The Neighbor Who Discovered My Secret Creek Nook

My name is Esteban, I’m fifty-four years old, and I live alone almost all day in a house at the end of a dirt road on the outskirts of Mendoza. I’ve been working part-time for a couple of years now, so the afternoons belong entirely to me. My wife gets home after eight, and my children have long since made their own lives far away from here.

Behind the property, hidden among cane stalks and brambles, there’s a branch of creek that no one else seems to know about. The water comes down clean from the mountains and forms a pool the size of a small swimming pool. I found it by chance while chasing a dog, and since then I made it mine. At first I bathed there wearing swim trunks. Then, when I realized no neighbor ever came near that corner, I started going in naked.

I can’t quite explain it. The idea of being completely exposed in an open place, knowing no one was going to show up, turned me on in a way the routine of my home hadn’t managed in years. It was my secret, and at that age secrets are worth more than gold.

***

One January afternoon, from my study window, I saw a brief flash in the house next door. It took me a while to understand what it was. Then I saw it again: sunlight reflecting off a pair of binoculars. And behind them, a girl.

It was Camila, my neighbor’s eldest daughter. She must have been twenty-two. Her father was one of those rigid men who lock the house with double keys and measure the minutes of every permission. He had her studying online, no going out, no known boyfriends, nothing he hadn’t approved first. We saw her rarely, always on her mother’s arm, always with her eyes down.

And now that lowered gaze was fixed on my window, through a pair of binoculars, while my hand went to my pants without my having fully decided to do it.

I could have closed the curtain. I didn’t. I did exactly the opposite: I pulled it all the way open, let the light wash over me completely, and looked back at her. Let her know that I knew she knew. My pulse hammered in my temples. If she opened her mouth to her father, my life would go up in flames in a single afternoon. And that certainty, far from stopping me, was what finally pushed me over the edge.

***

A week later I ran into her at the creek. I was in my briefs, towel over my shoulder, and she appeared through the brush with a branch in her hand, quietly calling for a cat.

“Easy,” I told her, not moving. “No one comes here. It’s a place only I know.”

She stood still, sizing me up. She didn’t run. Her eyes traveled over my body with a curiosity she didn’t bother hiding, and in that gesture I understood that the girl who was kept shut in knew a lot more than her father thought.

“Tomás got away from me,” she said at last. “The cat. He came this way.”

I helped her look for him. We walked along the bank moving branches aside, and the animal eventually turned up on its own, belly up on a warm stone. We sat in the shade. We talked about anything: the heat, how boring her house was, how quiet that spot was. Before leaving, I told her the creek was always there if she ever wanted to cool off.

“My dad would kill me if he found out,” she murmured.

But she said it smiling, and there was anything but fear in her eyes.

***

She started coming in secret, always around the time her father slept his siesta. At first she only wet her feet in the pool, sitting on the edge, her knees pulled to her chest. Then she got brave enough to go in wearing a swimsuit I had left her myself, folded on a stone, without saying anything. A tiny swimsuit, just two triangles of fabric, which she accepted without complaint.

The tension between us became its own language. I taught her to float on her back, and my hands stayed on her waist longer than necessary. When I corrected her stroke, her chest brushed mine under the water. She pretended not to notice my erection, but her cheeks would flush and she would press her thighs together, and I knew how to read those signs better than any words.

“You’re shaking,” I told her one afternoon.

“It’s the water,” she answered.

The water was warm. We both knew it.

***

One afternoon I got there before she did and fell asleep in the sun, wearing nothing at all, convinced she wouldn’t come that day. I woke with her shadow over me. She was standing there, staring, her lips parted.

“Why are you like this?” she asked softly, not taking her eyes off me.

“Because I want you, Camila,” I told her bluntly. “When a man desires a woman, the body says it before the mouth does.”

She knelt beside me, hypnotized, and I let her look as long as she wanted. The feeling of being like that, out in the open, where in theory anyone could appear, took me right to the edge. I took her hand and guided it slowly, unhurriedly, giving her time to stop. She didn’t stop.

“No one can see us,” I whispered. “Just you and me.”

That afternoon not much more happened. But when she left, we both knew we had crossed a line with no way back.

***

The next time it was she who took off the top of her swimsuit, with her back to me, trembling, before turning around. Her fair skin was sprinkled with freckles all the way up to her shoulders, and she had a slender body that shyness couldn’t hide. I kissed her slowly, first her mouth, then her neck, then worked my way down while she clung to my shoulders and let out a sound she couldn’t hold back.

“I don’t know what you’re doing to me,” she said, her voice breaking.

I laid her down on the towel, in the shade, and I traced her whole body with my mouth until she arched her back and bit her hand so she wouldn’t cry out. It was the first time she had come with someone, and afterward she looked at me as if I had taught her a new language.

***

I showed her some videos on the tablet, scenes of a grown man with a young woman, and she watched them with a mix of shame and hunger. Then she wanted to imitate what she’d seen. At first she did it clumsily, with both hands, asking me the whole time if she was doing it right. I told her yes. I told her I’d rarely liked anything so much.

Every encounter was one more step. And the risk never let up: sometimes we heard her father’s voice calling her from the next yard over, and we had to stay motionless, holding our breath among the reeds, until the voice faded away. Those seconds of panic left the two of us hotter than any caress.

***

The day we were really together, her parents had gone away to a two-day conference. Camila came to the creek without a swimsuit, wrapped only in a towel that she let fall on the bank. We got into the water and then came out into the shade, and that time there was nothing to stop anything.

I kissed her at length, stroked every inch of her, let her set the pace. When I finally had her underneath me, I entered her slowly, attentive to her face, stopping every time she squeezed her eyes shut. It hurt at first; I saw it, I felt it. Then something changed, and she started moving, searching for me, digging her nails into my back, repeating my name in a broken whisper.

“Don’t stop,” she begged. “Please, don’t stop.”

We both finished, exhausted, on the towel, with the sound of the water in the background and our hearts pounding. She suddenly laughed, a nervous, happy laugh, and curled against my chest as if that lost little corner were the only safe place in the world.

***

For almost two years, the creek was ours. Afternoons stolen from her father’s siesta, naked baths, hurried encounters where the mere possibility of someone showing up multiplied everything. Every time she grew bolder, every time she feared less, and I learned that the quiet girl with the downcast gaze was, in fact, the bravest person I had ever known.

It ended when her father, fed up with not being able to control her, decided to send her to study in another province, far from the house, far from the dirt road, far from me. We didn’t say goodbye the way we would have wanted. Just a message deleted in a rush and one last bath neither of us knew would be the last.

I still go down to the creek some afternoons. The water is still clean, the pool is still warm, and no one else knows the place. I sit on the same stone where I saw her appear for the first time, with her branch and her lost cat, and I think about her freckles, her nervous laugh, and the impossible perversion of those years when the forbidden had a neighbor’s name.