What My Neighbor Saw From His Window That Night

In this city, when June arrives, the heat gets inside the houses and never leaves. Anyone who has spent a summer here knows that. The walls hold onto the day’s sun and give it back at night, slow, sticky, until sleeping becomes a negotiation with the sheets.

That’s when the nights begin in which I throw the windows wide open and pull the blinds all the way up. I look for any breeze, however slight. Pajamas stop being an option. I lie naked on the bed, on top of the spread, and from there I watch the city lights and the clear sky.

I live on the top floor. It’s the only good thing about climbing so many stairs: from my bed I don’t see other buildings, only the open sky and the antennas cut out against the dark blue. Sometimes I think about what it would be like if I lived lower down, on an intermediate floor, with another façade right across from me. If instead of stars I had other people’s windows at the exact height of my eyes.

That night, however, I didn’t need to imagine it.

I had moved in just three weeks earlier, with boxes still half-unpacked in the hallway. The building across from me is closer than it looks during the day, and that night, for the first time, I noticed the window of an apartment one floor above mine. The bedroom light was on.

I saw him pacing back and forth. A man, still shirtless, getting ready for bed. He didn’t know me, didn’t even know I existed. I was in complete darkness, just another shadow in a dark room. He, on the other hand, was bathed in yellow light, perfectly visible. He couldn’t see me. I could see him.

My name is Lucía, by the way. Though that night I could have been called anything. In the dark, a woman stops being a name and becomes something else: eyes wide open, a held breath, a cunt getting wet on its own, without asking permission.

I watched him for a while without moving. He had just showered; he was rubbing his hair with a towel, barefoot, crossing the room with the lazy air of someone who doesn’t expect anyone to be watching him. And precisely because he didn’t expect it, I found it impossible to look away.

Nobody knows I’m here. Nobody knows I’m watching him.

It was that thought, more than his body, that lit something inside me. The certainty of seeing without being seen. Of stealing a piece of his privacy without him knowing. I felt my nipples harden against the hot air on their own, felt that sticky dampness begin to gather between my legs, no longer telling whether it was sweat or desire.

I slid my hand over my stomach, slowly, feeling the heat of my own wet skin. I paused for a moment on my tits, squeezed them with my open palm, pinched one nipple between my thumb and forefinger until a sigh escaped me. I moved down to my mound and stopped there for a second, palm open, just as he crossed near his window again. A drop of water ran down his neck, and I followed that line with my eyes until I lost it beneath the waistband of his pants.

I kept going down. My fingers sank between the lips of my cunt and came out soaked, shining. I found my swollen clit, taut, and started drawing slow, lazy circles, without taking my eyes off his room. I wasn’t in a hurry. The heat forced me to move slowly, and the pleasure of watching him mixed with the pleasure of touching myself until it became one and the same thing. Every time he turned, I pressed a little harder. Every time he bent to look for something, my fingers dipped down to wet themselves again and came back up, slow, slippery, to smear my own clit with my juices.

I lost sight of him for a moment. He must have sat on the edge of the bed, out of my angle. I pictured him there, with a drop of water still drying on the back of his neck, checking his phone, setting his alarm for the next day. Such an ordinary gesture, so domestic, and yet I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I wanted to fantasize that he was wearing black boxer briefs, very tight. I pictured his abdomen, that trail of hair disappearing beneath the fabric, the small folds of skin when he sat down, the relaxed posture of someone who thinks he is completely alone. And I imagined him too, with a half-hard cock outlined beneath the cotton, that bulge a man alone adjusts without thinking, with an absentminded hand, while he stares at the screen.

I imagined him another way too. Not sitting, but standing by the bed, suddenly realizing someone was watching him. Without flinching. Without rushing to pull down the blind. Just standing still, letting himself be seen, knowing that across the street there was a woman fixed on every movement he made. Slowly pulling down his boxers, letting his cock spring free, thick and hard, so I could see it properly. Closing his fist around the base and starting to masturbate in front of me, never looking away. That version of him, the one who didn’t hide, was the one I liked best.

In your head, everything is easier than in real life. In your head there is no shame, no neighbors hearing, no awkwardness of running into someone in the building the next day. In my head I could cross the street, go up a floor, knock on his door barefoot and let him open it without asking me anything. Let him pull me inside without saying hello, shove me against the hallway wall, tear off my T-shirt and sink two fingers into me up to the knuckles while he bit my neck. And then go back to my bed just in time for my body to thank me for it.

My circles grew firmer. I slipped my middle finger into my cunt, pulled it out dripping, and smeared my clit with my own wetness again. What would it be like to be on my knees in front of him right now? The question went straight through me. Would he keep looking at his phone while I waited, patient, for some signal from him to place little kisses over the fabric, to lick his cock through his boxers until I drenched it in saliva?

I liked imagining myself like that: still, obedient, mouth open, waiting like a good girl. Setting the phone aside only when he wanted to. Pulling out his cock and running it over my lips without putting it inside yet, rubbing it across my face, marking my cheeks with pre-cum. Lifting my chin with his hand and playing with his thumb inside my mouth, setting the rhythm, deciding when. And then grabbing my hair with both hands and shoving it all the way down my throat in one thrust, until it made me tear up.

I imagined it going in and out, thick, hot, scraping my palate. Me with spit running down my chin, dripping onto my tits, unable to breathe and not wanting him to stop. Him holding my head against his pelvis, forcing me to take it all for a few seconds longer than I could stand, until he let me go and left me gasping before starting again.

The insides of my thighs began to burn. Not from the heat of the night, but from another kind of fire, the kind that starts deep inside and pushes outward. My whole body began demanding more than my hand could give it. I sped up without realizing it. I already had three fingers going in and out of my cunt, my thumb pressed against my clit, and my thighs were trembling on their own between one thrust and the next.

And then there was movement at his window.

He came closer to it. He rested one hand on the frame and stood there looking outside, toward the empty street, toward the night. I froze, with my fingers still buried up to the knuckle, holding my breath.

Can he see me?

From his position, one floor higher, could he make out my bed? Could he see the silhouette of a woman lying in the dim light, knees bent and spread wide, hand sunk between her legs, eyes fixed on him?

I saw him scan the façade of my building. Window by window, floor by floor, like someone trying to locate the source of a noise he can’t quite place. And for one second, just one, but longer than any casual glance would justify, he stopped in my direction.

I didn’t move. Not from fear, but for the exact opposite reason. I spread my legs wider. Let my knees fall open to the sides, offered up, and sank my fingers deeper, my tits rising and falling fast. If he could see me, then let him see all of me. Let him see my cunt open, shining, dripping onto the spread. Let him see me fucking myself with my own hand while thinking of him.

I increased the intensity. It was getting harder not to close my eyes, not to sink into the sensation and stop thinking. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to watch him. And, above all, I wanted him to watch me.

I wanted him to see how my body shook more and more. How my chest rose and fell out of control, how my breathing broke into little gasps that I bit back so they wouldn’t escape. I wanted him to understand, even if he couldn’t hear me, that all of it was for him. That my whole body was silently screaming that I wanted his cock inside me. In my cunt, in my ass, in my mouth, wherever he wanted to shove it. That for minutes I’d been fingering myself while imagining his cock opening me from end to end.

He was still not taking his eyes off my side of the street. And on his lips... was that a smile I saw? I wasn’t sure. The distance and the half-light were playing tricks on me. But I wanted to believe so. I wanted to believe he knew exactly what was happening one floor below, and that he enjoyed watching it as much as I enjoyed being watched. I wanted to believe he had a hard cock inside his pants and was holding himself back from taking it out just for the perverse pleasure of enduring it.

My hand was moving on its own now, out of control, splashing against my soaked cunt. The wet sound filled the whole room, obscene, impossible to silence. Every circle tightened the screw a little more, every plunge of my fingers pulled a fresh shudder from me. I was brushing that razor-thin line where pleasure starts to blur into need, almost into pain. The seconds stretched into hours. Him in the light, me in the dark, separated by a narrow street and by everything we weren’t brave enough to name.

I thought about lowering the blind. I thought, for one absurd instant, about turning on the light and letting him see me completely, without shadows, without the alibi of darkness. About prying my cunt open with two fingers so he could clearly see how pink it was inside. About turning over, getting on all fours facing the window, and fingering myself from behind with the other hand so he could see my ass raised and the slick running down my thighs. About crossing that invisible border and turning the fantasy into something you can’t come back from. I didn’t do it. The secret was part of the pleasure. Knowing that he wasn’t sure, that he only suspected, that he would have to spend the next day wondering whether he had imagined that silhouette in the window across from him, masturbating for him.

I went faster and faster. My fingers went in and out with a sticky sound, my clit throbbing like a small, furious heart under my thumb, and I felt my legs tightening all the way to my toes. The entire building seemed to have gone quiet, as if the city were holding its breath with me. Only the two of us existed, and that impossible distance between his light and my shadow.

Until everything exploded.

I felt the spasm run through me from top to bottom, a brutal wave that started in my clit and rose to my throat, folding my knees up toward my chest. My cunt clenched again and again around my fingers, sucking them inward, spitting out a stream of warm wetness that slid between my ass cheeks and soaked the spread. I pressed my lips together hard so neither the neighbors nor the night would hear me, and still a muffled moan slipped through my teeth, long, broken. My whole body went rigid, arched on the bed, and then, all at once, gave way, trembling in tiny aftershocks while I kept rubbing my clit with my fingertips, squeezing out the last pulse of pleasure.

When I opened my eyes again, he was still there. Motionless in his window, still looking toward me. And there we stayed, the two of us, in silence, without gestures, without greetings, just staring at each other across the emptiness of the street, while I slowly pulled my fingers out of my cunt, shining with juice, and felt something warm sliding slowly down the inner side of my thigh to the crease of my knee.

I don’t know how long it lasted. Maybe a few seconds, maybe a whole minute. At some point he finally looked away, switched off his bedroom light, and disappeared into the dark, making us equal at last.

I stayed lying there, breathing deeply, my skin covered in a thin layer of sweat, my legs still open, my cunt throbbing slowly between my thighs. I was hotter now than before, much hotter, but I didn’t mind at all. I had needed that. I had needed to watch him, imagine him, feel that he saw me come.

I needed him. Or the idea of him, which for a fantasy is exactly the same thing.

Ever since then, every hot night I check to see whether his light is on. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. We’ve never spoken. I don’t know his name and I prefer not to know it. But we both know something nobody else knows, and that, in the middle of summer, is enough to make the heat worth it.