The Day My Neighbor Had Breakfast Naked on the Porch

Ramón woke up at quarter past nine and knew, before he even opened his eyes fully, that something was off. For a few seconds his brain was unable to place it on the map: where he was, what day it was, why that impossible silence reigned.

He stayed on his back, staring at the ceiling, listening. Nothing. Absolute silence, blessed, miraculous. Something that simply did not happen in that house. Ever. And yet that morning, it was happening.

Light was slipping through the half-lowered blind with the persistence of a salesman who knows you’re inside. It was June light in Almería, golden, promising heat now and threatening to turn the afternoon into a frying pan. He listened again and then suddenly understood: he was alone. Five whole days alone in the house.

Five days without having to explain himself to anyone. At sixty-one, it felt like a real vacation, not one of those other ones of “let’s all go to an apartment in Benidorm and kill each other over the TV remote by the third day”.

His wife, Encarna, and their two grown children, Sergio and Noelia, were in Albacete. A second cousin’s wedding on Saturday, but with farewells, meals, and gatherings spread across the whole week with the in-laws Ramón hated with all his soul. So he had invented an urgent shipment to Rotterdam, put on a face of “what can I do, work is work” and stayed home. A filthy lie, of course. He was officially on vacation, with the paperwork in order.

But the idea of spending five days putting up with Encarna’s four siblings, all of them with that capital-city superiority, looking down on people from the neighborhood, seemed like a fate worse than death. And now, instead, he had the whole house to himself. If that wasn’t freedom, God should come down and see it.

He got up with the dangerous optimism of a man who knows he can do exactly whatever the hell he wants. And then he thought: “Fuck, I could go downstairs and have breakfast naked if I wanted to”. Three seconds later he was going down the stairs completely naked, because at sixty-one he had already learned something: if you get the chance to do a stupid thing that makes you happy and nobody’s looking, you do it. Life is too short to wear underwear in your own house when there are no witnesses.

He made coffee in the Italian coffee pot —Encarna had taken the capsule machine with her, the clever bitch— and, while it gurgled and whistled like an angry pot, he toasted two thick slices of country bread and spread them with olive oil and grated tomato. Champion’s breakfast. Free man’s breakfast. He grabbed the tray and went out to the back porch wearing not a single stitch.

The porch was his kingdom. A bamboo reed screen gave shade, a plastic table held the tray, and an old aluminum folding chair greeted him with a familiar squeak. He sat down. Spread his legs because he could. He sighed the way only a man sighs after taking off the costume of civilized society.

“If happiness exists,” he thought while taking the first sip of bitter coffee, “it looks a lot like this”.

The garden stretched out before him like a green-and-blue promise. The pool, eight by four meters of pale mosaic tile, was so still it looked like a mirror. The air smelled of chlorine, the rosemary in the pots, and that indefinable scent of summer in the south: sea salt mixed with hot earth. He opened the newspaper he had taken from the mailbox with no intention whatsoever of reading it. He skimmed two pages of transfer news that he couldn’t have cared less about and let it fall.

What he really wanted to do —what he had wanted to do since Thursday— was go up to the study, open the folder hidden inside another subfolder called “Bills 2022,” and read stories until he got hard. Because yes. Because he was sixty-one and, eight months earlier, thanks to a trucker coworker who had let it slip in a service area near Burgos, he had discovered that there was a corner of the internet full of filthy stories infinitely better than any video. Stories with plot. With characters. With descriptions that pulled you into the scene.

What Ramón had not told anyone, not even that coworker, was what kind of stories turned him on: stories about mature men with other mature men. Bears, they called them. Big, hairy guys, with bellies and that air of having lived a lot and fucked little. Guys like him.

He looked at his own body. Chest covered in hair shot through with silver. Prominent but firm belly. Tattooed arms with skulls he had gotten in the nineties, when he still thought they gave him the look of a tough guy. Tree-trunk legs. At sixty-one everything still worked, more or less, with the help of a blue pill when needed.

And what worked especially well —something he had discovered five years earlier, in a seven-minute encounter at a service area in France that changed his entire life— was that he liked being fucked. A man fucking him slowly first and harder after, until he came without even touching himself. “Fuck,” he thought, and felt the idea beginning to wake his body right there, in the sun. His cock, still limp when he got out of bed, was slowly, heavily rising, as if it too were celebrating the lack of witnesses.

He settled on the perfect plan for that Monday of freedom: a swim in the pool, a while lying in the sun, and then, only then, those stories saved in bookmarks. He got up, walked barefoot over the tiles that were already burning, and just as he was about to put his foot in the water, he looked up. And he saw her.

Charo. The neighbor. Standing on the balcony of her bedroom. Looking at him. Straight at him. Naked. With his cock half-awake.

“Jesus fucking Christ” was the only thing his brain could manage to articulate.

And then Charo, incredibly, smiled at him.

***

Charo had woken at seven, as she had been doing for forty-odd years, because the human body is a traitor that knows nothing about retirement or Mondays without obligations. At sixty-three, her internal clock was still more accurate than a cathedral’s, and there was no way to switch it off.

She had stayed in bed until eight-thirty, a small useless act of rebellion, reading nonsense on her phone. Messages from the gym friends’ group, which didn’t matter all that much either: Marisa asking about the new machines, Pilar sending over a sugar-free sponge cake recipe that would taste like sawdust with good intentions, and Begoña forwarding for the fourth time the same joke about menopause.

And a message from her husband in Barcelona: “Good morning, babe. Meeting at nine. Kisses”.

“Kisses?”, Charo thought. As if kisses were still something they gave each other. As if her marriage were anything more than a cohabitation contract with clauses drafted in silence over four decades: him in Barcelona during the week, doing whatever he pleased; her at home, doing exactly the same; and on Fridays the two of them performing the role of happy couple in front of the children and grandchildren. It worked. It wasn’t romantic, but it worked, like an old appliance that makes noise and still washes.

She had made peace with all that the very day she found a folder titled “Projects” on Gonzalo’s computer, which contained no projects at all and instead fifty videos of mature men doing things that would never appear in a bank presentation. That morning she understood three things: that her marriage was a lie, that it had been for at least ten years, and that she didn’t care in the slightest. The revelation was, strangely, liberating.

She went downstairs to make herself a black coffee, strong, no sugar, the same one she had drunk since she was twenty, when she still believed life was going to be an adventure and not a succession of identical Mondays. She went back upstairs with the cup in her hand. The bedroom was large and bright, with that taste she, a former librarian for twenty-five years, had kept like a second skin. “Some of us are just born with class,” she thought without the slightest modesty, “and others have money and buy sequined cushions.”

She opened the balcony window and stepped out barefoot. The blast of heat felt like a summer slap. “Holy Virgin, twenty-six degrees at nine,” she thought. But the breeze carried the jasmine from the climbing vine and the rosemary from the planters, and that scent reminded her why she had chosen to live there. She leaned on the railing, took a sip of coffee, and because fate has a vicious sense of humor, looked up toward the neighboring garden.

And saw Ramón. Her neighbor, the trucker, Encarna’s husband, Sergio and Noelia’s father. Completely naked. Sitting in a porch chair. Reading the newspaper. Legs spread. Everything on display.

The cup froze in her hand, halfway between the railing and her lips. She blinked. Once, twice, three times, just in case it was a heat mirage. It wasn’t. Ramón was still there, naked as Adam before biting the apple.

She should have turned away. She should have gone back inside and pretended she hadn’t seen a thing. But Charo had raised three children, had a marriage that had been dead for a decade, and a thing going with a forty-year-old personal trainer who fucked her on Thursdays with the efficiency of a German appliance: functional, but without soul. At her age, she had long since outgrown being scandalized by nonsense. So she looked. She looked without hiding it, with the curiosity of someone observing an unexpected natural phenomenon.

And what she saw was exactly the kind of man who starred in the stories that got her hot. Because Charo, for two years now —specifically since the day she searched “garlic chicken” on Google and ended up on a story with a very similar title but infinitely filthier— had been a voracious reader of those same websites. And on those websites there was a very clear category: bears. Hairy men, with bellies, with big hands and an attitude of “I don’t care what you think of my body”.

Ramón fit the description like a glove. Solid build, a sturdy belly that spoke of beers with friends and Sunday barbecues. Thick arms under a layer of fat, marked with tattoos she couldn’t make out from that distance. And hair. “Sweet Jesus, the hair.” A dark mane shot through with gray covered his entire chest and ran in a dense line down to his navel. A hairy man the likes of which you don’t see anymore, because nowadays all the young guys shave themselves to look like ad models.

And there, between those spread legs, with the slightest shame, as if he were watching football in her living room, rested his sex, thick and heavy in the morning sun. Charo kept staring. She couldn’t help it. It was exactly the body from the stories that turned her on: a lived-in body, a real body, not one of those that spend four hours a day in front of the gym mirror. Ramón’s cock, still half-asleep, had that clumsy, honest weight of men who were not born to impress anyone and, precisely for that reason, impress even more.

“Bruno,” she thought suddenly, remembering her lover, “has the perfect body. Abs, shaved chest, a commercial smile. And he lacks this. He lacks exactly this”. What was “this”? Authenticity. That air of a man who has unloaded trucks, driven twelve hours straight, and still keeps going, damn it. Bruno was a poolside mannequin. Ramón was a man. And Charo, incredibly and inappropriately, was getting wet just looking at him.

She felt her nipples hardening under the thin robe. She felt heat between her legs, the kind that had nothing to do with the morning temperature. She noticed she was breathing faster and that the coffee had gone cold in her hand without her even realizing it.

“You shouldn’t be looking,” said the voice of reason.

“What an interesting man,” answered the voice of lust.

“He’s your neighbor. He’s married,” reason insisted.

“So are you. Next argument,” lust shot back without missing a beat.

“He’s sixty-something,” reason tried, already without conviction.

“Perfect. Men in their twenties don’t know how to fuck, they only know how to pose for Instagram,” lust cut in.

The voice of reason went quiet, defeated. Charo kept looking. Ramón was still reading the paper, utterly unaware that he was being watched with the intensity of someone keeping an eye on an endangered bird. The sun hit his skin, bronzed by years out in the open, full on. The muscles in his arms shifted as he turned the page. His belly rose and fell with his breathing. “If I were reading this on a screen,” she thought, “I’d already have my hand in my panties.” But this wasn’t a screen. It was real life. Her life. Her neighbor. Her arousal.

“And now what do I do?” she wondered. “Do I turn away and pretend to have a breakdown? Do I stay here like a stalker? Do I go down and say: hey, Ramón, sorry, but you were naked and you’ve made me horny, fancy a coffee?”.

Before she could decide anything, Ramón looked up. Their gazes met. Three seconds of absolute silence. Three seconds in which Charo saw an entire succession of emotions cross the neighbor’s face, worthy of a stage actor: surprise, horror, shame, panic —his hands half-rising to cover himself— and finally, incredibly, a decision.

The decision not to run. Not to hide behind the newspaper like a kid caught in the bathroom. The decision to simply smile. Smile and lift a hand. And wave. As if he were dressed. As if it were the most normal thing in the world, like two adults who had just run into each other at the neighborhood greengrocer’s.

And that crooked smile, half embarrassed, half amused, completely authentic, landed in Charo’s chest like the shot of a Cupid who, for once, had had the decency to be a real trucker and not a baby with wings.

“My God,” she thought, smiling back without thinking. “I like this man. He really turns me on.”

And, on the other side of the fence, barefoot on the burning tiles, Ramón thought something very similar while deciding that those five days of freedom had just become a whole lot more interesting.