herself through her skirt, pressing a seam of fabric into her cunt and grinding, tensing her thighs. It takes less than a minute every time. She can do it silently – barely a grunt. She can do it standing, sitting at her desk, sprawled in bed.

Constantly, now, she feels like she’s glowing from it. Rarely is she more than an hour from having come. Never more than an hour from coming again. In between the pleasure suffuses into her skin and tingles there like electricity, waiting to be discharged.

In the act of ordinary things, now, she finds pleasure. Pissing is pleasurable. Showering is pleasurable. When she sits on the bus and the seat vibrates beneath her she has to try quite hard not to come right then and there. It’s good, of course, but it’s frightening also. She feels naked, stripped bare, denuded of all protections. Anything can take her over the edge, now. Anything can make her lose control.

Perhaps that’s why it takes her so long to try it with another human being. It’s a different prospect, here on the other side of whatever transformation has taken place. A warm body and the thrill of being wanted are still exciting, sure. But the idea of going out, dressing up, flirting and talking and bringing home a man or woman of her choosing seems like a hassle. She could stay home instead, and make her own body perform a miracle a dozen times over.

For a while she does this. She flirts with Tinder, but cannot muster the effort to do more. It feels pointless, lackluster. She exchanges dirty messages with a tall, aquiline boy whose profile consists of two shirtless pictures of him vaping. Young-looking, oddly handsome. His messages are greedy, self-centered, demanding. She replies to each: obscene lists of what she wants, what she’ll let him do, what she needs. Masturbates while she waits for each message. Comes three times, the last almost suffocating. Blocks him and deletes his number after the third, and never thinks about him again.

It’s not until she runs into an ex that she tries it with someone else. They haven’t seen each other for years; she thought he’d left town. But here he is. Back. They go for drinks – more drinks than she intended, and before she knows it they’re at her flat, naked and on the bed and giggling.

She intends to warn him. Wants to warn him. But there’s not a chance to do so before it happens for the first time. His thigh between her legs. She grinds down, clutches his ribs, breathes in the olive oil scent of his skin, and comes explosively. He seems surprised. Not just surprised. Astonished. When she’s done he kisses her and she comes again.

They fuck for hours.

By the time they stop to rest and drink water and talk a little, her legs are weak. She’s lost count. Her head feels light and her skin enervated. She’s cloaked in light. All the orgasms have sunk into her skin and she’s warm and tender and richly happy. He flops on the bed beside her.

“So,” he says, “what happened?”

She doesn’t know how to answer that. She doesn’t answer that. She rolls on top of him and kisses him again, and they dissolve into one another. She feels the tug in the pit of her stomach. The rise. The fluttering excitement. And she thinks of an answer she could have given.

It’s a gift, she could have said. Although that doesn’t quite capture it. That’s not quite accurate. Is a thing still a gift if you give it to yourself? She doesn’t know the answer. She doesn’t know if it will stay or go away again after a year or two. She doesn’t understand and she doesn’t need to. It’s a gift. If it’s the only gift her body ever gives her, she’ll be more than happy with that.