The Neighbor Who Didn’t Want to Stay

Sofía arrived at her new apartment with four medium-sized boxes, a backpack digging into her shoulders, and the certainty that she was doing the right thing. Twenty-two years old, alone in an unfamiliar city, with a signed lease and just enough in her checking account. The living room was small but bright, with windows that overlooked an interior courtyard and parquet floors that creaked in the same spot every time she stepped near the wardrobe. It seemed perfect to her from the very first moment.

She spent the first few hours with an energy she didn’t remember having felt in a long time. She put away her clothes, organized the kitchen, lined up the books on the shelf she had hung before bringing in the furniture. Everything went well until, almost two hours later, she stood in front of the sofa and realized the problem.

It was an enormous sofa, made of thick cream-colored fabric, which her cousin had given her when she moved abroad. Sofía had accepted it without thinking too much about the logistics. Now she was looking at it head-on, occupying the center of the room at an absurd angle that made it useless for sitting and for moving around, and she thought she had made a monumental miscalculation.

She pushed it with her arms. It didn’t move.

She tried from the other side, bracing her shoulder against the back. Still nothing.

She sat on top of it and snorted, staring at the ceiling. She needed to shift it about thirty inches to the right so the room would make any sense. Thirty inches. Ridiculous. But that sofa weighed what it weighed, and she was narrow-boned, with arms that hadn’t seen a gym in months. She had already been at that battle for fifteen minutes when someone knocked on the door.

She opened it with her hair stuck to her forehead and the face of defeat. It was a man in his mid-fifties, round-faced, with a kind expression, wearing a faded T-shirt and his hands tucked into his trouser pockets.

“I’m Rodrigo, from apartment 4A,” he said. “I heard the thumping. Do you need help?”

Sofía looked at him, then at the empty hallway, then back at him.

“I just moved in,” she replied, as if that explained everything.

“I can see that. And that sofa looks rough from here.”

Rodrigo turned out to be one of those people who can turn a chaotic situation into something manageable without making a show of it. He talked to her about angles, about how to distribute the weight, about using the parquet’s creaking to their advantage instead of against them. Sofía followed his instructions, pushed when he told her to push, and the sofa began to move. Slowly, inch by inch, but it moved.

“Almost there,” Rodrigo said, wiping sweat from his forehead with his forearm. “To finish it, I need more strength. One moment.”

He pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed without giving it a second thought.

“Nicolás? Come down to 3B. The new neighbor needs help with a piece of furniture.” —A brief pause— “Yes, now. It’ll take five minutes.”

He hung up and smiled at Sofía.

“My son. He works from home, so he has no excuse.”

Sofía said nothing. She mentally imagined someone like Rodrigo, only younger: the same friendly face, maybe the same T-shirt. She was completely wrong.

The apartment door across the hall opened three minutes later, and Sofía immediately understood why Rodrigo had said “more strength” with such confidence.

He was tall, a little over six feet, with dark hair somewhat mussed, like someone who got up from a chair without thinking about how he looked. He wore a plain white T-shirt and dark track pants. He had defined forearms, broad wrists, the kind of body you notice even when you’re trying not to notice anything in particular. He came in quietly, assessed the room with a single glance, and then looked at her with dark eyes that gave away nothing special.

“Nicolás,” he said, by way of full introduction.

“Sofía.”

He nodded. He took his place at the far end of the sofa without any more ceremony.

“You push from that side,” he told his father. “Sofía, hold the front legs so they don’t scratch the floor. On three.”

They did it. The sofa moved without resistance, as if it had been waiting for someone with enough calm and strength to take it seriously. In less than a minute, it was in place, exactly where Sofía had imagined it when she signed the lease.

“Perfect,” she said, looking at the result with a satisfaction that wasn’t only about the sofa.

“You’re welcome,” Nicolás said. And he was already turning back toward the door.

“Wait,” Sofía called after him. “Do you want something to drink? I have juice, cold water. It’s the least I can do.”

Rodrigo accepted gladly. Nicolás stopped in the doorway, hand on the knob, and for a moment looked toward his own apartment with an expression that wasn’t indifference exactly, but rather that of someone who has something pending and knows it.

“Thanks, but I’ve got a call in ten minutes. Another day.”

And he left. The door across the hall closed with a soft, final click.

Sofía stared at that door for a moment before turning back and smiling at Rodrigo.

“Well,” she said. “More juice for us.”

***

Rodrigo stayed for almost an hour. He told her things about the building: who was noisy and who wasn’t, that the central heating took a while to kick in in October, and that it was worth having a decent duvet from September on. He told her about the corner bar where they made the best coffee in the neighborhood and the Sunday market three blocks away. He was pleasant and spoke with the warmth of someone used to living surrounded by people.

Sofía listened, poured more juice, and nodded. But her mind was elsewhere.

When Rodrigo left, night had fully fallen. Sofía ate what she had: two scrambled eggs, a slice of bread, and a glass of wine she poured herself because the moment seemed to deserve it. First night alone. Not visiting a friend’s house, not in her parents’ bedroom: alone in her own space, with her own things and the silence she herself decided when to break.

She sat on the sofa with her legs crossed and the glass in her hand and looked around the room. The boxes still to unpack. The TV not yet connected. The picture that needed hanging. All of that could wait.

What couldn’t wait, apparently, was her head.

Nicolás had been in that room for exactly as long as it took to move a sofa. He had said four sentences. He had left without looking at her twice. And yet Sofía still saw, with unsettling precision, the forearms resting on the edge of the furniture, the white T-shirt clinging to his chest when he bent to push, the way he had said her name — Sofía — without any special inflection, with nothing that could be interpreted as interest.

That was exactly what she couldn’t get out of her head.

She was used to men who looked. To the small but constant attention, the second glance, the smile that lasted a moment too long. Nicolás hadn’t done any of those things. Not because he was rude, but simply because he hadn’t lingered on her. He had come in, solved the problem, and left.

Another day, he had said.

She finished the glass and poured another. The room was quiet, and the wine went down easily.

She thought about his wrists. About how he had gripped the sofa without any apparent effort. About the forty exact seconds it had taken him to solve what she hadn’t been able to solve in twenty minutes. It wasn’t strength itself that drew her attention, but the calm with which he used it. Without showing off, without doing more than necessary. He came in, did it, left.

She set the glass on the floor and leaned back on the sofa.

She closed her eyes.

In the dark, she built the scene differently: Rodrigo leaves early, says he’s waiting upstairs, and Nicolás stays because he’s accepted the glass of water and sits at the other end of the sofa. There’s a silence neither of them hurries to break. Sofía glances at him from the corner of her eye, and he looks back at her directly, with that same calm she had seen before, and this time there is something in his eyes that wasn’t there when he came through the door.

She felt the heat before she was fully aware of where her thoughts were going. A dull pressure beginning in her stomach and slowly descending. She crossed her legs. Uncrossed them.

She was wearing an old T-shirt and sweatpants. No bra. The fabric brushed her with every breath, and that, combined with what was going through her head, was too much to ignore.

This is stupid, she thought.

And then she stopped thinking.

She slipped her hand slowly under the waistband of her pants, as if she didn’t want to interrupt herself. She was already wet before she got there. That detail would have surprised her in another context; now she registered it as information and kept going.

At first she touched herself slowly, without hurry. She had time. No one was expecting anything. The room was quiet except for the distant sound of traffic and the sound of her own breathing, which was already beginning to change rhythm.

In the image she kept building, Nicolás came closer. He didn’t say anything, because in the version she imagined there was no need to say anything. He laid a hand on the back of her neck with the same calm with which he had moved the sofa, and looked at her for a second before lowering his head to her.

Sofía pressed harder and let the air out slowly through her mouth.

The fantasy shifted abruptly when he, in her head, knelt in front of the sofa and opened her legs with his big, sure hands, as if he knew exactly what he was looking for. Sofía felt the tug in her belly as she imagined those fingers parting the fabric of her pants, the rough brush of his palm against the heat already throbbing between her thighs. Nicolás wasn’t smiling. That made it even more fucking unbearable. He looked at her as if the only problem in the world were her, lying there, wet and open for him.

She imagined his mouth lowering slowly, not delicately but precisely, his tongue pressing against her soaked cunt while his fingers held her hips still so she couldn’t move. The mental sensation was so vivid that Sofía arched her back for real, her breathing broken, her nipples hardening under the thin T-shirt. She brought a hand to her chest, squeezed her nipple through the fabric, and bit her lip hard.

In her fantasy, Nicolás lifted his gaze for an instant, as if he wanted to see her lose control before continuing. Then he slid in two fingers, then three, and fucked her with his hand while his tongue kept working on the outside, licking, sucking, making the wet sound of her sex fill the empty room. Sofía imagined the weight of his body, the tension in his forearms, the defined jaw, the white T-shirt wrinkled over his chest.

“That’s it,” she heard herself whisper, and she didn’t know if she was saying it to him or to herself.

She stayed there, in that point between discomfort and pleasure, moving in slow circles. She thought about the white T-shirt. About the line of his neck. About how he must smell after the effort, not bad, but of something real and concrete that was the opposite of artificial perfumes.

When she slid her fingers inside, she arched her back against the sofa and bit her lip to keep from making a sound, even though no one was listening. There was something strange and completely good about being alone with herself, without witnesses, without having to calculate anything or manage anyone else’s expectations.

The rhythm sped up on its own. Her thumb did its work and the image of Nicolás was still there, sharp in the essential details: the calm with which he moved, the way he hadn’t said more than necessary, another day, as if there were no rush for absolutely anything.

The fantasy got dirtier, closer. Nicolás was no longer just in front of her, but on top of her, pressing her against the imaginary mattress of the sofa while he held her wrists above her head and slid his cock into her slowly, with a controlled brutality that drew a moan from her every time he drove his hips forward. Sofía saw herself opening her legs wider, trembling under that weight, feeling how his dick filled her cunt centimeter by centimeter until she was left breathing in ragged pulls. He didn’t talk much, just let out short, dry phrases, the kind that burn from the inside: to stay still, to take it, to let him fuck her the way she’d been asking for ever since she opened the door.

The image pushed her to the edge. Sofía drove two fingers in more decisively, pressed the base of her breasts with her other hand, and began to move with little jolts of her ass against the sofa. The sound of her breathing turned obscene in the stillness of the apartment. Her thighs tightened, her abdomen trembled, and pleasure rose abruptly, filthy and dense, until she felt that exact point where everything stopped holding together.

The orgasm arrived in a rough wave, without ceremony. A broken moan escaped her as her whole body clenched, and for a few seconds she remained trapped inside herself, coming in silence with her fingers buried deep, her cunt throbbing around them and her back arched against the sofa. The shudder climbed through her belly, down her thighs, and left her skin hot, wet, and sensitive.

When she finally went still, she took a deep breath, slowly withdrew her hand, and looked at the white ceiling of her new apartment.

***

She fell asleep not long after, but not because of the insomnia of the first days in an unfamiliar place. It took a while because her mind was still running, thinking about practical things and things that weren’t quite so practical.

The apartment across the hall was four meters from hers.

The following week she’d have to hang the picture in the living room, and for that she needed a drill, and she didn’t have one. It was perfectly reasonable to ask a neighbor if she could borrow one. The most natural thing in the world.

Another day, he had said.

Sofía closed her eyes with a small smile aimed at no one in particular, and fell asleep thinking about reasonable things.