What I Heard Through My Roommate’s Wall

I shared a huge old apartment right in the city center with three other students. There was Bruno, who studied Engineering and lived glued to his headphones; Carla, quiet and meticulous to the point of obsession; and Noelia, who was in her third year of Psychology and who, without meaning to, ended up occupying almost all my thoughts that semester.

It was finals season and the atmosphere in the apartment felt like an abandoned boarding house. We left at dawn for the library and came back at night, emptied out, dragging ourselves to bed. We barely crossed paths: a “hey” in the hallway, a note on the fridge about who had used up the last coffee. With Noelia, every chance meeting always felt longer than it really was.

She had long brown hair she wore loose almost all the time, and green eyes that seemed to be laughing at something only she understood. When she talked to me, I became clumsy for no reason: I dropped my words, pretended to be looking for something in the cupboard so I wouldn’t stand there staring at her. I liked her in that awkward way you like someone you share a bathroom and breakfast schedule with.

One Thursday night I tried to study in my room, but exhaustion won. I turned off the lamp and got into bed in nothing but my boxers. The apartment was completely silent, a thick silence that hummed in my ears. And then I heard it.

At first I thought I was imagining it. A soft sigh, almost nothing, came from the wall separating my room from hers. Then came another, longer one, followed by a low, restrained moan, as if she were biting her lip to keep from making noise. The rhythm was slow at first: deep breaths, little gasps that came farther and farther apart and then closer together again. And in between those gasps, a very faint, wet, rhythmic sound that could only have been her fingers going in and out of her wet cunt.

I froze, my heart hammering against my ribs. There was no way to mistake it. Noelia was touching herself. Alone, in her bed, a few centimeters from me, separated only by a thin partition that suddenly seemed like the thinnest thing in the world. I imagined her hand buried between her thighs, two fingers slipping inside her, her thumb rubbing her clit in slow circles. I imagined her naked from the waist down, her T-shirt pushed up to her tits, her nipples hard, the other hand pinching them while she fucked herself.

I tried not to listen. I really did. I covered half my head with the pillow, counted backward from one hundred, recited from memory an exam topic I still hadn’t understood all week. Nothing worked. Every time I thought I’d calmed down, another sigh came, a half-formed word I couldn’t make out, and I’d be left suspended again, alert to the slightest sound, as if my whole room had turned into an ear pressed against the wall. At one point I heard her murmur something through her teeth, a muffled “like that, more,” and I felt my cock jerk under the sheet.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t move. I just listened, holding my breath, until the gasps grew faster, until a choked-off “ah” was cut short, followed by a broken, uneven breathing that gradually faded away. Then, once again, silence. I stayed awake for hours, with an erection that hurt and that I didn’t dare touch, as if doing so would somehow betray her in some stupid way.

***

Since that night, something inside me had gone crooked. When we ran into each other in the hallway or the kitchen, I couldn’t look at her the same way anymore. I noticed how she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, how her lips got wet when she drank water, the way her loose T-shirt outlined her chest when she stretched half asleep in the morning, with her nipples showing under the thin cotton because she wasn’t wearing a bra.

Every one of her gestures, even the most ordinary, took on an erotism that burned me from the inside. The sway of her hips when she walked barefoot, the brush of her thighs when she sat on the shared sofa with her legs folded up, the way her ass showed under the short pajama bottoms every time she bent down to open the fridge. Everything brought me back to those moans. It was enough to see her for me to get hard, and then I had to look away, say some stupid thing, and escape to my room with a sour mix of desire and shame, my cock already hard against my zipper.

The days passed and the obsession, instead of loosening, grew. A week later, it happened again. The same sighs passing through the wall, the same nightly ritual she thought was secret. That time I didn’t hold back. I pulled my clothes down to my knees, spat into my palm, grabbed my cock, already soaked with pre-cum, and started jerking off to the rhythm of her gasps, imagining what was happening on the other side: her fingers buried in her cunt, her body arching against the sheets, her mouth slightly open, her nipples rigid.

I jacked off slowly at first, keeping time with her, brushing my thumb over the head of my cock every time she let out one of those muffled “mmm” sounds. I imagined her kneeling in front of me, looking at me with those green eyes while I shoved it all the way into her mouth, her tongue dancing under the tip, saliva dripping down my shaft to my balls. I imagined her on all fours, ass raised, cunt open and shining, asking me to drive it all the way in. Her moans sped up and so did I, synchronized to a woman who didn’t know she had company, my hand moving faster and faster, the mattress creaking, my balls tightening against the base.

When I heard her come, a badly stifled sharp “oh” followed by three broken gasps, I came too, biting into the pillow so I wouldn’t make a sound, my cock spitting shot after shot of hot semen over my stomach and chest. My legs trembled. I stayed lying there for a while, panting silently, my heart racing and my belly slick with my own load. Then came the guilt, punctual as always, but desire was stronger than any remorse. I wanted her with an intensity that consumed me, and at the same time I was terrified she might notice.

Because Noelia was kind, yes, but distant. Our conversations never went beyond the trivial: the Wi-Fi acting up, whose turn it was to take out the trash, how the statistics exam had gone. I felt like an impostor, a guy who smiled at breakfast while fantasizing at night about fucking her against the kitchen wall, shoving my cock down her throat, emptying myself inside her cunt in a way I would never have dared confess.

I even planned whole conversations on the way to the library. I’d say something clever, invite her out for coffee, slip in some comment that would finally break that tenants’ politeness. But every time I had her in front of me, with her cup in her hands and those green eyes looking at me without apparent malice, I lost my nerve. I went back to my room convinced that what I felt was pathetic, a silent obsession she would never suspect.

***

One Saturday morning I gathered up my dirty laundry to do a wash. The room where the machine was kept was small and badly lit, a converted storage closet at the end of the hallway. The washer was already spinning with someone else’s load, and beside it, on the floor, there was a basket half emptied.

Next to the basket, fallen onto the tiles as if they had slipped out while being taken off, there was a pair of white cotton panties with a small pink bow. They were there in plain sight, abandoned in a hurry. I looked over my shoulder: nobody was there. The apartment was still silent. I knew whose they were. I knew her clothes from seeing them hanging up so often, and that garment was unmistakably Noelia’s.

My pulse shot up. I know I should have left them where they were, put in my laundry and walked away. Instead I crouched down and picked them up with shaking hands. There was a pale, stiff stain on the crotch of the cotton, and when I turned them right side out I saw the wet, shiny trace her cunt had left during the day. I don’t know what I expected to find, but when I brought them a little closer I caught her smell, that intimate, warm scent, a mix of sweat and wet cunt, unlike anything else.

Without thinking too much, I slipped them into my trouser pocket and went up to my room with my heart in my mouth. I locked the door, lay down on the bed, and took them out like someone pulling out something forbidden. I brought them to my face, pressed the stained crotch against my nose and mouth, inhaled deeply, stuck out my tongue and licked the fabric right where the dried trace showed, and all the desire I’d built up over weeks came crashing down on me at once.

I unbuttoned my pants and pulled out my cock, already rock hard, throbbing, the tip purplish and a fat drop of pre-cum hanging from it. I wrapped the head in the damp part of the panties, feeling the cotton’s rough texture against me, and started jerking off slowly, squeezing hard, while I kept breathing in her smell with my nose buried in the fabric. I imagined her sitting on my face, forcing me to lick her cunt until she came. I imagined her riding me, bouncing up and down on my cock, her tits jolting in my face, biting her lip like that night.

The smell made my head swim. I jerked myself faster and faster, in anger, grinding my teeth, until I felt my balls harden and the climax rise from the base of my cock. I shoved the panties over it just before, wrapping the head, and came inside them with a long, silent spasm, biting my forearm, soaking the white cotton with thick spurts of semen. I kept pumping until the last drop, feeling my semen mix with her fluids inside the fabric.

Afterward, as always, the usual question: “What the hell did I just do?” I felt filthy, ridiculous, but also more aroused than I remembered ever being. I got up, my cock still half hard, and washed the panties by hand in the sink with near-maniacal care, scrubbing the crotch well with soap until the water ran clean, erasing any trace. I dried them with the hair dryer until they were impeccable and went back down pretending I was just checking the washer. I returned them to the basket, folded exactly right, as if nothing had happened.

I spent the rest of the day on edge, measuring every sound in the apartment, convinced that at any moment someone would notice what I had done. I went over my movements a thousand times: if anyone had seen me go into the storage room, whether I had left the tiles exactly as they were, whether the basket was still at the same angle. I promised myself, like so many other times, that it wouldn’t happen again, that from that night on I would sleep with earplugs and forget about the wall. A promise I didn’t even believe myself.

***

That afternoon we met in the kitchen. Noelia was making coffee in shorts and a tight T-shirt, her hair still damp from the shower. Her shorts were wedged between her ass cheeks every time she stood on tiptoe, and her shirt clung to her breasts with nothing underneath. I was trying to act normal, but my eyes kept drifting on their own toward her legs, toward the curve of her back when she reached for a cup on the high shelf, toward the line of her nipples pushing against the cotton.

Suddenly she turned with a smile I had never seen on her before. It wasn’t the shy smile from the hallway, or the polite one at breakfast. It was something else: playful, confident, almost dangerous. She took a sip of coffee without taking her eyes off me.

—How was this morning’s laundry, Adrián? —she asked, in a low, rough voice that raised gooseflesh over my entire body.

I went cold, my throat dry. I tried to say something, anything, but all that came out was a stammer.

—Fine —I managed—. Normal.

She tilted her head, amused, and took a step toward me. Her green eyes were shining with pure mischief, as if she had been waiting for this moment for hours.

—That’s strange —she said slowly—. Because I left something on the floor on purpose. And when I came back down, it was washed, dry, and folded better than I fold it myself.

I felt the floor open beneath my feet. I wanted to invent an excuse, deny everything, but she raised a hand to silence me before I could even start.

—I hear you, you know? —she added, lowering her voice even more—. The wall is paper-thin. I hear you jacking off almost every night. I hear how your breathing speeds up when I start moaning, I hear the mattress creak when you jerk yourself off. That’s why sometimes I do it more slowly. So you can make it on time. And that’s why sometimes I slip two fingers in and pull them out suddenly, all wet, so you can hear how my cunt sounds when it’s dripping for you.

I had completely forgotten about the coffee. The whole kitchen shrank down to the tiny space left between us. She set the cup on the counter very slowly and braced her hands behind her, arching her back slightly so her tits pressed out even more against her shirt.

—Next time —she murmured, now very close, with that half smile— you don’t need to return them quite so clean. I like knowing you enjoyed them more. That you came inside them. That you smelled my cunt properly while you emptied yourself into the cotton.

And she stayed there, holding my gaze, the tip of her tongue peeking between her teeth, waiting to see what I would do with everything I had spent weeks believing belonged to me alone.