What I Heard Through My Roommate’s Wall

I shared an old but enormous apartment right in the center with three other students. There was Bruno, who studied Engineering and lived glued to his headphones; Carla, quiet and obsessively tidy; 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 at home 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 “hi” in the hallway, a note stuck to the fridge about who had used the last coffee. With Noelia, every passing glance always felt longer than it really lasted.

She had long brown hair, which 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 awkward for no reason: words slipped out of me, I pretended to look for something in the cupboard so I wouldn’t keep staring at her. I liked her in that uncomfortable way you like someone you share a bathroom and breakfast schedule with.

One Thursday night I tried to study in my room, but tiredness got the better of me. I turned off the lamp and got into bed wearing only my boxers. The apartment was in total silence, thick, the kind that hums in your 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, contained moan, as if she were biting her lip to keep from making noise. The rhythm was slow at first: deep breaths, little gasps that spaced out and then came back together.

I lay perfectly still, my heart pounding against my ribs. There was no mistaking 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 tried not to listen. I really did. I pulled half the pillow over my head, counted backward from one hundred, recited from memory an exam topic I’d spent the whole week not understanding. Nothing worked. Every time I thought I had calmed down, another sigh came, a half-formed word I couldn’t make out, and I was left hanging there again, alert to the slightest sound, as if my entire room had become one big ear pressed against the wall.

I said nothing. I didn’t move. I just listened, holding my breath, until the gasps grew faster, until a muffled “ah” was cut off abruptly. 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 betray her in some stupid way.

***

From that night on, something shifted inside me. When we ran into each other in the hallway or in the kitchen, I couldn’t look at her the same way anymore. I watched the way she tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, the way her lips glistened when she drank water, the way the loose T-shirt outlined her breasts when she stretched half asleep in the morning.

Every gesture of hers, the most ordinary ones, became charged with an eroticism 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 bent. Everything brought me back to the memory of those moans. Just seeing her was enough to turn me on, and then I had to look away, say something stupid, and escape to my room with a sour mix of desire and shame.

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 down my clothes and started jerking off to the rhythm of her gasps, imagining what was happening on the other side: her fingers, her body arching against the sheets, her mouth parted.

Her moans sped up and I did too, synchronized with a woman who had no idea I was keeping her company. I finished biting into the pillow so I wouldn’t make a sound. 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’d notice.

Because Noelia was kind, yes, but distant. Our conversations never went beyond the trivial: the Wi-Fi acting up, trash duty, how the statistics exam had gone. I felt like an impostor, a guy smiling at breakfast while at night fantasizing about her 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 for coffee outside the apartment, drop a comment that would finally break that tenant-like politeness. But every time I had her in front of me, with her cup in her hands and those green eyes looking at me with no apparent malice, I’d chicken out. I’d go back to my room convinced that what I felt was pathetic, a silent obsession she would never suspect.

***

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

Next to the basket, fallen onto the tiles as if they’d slipped out when they were taken off, there were a pair of white cotton panties with a small pink bow. They were right there in plain sight, abandoned in a hurry. I looked over my shoulder: no one was there. The apartment was still silent. I knew whose they were. I knew her clothes from seeing them hung out so much, and that item was unmistakably Noelia’s.

My pulse shot up. I know I should have left them where they were, put my clothes in, and gone. Instead I crouched down and picked them up with trembling hands. I don’t know what I expected to find, but when I brought them closer I caught her scent, that intimate, warm aroma unlike any other.

Without thinking too much, I stuffed them into my trouser pocket and went up to my room with my heart in my throat. 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, inhaled deeply, and all the desire I’d been building up for weeks came crashing over me at once.

I unfastened my pants. I was harder than ever, throbbing, as I pressed the fabric against myself and imagined her tongue, her mouth, her body tight against mine. The smell was clouding my head. I touched myself hard, fast, until I came gasping, spilling myself in silence with my face buried in that garment.

Afterward, as always, the usual question: “What the hell did I just do?” I felt dirty, ridiculous, but also more aroused than I could remember ever being. I got up, hand-washed the panties in the sink with almost maniacal care, erasing any trace. I dried them with the hairdryer until they were spotless and went back downstairs pretending I was only checking the washer. I returned them to the basket, folded exactly as before, 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’d done. I went over my movements a thousand times: whether 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, as I had so many other times, that it wouldn’t happen again, that from that night on I’d sleep with earplugs and forget about the wall. A promise I didn’t even believe myself.

***

That afternoon we ran into each other in the kitchen. Noelia was making coffee in shorts and a tight T-shirt, her hair still damp from the shower. I was trying to act normal, though I didn’t feel it, but my eyes kept drifting to her legs, to the curve of her back when she reached for a mug from the high shelf.

Suddenly she turned with a smile I’d never seen on her before. It wasn’t the shy smile from the hallways, nor the polite one at breakfast. It was something else: playful, self-assured, 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, hoarse voice that raised goosebumps all over my skin.

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

—Fine —I managed to get out—. Normal.

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

—How strange —she said slowly—. Because I left something on the floor on purpose. And when I went back down, it was washed, dried, and folded better than I fold it myself.

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

—I can hear you, you know —she added, lowering her voice even more—. The wall is paper-thin. I hear you almost every night. That’s why sometimes I do it more slowly. So you can catch up in time.

I had completely forgotten about the coffee. The whole kitchen shrank down to the tiny distance left between us.

—Next time —she murmured, now very close, with that half smile— there’s no need to return them so clean. I like knowing you enjoyed them more.

And she stayed there, holding my gaze, waiting to see what I would do with all that I had spent weeks believing belonged to me alone.