On Listening In

It’s 7am and the campsite is starting to wake up around me. My festival buddy has already left for an early morning yoga class, so I’m snuggled up against the side of the tent, warm in my sleeping bag despite the buffeting wind and pitter-patter of raindrops on the canvas above.

Honestly, I’m in no hurry to move. I could hover like this, somewhere between sleep and full consciousness, for hours, and this morning’s weather forecast is bad enough to make me burrow down further into my bedding every time I think about it.

I’m not the only one enjoying a lie-in. It takes a few minutes, but gradually I pick out a very familiar rhythm from the general swirl of noise surrounding my tent – at which point it becomes all I can hear. They become all I can hear. Neither muffled nor self-conscious, each moan and hard, staccato thrust cuts right through the wind and rain. There’s a pop to it – like highlighted text, it jumps right off the page.

Still, aural proximity is hard to calculate when you’re confined within such a small space, and my foggy morning brain struggles to zero in on the source of the sound; it feels both distant and right on top of me – the latter thrillingly so. When my sensory compass kicks in and I narrow it down to a tent just a couple of metres away, blood rushes to my head and suddenly everything is clear.

Almost instinctively, I slide a hand down under the waistband of my girlfriend’s PJ bottoms and curl it around my stiffening cock. The sleeping bag is tight across my shoulders, and I’m restricted to short, jerky strokes as I try to match my rhythm to theirs. With my eyes squeezed shut like this, I can picture them vividly; not their faces, just the broad outlines of their sweaty, naked bodies, crushed together in a tent I’m pretty sure is even smaller than mine.

She’s louder than he is – louder and more vocal. More ragged. It’s as if she’s being fucked so hard, so deep, that the sexual energy flowing through her pulses out into the chilly morning air. She talks, begs, pleads. Like a dodgy car radio, snatches of dialogue break up the ambient fuzz. “Fuck me, please. Please.” “Oh yeah, just like that. Just there. That’s it baby, harder…” “I’m so close, don’t stop now. Don’t you dare fucking stop.”

My body jackknifes with every gasping breath she takes. I squeeze saliva out onto my fingers and use it to lube the head of my cock; the taut skin is so warm that each stroke seems to fizz like the rushing tide on white tropical sand, leaving only a glistening dry foam in its wake. I’m holding on because she’s holding on – or maybe she’s stranded out there and can’t find her way home, even though it’s the only place she wants to be.

The whole thing is weirdly immersive. I’m wanking to a soundtrack that feels curated – my own filthy mixtape – but is actually someone else’s public playlist. Stick it on shuffle and enjoy the ride. All around me there are other people listening in. There have to be. Maybe some of them are jerking off – or fucking, faces squished into their pillows to stop the echo spreading across the whole site – and maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re seething in silence, or giggling to each other, or just squirming with embarrassment at the whole thing. Either way, this is very much a shared experience.

I come with a shudder, and hot spunk spurts out over my hand and stomach. She’s still going, still straining under the weight of his cock, as he grinds down – or up – into her. I scoop cum off my skin and bring it up to my mouth, then suck my fingers clean. It’s early morning in the middle of a festival, so there’s a good chance they’re both too hungover, too stoned, to finish any time soon. They’re just fucking because it feels good to fuck, and frankly who can blame them? I listen for a while longer; fuzzy now, my skin glowing. I drift back to sleep.

~

A few hours later I posted this poll on Twitter:

Been thinking about this today… Quick poll: overhearing strangers having sex is

— Exhibit A (@EA_unadorned) September 3, 2016

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The results didn’t surprise me. Arousal is both hideously complex and remarkably simple, but at a deep, primal level it involves all five of our senses; if watching other people fuck is hot – and the way we consume porn leaves little room for doubt on that front – then hearing them fuck ought to have roughly the same effect.

For some of us, it’s even more powerful than that. Overhearing strangers is like reading erotica – you’re given pieces of the puzzle, and invited to construct the rest in your own imagination. I have no idea what my campsite neighbours looked like, nor do I really know what they were doing. They could have been young, middle-aged; tall, short; fat, thin; white, black. They could have been doing it doggy-style or missionary or cowgirl…or some combination of the three. Maybe they weren’t ‘doing it’ at all – maybe that was a toy filling her cunt, or just his fingers ramming into her as she writhed on the tent floor. The possibilities are endless, and I was the one who got to control the kaleidoscope, twisting and turning till I found a pattern I liked.

I get why some people might have found that whole situation uncomfortable – and I know that in other circumstances I wouldn’t want to stick around for the thump-thump of bedframe against apartment wall. There are limits and exceptions with all of these things. But given the right time and place – the right mood – there are honestly few things I find hotter than the unpredictable, unscripted sound of other, real people having sex. It stimulates my cock and my curiosity in equal measure, and generates a level of intimacy that porn can never really hope to attain. For a few, brief moments I feel like I’m in the room with them, adding my own voice to the chorus. And it’s awesome.