What My Neighbors Asked of Me in Return

The fourth-floor hallway had a single bulb that flickered. Two in the morning, cold linoleum under my socks, and my fist raised before the door to 4B while I still hadn’t fully decided.

I had already gotten this far before. Twice the week before. Both times I turned back before knocking.

That night, I didn’t.

The first knock was soft. The second, firmer. The echo surprised me: I hadn’t reckoned with how much it would resound in the empty hall. My heart sped up before I even heard footsteps on the other side.

I had been listening to them for weeks. At first I thought it was the television. Then I thought I’d get used to it. Neither happened. The sounds from 4B had colonized my nights with a precision that felt almost personal: the cadence that rises and breaks and rises again, the mixed voices, the rhythmic thudding of the headboard against the wall we shared, the moans that turned into muffled cries, the wet splashing that sometimes leaked into my room with indecent clarity. I had woken up like that for twenty nights in a row, my cock hard and stuck to my briefs, my hand going down on its own, stroking myself silently against the wall while I listened to them come on the other side. I had memorized the patterns, the rhythms, the exact moments when one of them reached the peak and let it out with a howl that left me staring at the ceiling for hours, eyes open, semen drying on my stomach.

So there I was.

The door opened.

Nadia filled the frame. Brown hair loose over her shoulders, a satin robe hanging open to mid-thigh. She was taller than I’d imagined from crossing paths with her by the mailboxes, with broad shoulders and a calm in her eyes that threw me completely off. She looked me up and down in silence, unhurried. Not surprise, not annoyance. Pure appraisal.

Behind her, Raquel appeared in the gap: dark-haired, her hair half tied up, arms crossed in that posture that can mean many things and that night meant only one.

“What do you want?” she said.

I hadn’t prepared any speech. I only had what had brought me there.

“I’ve heard you,” I said. My voice sounded smaller than I wanted. “Every night. I’ve been sleeping badly for weeks. I can’t stop thinking. I’m...” I stopped. Swallowed. “I’m alone and I don’t know what to do with that anymore.”

Silence. Nadia turned her head toward Raquel. Raquel lifted an eyebrow. One second, two. Then they both looked at me with something I couldn’t make out at first: not pity, not rejection. Recognition.

“Come in,” Nadia said.

***

Their apartment was the opposite of mine. Mine had white walls and boxes still unpacked after four months. Theirs had plants on every windowsill, half-burned candles, fabrics hanging from the ceiling softening the corners, and a smell I took a moment to identify: burnt wood and some kind of flower I didn’t recognize.

They sat me on the sofa. Nadia brought a glass of water without asking if I wanted one.

I talked more than I had talked all month. The city that had swallowed me before I could settle in, the job that left no room for anything else, the persistent feeling of being right next to something without being able to cross over. Raquel listened leaning against the bookcase with her arms crossed. Nadia, with her legs tucked up on the armchair, didn’t interrupt me once.

When I finished, Raquel asked:

“What exactly are you looking for here?”

It was the right question. Not what I wanted from them. What I was looking for.

“Something real,” I said. “Something with weight.”

Nadia smiled. A slow smile that started at her lips and reached her eyes a second later.

“We can give you that,” she said. “But there are rules here.”

Raquel pushed off the bookshelf and sat down beside me on the sofa. Her thigh brushed mine.

“We’re in charge here,” she said softly. “You do what we ask, when we ask it. You’re going to suck, you’re going to lick, you’re going to open your mouth and your ass when we tell you to, and you’re not going to come until we give you permission. If you want to stop, you say the word and we stop. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“I need to hear you say it clearly,” Nadia added.

“I understand,” I said.

“Good,” Raquel replied, and for the first time all night, something in her posture loosened by a millimeter.

***

Nadia put me on my knees on the rug in front of the sofa with the same naturalness with which someone sets a glass down. No negotiation, no theatricality. She simply did it, I allowed it, and in that permission I found something I hadn’t anticipated: an inner silence I hadn’t visited in weeks.

Kneeling there, looking up at them from below, I felt my head finally stop racing.

“Like this,” Nadia said, sliding a finger along my jaw, slipping it between my lips until I sucked it without thinking. “Still. That’s it. Good boy.”

Raquel moved behind me. Her hands gripped my shoulders with precision: not hard, but purposeful. She yanked my shirt off my shoulders and let it fall to my elbows, leaving my chest bare and my arms half trapped in the fabric.

“Breathe,” she whispered in my ear, her lips brushing my lobe. “And don’t do anything we don’t ask you to.”

I breathed.

Nadia opened her robe slowly. She was trans, something I already knew and that night had the same weight as any other detail in the room: part of who she was, part of what they had offered me. The robe opened fully and the cock was at eye level, hard, thick, with veins running along the shaft and the glans glossy and bare a handspan from my mouth. A string of pre-cum dangled from the tip. My mouth watered without asking permission.

“Stick out your tongue,” she said.

I did. She dragged the glans over my tongue slowly, rubbing it across my lips, coating my face with her own juices. The taste was salty and thick and hit me in a place I hadn’t known I had.

“Open,” she added. “All the way.”

I opened my mouth as wide as I could and she eased in without haste, one firm hand holding the back of my neck. Her cock filled my tongue, pressed against my palate, and kept going until it touched the back of my throat. I gagged. She didn’t pull out. She waited a second, two, and when the reflex gave way she pushed another inch.

“Slower,” she said, though she was the one setting the pace. “Breathe through your nose. Swallow me.”

I swallowed. My throat opened around her cock and she let out a rough moan that went straight through me. She started fucking my mouth with short thrusts, then longer ones, until her pubic hair brushed the tip of my nose every time she drove in to the hilt. Saliva ran down my chin and dripped onto my bare chest. My eyes filled with tears. I didn’t close my mouth once.

Raquel undid my pants from behind, pulled them down to my knees along with my briefs, and her hands moved across my torso without hurry, then lower. She gripped my thighs firmly and ran her fingers through the cleft of my ass. One of her fingers, wet with something I didn’t see her take from anywhere, slipped between them and pressed against my hole with calculated slowness.

“Look at me,” she said.

I looked at her, with Nadia’s cock still buried in my mouth. Raquel pushed the finger into me to the knuckle. I arched without meaning to.

“Good.”

She started moving it slowly, in and out, curling it inside until she found a spot that made me groan around Nadia’s shaft. Nadia felt it, laughed under her breath, and rammed into me harder.

“He likes it,” Raquel murmured. “Look at his cock, he’s getting hard with just one finger in his ass.”

“That’s what he is,” Nadia answered, and held my head with both hands, fucking my mouth to her rhythm, not letting me do a thing.

Raquel slipped in a second finger. It burned at first and then opened. She worked them like scissors, stretching me slowly, while with her other hand she grabbed my cock from behind and stroked it firmly. Not enough to make me come. Just enough to keep me at the edge and not let me drop.

“Not yet,” she warned in my ear. “Don’t even think about it.”

I clenched my teeth against the urge, without closing my mouth around Nadia. She yanked out of my mouth all at once with a wet sound and sat on the sofa, legs open, cock erect and shining with my saliva.

“Come here,” she said. “Lick my balls. Slowly. One and then the other.”

I crawled to her with my pants tangled around my ankles and buried my face between her legs. I ran my tongue under her cock, over the taut skin of her testicles, took them into my mouth one by one, sucking them carefully while she stroked my hair and sighed. I licked up along the shaft, wrapping it with my lips, and went back down. I repeated the route several times until she tugged my hair to lift my face.

“Very good,” she said. “You learn fast.”

Raquel sat up on the sofa and drew me toward her. She had taken off her pants and panties at some point I hadn’t seen. She spread her legs and planted her hand on the back of my neck without a word. I took the inside of her thigh with my hand and waited. She nodded and I continued with my fingers, following the specific instructions she gave me in a low voice: here, like this, not so hard, more. I parted the lips of her cunt with two fingers and saw how wet she was, the pink, glossy flesh, the swollen clit peeking out between the folds. I pushed one finger inside and she closed around it with a heat that made me clench my teeth.

“With your tongue,” she said.

I obeyed. I buried my mouth in her cunt, ran my tongue along the slit, up and down, licked her inner lips, hunted for her clit with the tip and circled around it without quite touching. When I finally covered it fully with my mouth and began to suck it slowly, she arched her hips against my face.

“There,” she gasped. “There, don’t stop.”

Her head was thrown back and her fingers buried in my hair, and every so often she told Nadia, in a low voice, what she wanted her to do next. I fucked her cunt with two fingers while sucking her clit, curling them upward until I found a rough spot that made her press harder against my mouth. Her wetness streamed down my chin, mixed with the saliva from the blow job before, and ran down my neck.

Nadia had gotten up and was moving behind me. I felt her hands spread my ass cheeks. I felt something cold and thick spilling between them, a stream of lubricant that ran down my slit. Then the glans of her cock, broad and hot, resting against my hole, newly opened by Raquel’s fingers.

“Don’t stop eating her pussy,” she ordered. “Even while I fuck you. Not for one second.”

She pushed. The glans forced the ring open and slid in all at once, and I let out a muffled growl against Raquel’s sex. She pressed my head harder into her.

“Keep going,” she said. “I said keep going.”

I kept going. Sucking her clit, taking it between my lips, while Nadia opened me at her own pace, centimeter by centimeter, until her hips were glued to my ass and all of her cock was buried inside me. She stayed still for a moment, letting me feel every pulse, every vein. Then she started moving.

At first slowly, with long thrusts that pulled almost all the way out and drove back in to the hilt. Then faster. Her hips slammed into mine with a wet splashing I recognized instantly: it was the same sound I had heard through the wall for twenty nights. Now I was the one making it. Now I was the one groaning against Raquel’s flesh while Nadia’s cock split me open, I was the one with the headboard pounding, I was the one sounding like two in the morning.

“Look at him,” Nadia said to Raquel. “I’m burying it to the hilt and he doesn’t pull away. He opens for it on his own.”

“He loves it,” Raquel panted back. “Look how he eats me. You’ve opened his ass and his tongue’s moving faster.”

It was true. Every thrust from Nadia drove my face harder into Raquel’s cunt, and I used the momentum to suck her more fiercely, deeper. The three of us moved with a single rhythm, fitted together, Raquel deciding how much and when with her hand in my hair, Nadia driving into me with controlled precision, me between them, drilled and used and, for the first time in months, completely present.

Raquel came first. She clenched around my fingers, shook against my mouth, and let out a long moan that bounced off Nadia. She pressed my face into her until the last tremor passed. She didn’t let me breathe. When she let go, I gasped for air, chin soaked.

Nadia pulled her cock out of my ass, turned me over with two firm hands, and threw me onto my back on the rug. She mounted me the other way around, straddling my face, and lowered herself until her glans hit my lips.

“Open your mouth,” she said. “And stay still. I’m going to come in your throat.”

I opened. She shoved herself all the way in, holding my head to the floor, and fucked my mouth with short, brutal thrusts. At the same time, with her other hand, she grabbed my cock and stroked it hard. Raquel crouched beside me and slid three fingers into my ass, searching for that spot deep inside, pressing it with the same insistence with which Nadia was fucking my mouth.

“Now,” Raquel said. “Come.”

I let go as if someone had cut a rope. My orgasm hit in waves, thick spurts splashing my stomach and chest, while Nadia growled over me and emptied herself into my throat with slower and slower thrusts. Hot semen ran down the back of my palate and I swallowed as much as I could. What I couldn’t, seeped from the corners of my mouth.

I came when they told me I could. Not before.

Afterward, the three of us stayed still. It took a while for our breathing to come back to itself. The air smelled of burning wax, hot skin, semen and sweat, and the same burnt wood as always.

***

It was Raquel who broke the silence.

“There’s something you need to know,” she said without moving, staring at the ceiling. “I don’t like men. Generally.”

I turned to look at her.

“Tonight was different,” she continued. “But it’s not what I usually go for.”

“Why did you do it then?”

“Because Nadia wanted to. And because you seemed to really need it.”

I didn’t know exactly how to process that. In the end I decided to take it as honesty and keep going.

Nadia stretched and looked at me sideways.

“Raquel and I have talked about this before,” she said. “About whether there could be someone else in this space.”

“And?”

“The condition is that it’s not a man,” Raquel said.

I stayed quiet.

“We’re not asking you to give anything up,” Nadia added. “We’re asking you to leave it aside, here, inside these walls.”

Raquel got up and opened the wardrobe. Large and neatly arranged: bright colors, long skirts, blouses of different textures, fabrics that, in the candlelight, seemed to have a weight of their own.

“You can say no,” she said. “You go back to your apartment and this was one night. Nothing more.”

I looked at her. Then at Nadia. I thought of the empty apartment on the other side of the shared wall, the unpacked boxes, the fluorescent tube in the hallway flickering in the dark.

“What do you need from me?” I asked.

“For you to be what the three of us can build together,” Nadia said.

***

Nadia chose a dark silk blouse and slid it over my shoulders without ceremony. The fabric felt cold to the touch and slowly warmed with the heat of my skin. Raquel took out a long skirt and placed it on my hips with precise hands, adjusting it without comment, like someone fixing something that had already been there all along.

Then the two of them looked at me.

“What’s your name here?” Raquel asked.

“Daniel,” I said by force of habit.

“No.” Direct. “Tonight, here, in this apartment, what’s your name?”

I hadn’t thought about it. The name came on its own, as if it had been waiting for someone to ask for it.

“Sombra,” I said.

Nadia nodded slowly, weighing it.

“Sombra,” she repeated. “Yes. It fits.”

Raquel crossed her arms, but with a different posture. Less guard, more something that looked like acceptance.

“Sombra can stay,” she said. “Daniel has to leave before dawn.”

I looked at myself in the wall mirror. The dark blouse, the flowered skirt, my mussed hair, the eyes that returned an expression I didn’t quite know how to name. I didn’t recognize what I saw, but it didn’t feel чуждо either. It was something under construction, something without fixed edges yet.

At that moment, that seemed enough.

“Sombra stays,” I said.

***

Nadia taught me how to move in the skirt, which was less complicated than I’d imagined. Raquel combed my hair back with practical efficiency that made me laugh, and she laughed too, which was the first time all night.

We sat on the floor of the room with the lights low and Raquel put on music I didn’t recognize but that fit the space and the hour.

We talked until the sky began to lighten. About ordinary things: the neighborhood supermarket that closed too early, the people on the first floor who argued every Sunday, a movie none of the three of us had ever finished. The ordinary conversation I had been missing for months and that in that apartment, in those clothes, with those two people, came without any effort.

Before I left, Nadia said:

“Next time, you get here before two.”

It was an order. It was also an invitation.

“All right,” I answered.

Raquel opened the door. She didn’t say anything. But when I reached the end of the hall and turned back, she raised her hand: a small gesture, almost nothing.

Enough.