What I Found in the Hallway of the Shared Apartment

The silence that followed Lorena’s words was thick, almost solid. Adrián felt the floor disappear beneath his feet. At that exact moment, the front door opened and Bea appeared, the third tenant in the apartment, wearing an awful teddy-bear pajama set and looking like she hadn’t slept enough. She scratched the back of her neck with one hand while with the other she adjusted her underwear over her pants, completely oblivious to the tension that had just split the air in two.

Her arrival was a relief and a torment at the same time. Adrián, unable to say a single word after what Lorena had just thrown at him —that she knew everything, that she had heard him, that she knew his secret and that instead of being scared off she had been teasing him— took advantage of the confusion to escape.

—Girls, I’m leaving, I’m going to be late for class —he said barely audibly, and slipped into his room.

He got dressed in record time and walked out the door with his heart battering his ribs. He didn’t remember the walk to the university. He only remembered her smile, that smile that was anything but innocent.

The following days were an endurance test. Between final exams and the electricity hanging over the apartment, Adrián avoided crossing paths with Lorena in the kitchen, in the bathroom, anywhere. But in the solitude of the library, surrounded by notes that refused to stick, he began to turn it over in his mind. If she knew and hadn’t kicked him out, if instead she had looked at him like that... then he wasn’t a degenerate. He was a guest. The thrill of knowing he had been discovered, far from killing desire, fanned it until it became something he could no longer control.

On Friday, after the last exam, he came home with a new kind of confidence in his body. In the hallway, on the worn wood of the floor, he found a patch of color that shouldn’t have been there: Lorena’s panties, folded, with a note on top.

I’ve just taken them off. I’ve touched myself twice in a row thinking of you. Use them properly: I want you to cum in them and leave them hanging on my door handle. They’re my favorites. Don’t lose them. Don’t tear them.

Adrián picked them up by the tips of his fingers. They felt heavier than a piece of fabric should. They were loaded with her, still warm. He went into his room, closed the lock, and stood in the middle of it, staring at them like someone holding something forbidden and not knowing whether he was going to get burned.

***

He brought them to his face almost without thinking. The smell hit him squarely, dense and alive, and clouded whatever notion of prudence he had left. It was Lorena’s scent at her most intimate, the one he had imagined a hundred times through the wall without ever daring to name. He closed his eyes and breathed all the way in.

—Fuck, Lorena —he muttered, his voice coming out broken.

He undressed with an urgency he didn’t recognize in himself. The T-shirt flew into a corner, the pants fell to his ankles, and he sat on the edge of the bed with the note still in his left hand. He read the message once more, as if to convince himself it was real, that for months the two of them had been wanting each other in silence without either of them making a move.

He imagined Lorena on the other side of the wall, listening closely to every sound, knowing exactly what he was about to do with her favorite garment. That certainty —being heard, acting for her— disarmed him more than any fantasy.

He started slowly, almost reverently. He wet his hand and stroked himself in a slow rhythm, lengthening each movement, holding back on purpose. He didn’t want it to end quickly. He wanted to hold that state for as long as possible, that exact point where desire still weighs more than relief.

He wrapped Lorena’s fabric around his hand and used it that way, feeling the contrast of lace against his skin. The detail drove him insane. It wasn’t the contact itself; it was knowing whose fabric it was, where it came from, what she had written for him. His breathing began to break up until it turned into a dry panting, and he felt that electric pressure rising from the base of his spine, warning him there was no turning back.

He held out a little longer, teeth clenched, his whole body tense. And when he finally let go, he did it with his eyes closed and her name stuck in his throat. He stayed still for a few seconds, trembling, breathing in fits, the room suddenly too quiet.

When he regained some semblance of his senses, he spread the panties out on the table, folded them as he had found his own, and wrote on a piece of paper, his hand still shaking: Your dinner. He hung them from Lorena’s door handle, exactly as she had asked, and went out of the apartment and onto the street. He needed the cold night air so he wouldn’t burn up right there, against that closed door.

***

Lorena heard the front door close and knew she was alone. She unlocked her room only to take down what she found from the handle, and locked it again. She left the garment on the nightstand and stood for a moment in front of the full-length mirror, looking at herself with the warm lamplight falling across her diagonally.

She yanked off her sweater. Her body had been burning for hours, ever since she had left the panties in the hallway imagining what he would do with them. She ran her hands over her shoulders, her neck, her breasts, slowly, as if the hands belonged to someone else. She had been like this all week: the tension built up by exams mixed with this, with the game they had started without ever saying it out loud.

She slid her skirt down over her hips and let it fall. In front of the mirror, legs spread, she looked at herself without shame. She liked looking at herself like this, recognizing desire in her own face, in the way she breathed. And that night there was a new reason: on the nightstand waited Adrián’s answer, proof that he wanted her with the same unrestrained intensity.

She picked up the garment and brought it closer. His scent mixed with hers stirred something inside her, an intimate, brazen cocktail that made her clench her thighs. She imagined the scene on the other side of the wall, Adrián holding himself back, rereading her note, thinking about her. Imagining him losing control because of her was almost more arousing than any touch.

She lay down on the bed and touched herself without hurry, with the fabric still near her face. She started with her breasts, drawing slow circles, and then moved down with two fingers over her belly until she found the exact spot. She had been soaked for a while. At the first touch she jerked and had to bite her lip not to make a sound, though deep down she wanted him to hear her, to come back and hear her from the hallway.

She took her time. She knew her body by heart and brought it slowly to the edge, pulling back just before, stretching out the wait just as he had done on the other side of the wall without either of them knowing it. She rubbed in circles, closed her eyes and opened them again to look at herself, over and over, playing with the line between control and surrender.

She thought about how they had gotten there. About the months of casual brushes in the kitchen, the glances that lasted a second too long, the nights when she knew he was on the other side of the wall and wondered if he was thinking of her. For a long time she had not dared do anything, convinced she was imagining it all. Until one morning, while collecting laundry from the line, she understood that he wanted her too and that all it took was for someone to make the first move. That certainty had brought her here, to this bed, with his garment in her hands and her body ready to explode.

When she could bear it no longer, she pressed Adrián’s garment against herself and gave in completely. The orgasm hit her like a tide, all at once, without warning. Her legs trembled, her toes curled, and she stayed like that for a long while, panting, her gaze lost on the ceiling and her chest rising and falling quickly.

Little by little her breathing calmed. She propped herself up on her elbows, still dizzy, and smiled alone in the dim light. She wasn’t thinking about relief, but about what would come next: the day they stopped talking with notes and door handles, the moment when papers and the walls between them would no longer be needed.

With one last effort of will, she wrote on a scrap of paper, in shaky handwriting: Here’s your dessert. She got up, still shining with sweat, slipped into the hallway in silence, and hung the garment on the handle of Adrián’s door. Then she went back to her room, got under the sheets, and stayed awake for a long while, smiling in the dark, counting the hours until he came home.

***

That night neither of them slept well. Adrián came back at dawn, found the note on his door, and read it three times, leaning against the hallway wall, his heart once again in his throat. He knew Lorena was on the other side, awake, waiting for some sound that would confirm he was back. And for the first time in months, instead of going into his room, he raised his hand and knocked twice softly on her door.

There was a silence. Then the click of the latch.

—I knew you’d come back —Lorena said from the other side, without opening it all the way.

—I ran out of dessert —he replied, and for the first time the two of them laughed for real, without barriers, without notes, without fabric between them.

The door opened a little wider. Neither of them went back to class the next day.