What I Saw from My Window on My First Day at the Chalet

I was nineteen years old and convinced that starting university would change everything. What I hadn’t foreseen was that the first problem I’d have to solve wouldn’t be academic, but logistical: finding somewhere to live in a city I didn’t know, more than an hour and a half away by bus from my home. I’d let the deadlines slip. When I went to the student services office at the end of August, all the places in the university residences were already taken.

The woman who helped me told me bluntly, without taking her eyes off the screen.

—Places are assigned in July, as soon as you complete enrollment —she explained—. What’s left now are the noticeboards, in case some student is looking for someone to share an apartment with. Or there’s also the host family option: couples who offer a room and meals to students in exchange for company.

I called my parents from a bench in the corridor. My mother listened in silence and then said I should try the families, that it could be a good experience. My father added that I should write down the address and let them know as soon as I had something concrete.

I went back to the counter. The administrator typed for a moment and found a couple in a housing development on the outskirts: Roberto and Carmen, in their mid-fifties, childless, offering a room with a private bathroom and meals in exchange for company.

—Do you want me to call them so you can meet? —she asked me.

I said yes.

The phone conversation was brief. It turned out Roberto and Carmen were walking through a park near campus and could come pick me up by car. I stayed waiting, seated in the corridor chairs, my backpack between my feet and the feeling that the afternoon was slipping through my fingers.

***

Roberto was broad and slow-moving, with graying hair and a smile that arrived before his words. Carmen was thinner, with dark hair gathered rather carelessly and brown eyes that looked at me with real attention, not the automatic politeness of someone who has already assessed the situation. They both wore weekend clothes, comfortable, as if they had not planned the day any differently.

When Carmen held out her hand, she clasped mine with both of hers.

—You’ve come at a good time —she said—. The sun’s still hanging on.

Roberto drove slowly, unhurried. During the ride they asked me what I was going to study, whether I had siblings, whether it was the first time I’d lived away from home. I answered without thinking too much, watching the city fall behind and the first trees of the development appear.

The chalet was at the end of a quiet street. It was white, with clay roof tiles and a small front garden with rosebushes and a fountain that didn’t work. Nothing flashy. The house of people who had been in the same place for years and had stopped wanting to impress anyone.

The room that would be mine was larger than I expected: a double bed with a dark wood headboard, a desk with an articulated lamp, a fitted wardrobe that smelled of lavender, and a window overlooking the back garden. In the distance, through the glass, I could see two wooden loungers beside a pool surrounded by tall hedges.

It had its own bathroom. That decided me.

We ate a paella Roberto had made. The two of them moved through the kitchen with that silent coordination of couples who have been together for many years, not bumping into each other, not explaining anything, as if the space remembered each one of them. The conversation was easy: they asked about my tastes, told me things about the city, explained the bus schedule from the entrance to the development.

Before coffee, they asked me for something.

—We’re private people —said Roberto—. What happens inside here is not a topic of conversation outside this house. Your habits, your life, your things. We ask for discretion, nothing more.

It seemed like a reasonable request. I called my parents, handed them the phone, and they spoke for a while with Roberto. All good. We agreed that I’d come back on September fifteenth with my things.

***

I arrived on time, with two suitcases and a backpack. Carmen was waiting at the door. Roberto carried the luggage upstairs while she made me a coffee and asked whether I’d had breakfast before catching the bus. When I finished arranging my clothes in the wardrobe and stacking my books on the desk, the room was already beginning to feel like mine.

I heard them go out to the back garden a little later. The splash of water came through the ajar window.

I went to close it so the afternoon heat wouldn’t come in.

And I saw them.

Roberto and Carmen were in the pool, completely naked. He was holding her from behind, the water up to his chest, his mouth pressed to the curve between her neck and shoulder, nibbling at her skin with the calm hunger of someone who knows he has time. One of Roberto’s hands was kneading a breast above the water, his fingers closing around the hard nipple, twisting it slowly while Carmen moaned with her mouth open. His other hand was sunk between her thighs, moving with a slow rhythm I could infer without seeing: his fingers inside her cunt, in and out beneath the turquoise surface, rubbing her clit with his thumb while he fucked her with the rest of his fingers.

Carmen threw her head back against his shoulder, narrowed her eyes, bit her lower lip, and let out that rough woman’s laugh of someone who has been letting the same man fuck her for years and still loses her voice when he finds just the right angle.

I stood frozen with my hand on the window frame.

I should have closed it. I didn’t.

Carmen had the body you don’t expect to see in a woman her age, or maybe you do, if you stop thinking about what should be and what shouldn’t. Pale skin, with the faint line of some swimsuit she no longer wore marking two heavy, full breasts, with large dark nipples hardened by the water and by his hands. Rounded shoulders, slender but firm arms, a waist still defined and the curve of her ass pressed against Roberto’s groin each time he drove her against his body. Roberto was broad across the back, with graying chest hair, and he moved with the confidence of someone who has been comfortable inside himself for decades and doesn’t need to prove it to anyone.

She turned to face him. She found his mouth and they kissed with tongues deep inside, one of Carmen’s hands gripping the back of his neck and the other moving down through the water until it closed around a cock I guessed was thick and hard from the way she jerked her wrist, pumping long, firm strokes while Roberto growled against her lips.

Carmen let go of his cock, moved to the pool edge, rested her forearms there and arched her back, offering him her ass. Roberto positioned himself behind her. I saw him take his dick in his hand, rub it a couple of times against the lips of her open cunt, and then thrust it all the way in with one single shove. Carmen opened her mouth without making a sound for an instant, as if she’d run out of air. Then she moaned, loudly, and Roberto started fucking her with that assured rhythm of a man who knows his woman by heart. He held her by the hips, pulling her back each time he went in, and their bodies hit each other with a dull slap that the water partly muffled. Carmen’s breasts bounced against the pool edge with every thrust. She brought one hand to her crotch and started rubbing her clit while he kept pounding her from behind, the two of them synchronized without having said a single word.

I closed the window slowly, without making a sound. I stood in the middle of the room with my heart racing and my ears ringing.

***

I sat on the edge of the bed. The image wouldn’t leave: Roberto’s hands under the water, his fingers sunk into Carmen’s cunt, his dick sliding in and out of her against the pool edge, her rough laugh with her eyes closed, the sheer naturalness of the two of them, the way they fucked as if nobody in the world had anything to say about it.

I lay back and looked at the ceiling.

My cock was so hard it hurt against the fabric of my trousers. I unbuttoned them, lowered the zipper, and let the pressure ease. I pulled my dick out of my briefs and let it rest on my stomach, stiff against my navel, the tip shiny and a thread of fluid threatening to spill onto my skin. I stayed like that for a moment, breathing, listening to the muffled sound of water coming from the garden through the closed glass, still imagining Carmen’s moans even though they no longer reached me for real.

In the end I took off my trousers and briefs completely, keeping only my T-shirt on. The south-facing room held onto September heat in a way that was very noticeable on bare skin, on my balls sticking to my thigh, on my cock pulled tight against my belly.

I spat into my palm and closed my fist around my dick. I started slowly, long, tight strokes from the base to the glans, pausing at the top to rub the tip with my wet thumb, feeling pleasure gather at the base of my spine. I closed my eyes and the image came back on its own: Carmen leaning on the pool edge, ass up, her cunt lips spread around Roberto’s cock, her breasts swinging with every thrust.

I imagined it was me behind her. That it was my cock going in and out of that ripe, wet cunt. That Carmen was turning her head over her shoulder and looking at me with that same rough laugh, biting her lip, wordlessly begging me to shove it in harder. I clenched my fist and started jerking faster, my hand moving up and down with a wet, sticky sound that filled the room.

I thought about sucking Carmen’s tits. About licking her large dark nipples one by one until they swelled. I thought about kneeling her in front of me and burying my cock all the way down her throat, feeling her suck me off with the same calm with which she’d peeled an orange in the kitchen weeks before. I thought about spreading her legs on the garden lounger and eating her cunt until she came against my face while Roberto watched from the other side of the pool without moving, smoking, waiting his turn.

I took my time. That was what I had now. At home it had always been in secret, alert to any noise in the hallway, finishing before I was ready, coming into a piece of toilet paper with the fear that the cistern might be heard. Here nobody was watching. The room was mine. The muted voices drifting up from the garden were, in some strange way I couldn’t explain, company. Almost an invitation.

My hand moved faster. I took the other one to my balls and squeezed them against the base of my cock, feeling them tighten, feeling my whole body gather toward a single point. I thought about Carmen coming out of the water naked, droplets sliding down her breasts, her stomach, the graying hair on her cunt. I thought about the confidence with which Roberto had his fingers in her. There was something in that scene that wasn’t just arousal: it was envy too. A strange envy of someone who still didn’t quite know what he wanted but recognized something true when he saw it.

The voices in the garden faded away. The water stopped making noise. The afternoon went silent. I imagined they had stretched out on one of the loungers, her on top of him, impaled on his cock, riding him slowly while the sun beat down on their backs.

And I came.

I came with my mouth open and a strained groan between my teeth, my heels digging into the mattress, my cock firing thick ropes of cum that landed on my stomach, on my T-shirt, one of them all the way up to my chest. I kept jerking it, squeezing out every drop, feeling pleasure run down my legs to my feet. When I finished, I stayed still for a moment staring at the ceiling, my body completely relaxed and my cock still hard in my hand, smeared with cum, as if I had unloaded something I’d been carrying for weeks without knowing what it was called.

I got up carefully so as not to stain the sheets, turned on the shower, and stepped under the hot spray. I soaped myself slowly, cleaning the cum off my stomach, off the soaked T-shirt I left balled up on the floor, rubbing my still-sensitive cock with my lathered hand until it finally went soft. When I came out and looked at myself in the mirror, hair wet and face flushed, I still didn’t know very well what to feel. But I didn’t need to know yet either.

I dressed, went out into the corridor, and downstairs to the dining room.

***

Roberto was in the kitchen wearing light linen trousers and an open shirt. Carmen came in from the garden carrying a tray of fruit and two glasses. She wore a light summer dress, no bra underneath, her nipples showing through the thin fabric each time she moved, her hair still damp and swept back with a barrette. She looked calm. They both did, with that tranquility of people who have just spent an afternoon fucking exactly the way they wanted.

—Did you finish settling your things in? —Carmen asked, setting the tray on the table.

—Yes —I said—. Thank you.

Roberto sat down across from me. He folded his hands on the table and looked at me for a moment, with that way of his of watching that wasn’t aggressive, just direct, without looking away.

—You saw us —he said.

It wasn’t a question. He said it the way you say something that has already happened, without guilt and without reproach, like someone announcing that it rained this morning.

—Yes —I answered. It made no sense to deny it.

He nodded.

—We’re nudists —he explained—. And not just nudists. We like fucking outdoors, in the pool, wherever the mood takes us. We’ve been doing it for many years. We’re not hurting anyone. We put up the hedge so as not to bother the neighbors, and this is the last house on the street, so from outside nothing can be seen. The only exception is you, from your window.

Carmen rested her elbows on the table. The neckline of her dress opened a little, and for an instant I saw the curve of a breast, the same dark nipple that had pressed into Roberto’s palm under the water.

—We ask the same thing we asked in June —she said—. Discretion. Not because we have anything to hide, but because this is our life and we’d prefer it to stay that way. Inside here we move however we want. That includes being naked. That includes fucking, if we feel like it. If that makes you uncomfortable, we understand and you can look for somewhere else. If it doesn’t make you uncomfortable, then there’s no problem.

—It won’t come out of here —I said—. And it doesn’t make me uncomfortable.

—Perfect —said Roberto. And then, with a smile that had no clear edge—: And if someday you decide to join us in the pool, there are no judgments of any kind here. No written rules. Whatever happens, happens.

He said it with a naturalness I couldn’t tell was an invitation or simply courtesy. Carmen didn’t clarify it either. She just went on peeling an orange with her fingers with a calm that was beginning to seem like the most enviable thing in the world, while she looked at me over the fruit with those brown eyes that were no longer bothering to hide much at all.

We ate. The conversation drifted to bus times, the calendar for the first semester, the market held on Thursdays in the square of the development. Carmen told me that in October she made quince jam with the trees at the back of the garden. Roberto asked me if I knew how to play chess.

When we were done, he took a bottle of cold white wine from the fridge and filled three glasses without asking if I wanted any.

—To beginnings —he said, raising his.

—And to well-kept secrets —added Carmen, looking at me with that calm of hers that was already starting to feel familiar.

I raised my glass. We drank.

Through the dining room window you could see the back garden. The empty loungers. The pool water still and bright under the afternoon light, already holding, without knowing it, the first story of what was going to be a year very different from anything I had imagined.