My Hermit Neighbor Had Me in His Gallery

Valeria was thirty-eight years old and had gotten into the habit of going for a run every afternoon since her divorce. It was the only thing that kept her grounded after work: the headphones, the same route through the park, and the forty minutes that separated the moment she closed her laptop from the moment she had to go back to a department that was far too quiet. It wasn’t a chosen routine; it was a necessity.

The five-story building where she lived was quiet. The neighbors nodded to each other in the elevator and stayed out of one another’s business. Valeria had lived there for two years and knew the people on the third floor by their dogs, the woman on the fourth by her phone arguments, and Marcos from the sixth by his near-total absence.

She had seen him maybe four times since she arrived. A man of about forty-five, thin, always wearing the same kind of casual clothes as someone who works from home. Thick-rimmed glasses, hair with no particular haircut, and the habit of looking at the floor when he waited for the elevator as if the floor were the most interesting thing in the scene. The building manager had told her at some point that he was a programmer and barely ever went out. Valeria had filed that information away without giving it much importance.

The Wednesday when everything changed started like any other.

She stepped out of the elevator into the building lobby in her training leggings, her fitted T-shirt, and her headphones hanging around her neck. It was four fifteen in the afternoon. Her head was already on her route when she heard a voice behind her.

—Excuse me.

It was timid, almost inaudible. She turned around and saw Marcos standing by the mailbox, a tablet in his hand and an expression that mixed the discomfort of having to ask for help with the resignation of someone who had no other option.

—I can’t install the update —he said, lifting the device—. It says there isn’t enough space, but I’ve already deleted everything I can find.

Valeria looked at him for a moment. Then she looked at the watch on her wrist. She had time.

—Let me see —she said, removing her left earbud.

She took the tablet. It was a recent model but neglected: the screen covered in fingerprints, the rear camera smeared with a visible layer of dust. She went straight into the gallery to clean the lens and free up some space, and what she found there left her frozen.

—Can we go upstairs for a minute? It’s not easy to see well in this light —she said, her voice perfectly controlled.

He nodded and headed for the elevator. Valeria followed him.

***

Marcos’s apartment smelled of cold coffee and windows that weren’t opened very often. It was tidy, but in a purely functional way, with nothing that suggested anyone had arranged it with intention: basic furniture, no pictures on the walls, a bookshelf full of technical books and nothing else. Three monitors on the desk, cables neatly lined up along the baseboard. A space designed to work in, not to live in.

—Want something to drink? I have water, coffee… —he said from the kitchen.

—Water is fine.

Valeria sat on the sofa with the tablet in her lap and waited for his footsteps to fade down the hall. Then she opened the file manager to confirm what she had already seen in the lobby: something occupying forty-two gigabytes.

The first images left her speechless.

Her. Leaving the building in black leggings. Her stretching in the park with her arms extended. Her waiting at the crosswalk on the corner with her headphones on. Her in the building lobby, from behind, checking her email. Her on the balcony of her own apartment, one Sunday, watering the plants with her hair tied up in a messy bun. Dozens of photos. Hundreds, maybe.

She had been photographed from the sixth-floor angle, with zoom, for months. Her everyday life turned into a private archive she knew absolutely nothing about.

Valeria felt heat rise from her neck to her temples. She kept scrolling through the images with her thumb, faster, unable to stop, counting in her head the months the collection covered. After her photos came others: screenshots of code, some landscape shot from a window, selfies of him in front of the bathroom mirror.

And then that last photo appeared, and Valeria stopped.

It was him, full-body, in this same bathroom. Naked. Holding the phone with his arm extended toward the mirror. And with an erect cock that took her brain several seconds to fully process because the proportions simply did not correspond to what one would expect from a man who spends his days looking at the floor. Long, thick, with veins running along the shaft and the reddened tip resting almost against his navel. A cock that did not fit at all with the rest of the lean body holding it.

She heard his footsteps coming back from the kitchen.

She closed the gallery. Set the tablet carefully on her lap and composed her expression before Marcos appeared in the doorway with a glass of water.

—I found the problem —Valeria said.

—Oh yeah? What was it?

—The gallery. You had a lot saved in there.

A pause. Marcos’s eyes, behind his glasses, made an almost imperceptible movement.

—You saw…?

—I saw.

The silence that followed was long. Marcos set the glass down on the coffee table and sat on the edge of the desk chair, as far from the sofa as the space allowed without him having to remain standing. He rested his elbows on his knees and covered part of his face with his hand. It was the posture of someone who knows he has no arguments.

—I’m sorry —he said. His voice came out small and defenseless—. I know perfectly well it’s not right. I never meant to make you feel watched. It’s just that…

He stopped.

—It’s just what? —Valeria said.

Marcos looked up.

—I have a really hard time talking to people. It’s always been that way. I don’t know how that thing works that other people do when they approach someone and say something and it all flows naturally. I never learned. —He paused—. When I started seeing you go out every afternoon, I started watching you. And then I kept watching because I didn’t know how to do anything else.

—And the photo of you? —Valeria said.

Marcos didn’t answer right away.

—You saw that too?

—Yes.

He looked at the floor. It wasn’t exactly shame; it was something more like the concentration of someone trying to understand how he got to this specific point.

—That has nothing to do with you —he said—. I’d had it saved for months. Sometimes I need to remind myself that I exist in another way.

Valeria studied him for several seconds. There was something strangely honest in everything he said, in the complete absence of elaborate excuses or attempts to make himself look good.

—I’ve been running alone for two years —she said—. Two years of coming back to this building and walking into an apartment where no one is waiting for me. —She crossed her arms—. And you’ve been watching me from the sixth floor for two years without saying a word to me.

Marcos opened his mouth.

—I didn’t know how…

—I know —Valeria said—. I’m not blaming you. I’m explaining the context.

***

She stood up slowly and moved closer. Marcos looked up when she was less than a meter away. His expression was that of someone who still can’t quite believe what he’s seeing, who expects the scene to be interrupted before he fully understands what’s happening.

—If this happens —Valeria said—, you delete all the photos tonight. No exceptions.

—Yes.

—And you don’t tell anyone. Ever.

—Of course not.

She nodded once. It was the right answer, and he had given it without hesitation for even a second.

She crouched in front of him and placed her hands on his knees. Her fingers climbed along the inside of his thighs with deliberate slowness until they met the obvious bulge pushing from inside his pants. Valeria smiled faintly when she felt it. Her fingers were precise as they unfastened his belt, unhurried, and pulled the zipper down with the same calm. She tugged his pants and his boxer briefs down at the same time, to his knees, and Marcos’s cock sprang free and lightly hit her chin before pointing up toward the ceiling.

Marcos remained completely still, his shoulders tense, his eyes fixed on her with a mixture of disbelief and the concentration of someone who doesn’t want to make a single wrong move.

The photo had not lied.

She took it in her right hand and could barely wrap her fingers around it. Thick, hot, responding immediately to the touch, the tip already damp with a drop of pre-cum shining on the glans. She traced it from base to tip slowly, studying the texture and the pulse she felt against her palm. Every marked vein, every inch of the shaft shifting slightly in her hand to the rhythm of his heartbeat. Marcos breathed from the chest but made no sound. He was holding everything in.

—Look at me —Valeria said, not raising her voice much—. Don’t close your eyes.

He obeyed at once. She held his gaze while bringing her mouth closer. She tilted her head and ran her tongue over the tip, slow and direct, collecting the salty fluid there, and heard him let out his breath all at once as if it had been forcibly taken from him. She licked him again, this time wider, flattening her tongue against the glans and sliding down beneath it. She moved down the side and back again, letting the heat of her mouth travel over him carefully. She traced a long path from the base to the tip, with her lips barely parted, until she felt his pulse quicken against her tongue.

—Jesus Christ —muttered Marcos, his voice broken.

—I haven’t even started yet —she said, and nipped the skin along the side of the shaft lightly, no real teeth, only the pressure of her lips.

When she opened her lips and took him in for the first time, the sound that came out of Marcos was low and shapeless, like something that had been looking for an exit for too long. She let him enter slowly, feeling the glans press against her palate, feeling the thickness force her jaw open wider than she was used to. She stopped when the tip touched the back of her throat and swallowed around him, just slightly, just enough for him to feel the squeeze. Marcos moaned out loud for the first time.

She worked slowly at first. With one hand at the base and her mouth doing the rest, she alternated the pace: slower so he could feel every detail, deeper when she noticed his breathing turning uneven. She rose until only the tip remained between her lips, teased the tongue around the ridge, and then went all the way down again until her nose brushed the hair at the base. Every few thrusts she pulled his cock out of her mouth and licked the whole shaft from top to bottom, with her tongue completely flat, while glancing up at him out of the corner of her eye. Then she took his balls into her mouth, one and then the other, sucking them carefully while her hand kept sliding up and down the shaft slick with saliva.

Marcos’s hands didn’t know where to go. She felt them move in the air, brush the edge of the sofa, and finally settle on her hair with an almost comical delicacy, without pressing, as if he were afraid of breaking something.

—You can grab my hair —she said, letting him go for a moment and looking up at him from below, her lips shining and her chin faintly stained—. You won’t hurt me.

Marcos clumsily tightened his fingers in her hair. She smiled and took him back into her mouth, faster this time, letting him set the rhythm. She felt him tug lightly, gaining confidence, starting to lift his hips off the sofa to push deeper into her throat. She let him. She relaxed her jaw and took him all the way in, gag after controlled gag, her eyes wet and saliva spilling from the corner of her lips down to her chin.

He was a man who clearly didn’t know what to do with his hands when someone was sucking his cock. For some reason, she found that completely honest too.

—It’s just that you’re… —Marcos swallowed—. No one’s ever sucked me like that before.

—I know —she said, pulling off for a second and tapping his cock against her cheek, against her lips, letting his pre-cum mark her face—. It shows in everything.

She devoured him again. She grabbed his ass with both hands, digging her nails in just enough to force him to push against her. She sucked with firm suction now, never stopping the movement of her tongue against the underside of the glans, that spot where the veins gather and where she knew men break. Marcos started panting uncontrollably, his head thrown forward to watch her, his fingers tangled in her hair and his mouth open as if he were short of air.

—Wait —he said, his voice tight—. Stop for a moment.

Valeria stopped with her lips pressed around the base and looked up at him, without taking him out of her mouth.

Marcos had his jaw clenched and his eyes darker behind his glasses. He was breathing with visible effort, his chest rising and falling under his shirt. She let him slide out of her mouth with a wet sound and stroked his damp cock with her thumb.

—I don’t want to finish like this —he said. There was something almost awkward in the way he said it, but genuine—. I thought maybe we could…

—Could what? Let me fuck you?

Marcos nodded slightly, embarrassed by the word, or maybe by how directly she’d put it in his mouth.

—Not today —Valeria said, simple and direct. She ran her tongue over the tip again, unhurried—. Today you’re going to come in my mouth. And next time, if you behave, we’ll talk about the other thing.

He nodded. No arguing, no trying to negotiate. Just nodded and waited.

She liked that detail more than anything else about the afternoon.

She picked up the pace again, faster now, with more pressure at the base. Her right hand twisted at the wrist along the shaft, moving up and down in sync with her mouth, while her left hand stroked his balls underneath, squeezing them gently now and then. She sucked with hollow cheeks, swallowing every drop of saliva and pre-cum that gathered on her tongue, and let him hear the wet, obscene sound of his own cock sliding in and out of the downstairs neighbor’s mouth.

—Look at it —she said, pulling off just enough to speak against the glans, saliva running over her lips—. Look how it goes into your mouth. Two years watching me from above for this.

Marcos moaned wordlessly and shoved her head down, no longer gentle, unable to hold back. Valeria let him. She opened her throat wider and took him to the hilt, and noticed the shaft swelling in her mouth, the veins standing out more, the balls tightening against her palm. She knew what was coming.

Marcos dropped his head back and closed his eyes and stopped trying to control the sounds he made. He came with his shoulders tense and his fists clenched on the armrest of the sofa, with that one second of absolute silence that precedes total relief. The cum shot out in a long, hot stream against her palate, then another, and another, so many that Valeria had to swallow twice without stopping sucking the tip, milking him with her hand to the very last drop. He kept shuddering against her, thighs trembling, murmuring something that wasn’t a word but an animal sound, something he had probably been doing for years alone on that same sofa.

When he was done emptying himself, Valeria kept him in her mouth a moment longer, still, letting him feel it. Then she let him go slowly, ran her thumb along the corner of her lips to gather what had escaped, and brought it to her mouth without taking her eyes off him.

Marcos stayed motionless for a few moments with his eyes closed. When he opened them and looked at her, there was something in his expression she recognized without effort: the look of someone who has just lived through something that had existed for a long time only in his own head.

—The photos —Valeria said, standing up and wiping her knees off on her leggings.

—Tonight. I swear it.

She took the tablet from the coffee table and opened the gallery. She selected all the images that were hers, one by one, with the same calm she had shown throughout everything else, and deleted them. Then she emptied the trash. She showed him the blank screen before leaving the device on the desk.

—Now it’ll have enough space for the update —she said.

Marcos looked at her without saying anything, still with his pants around his knees and his wet cock resting against his belly, unable to move. He followed her with his eyes as she picked up her headphones from the sofa and walked to the door.

With her hand on the doorknob, she paused for just a moment, without turning all the way around.

—If the next time we run into each other in the elevator you’re still staring at the floor —she said—, you might miss something a lot more interesting. Next time I want to feel it inside me.

She left without waiting for an answer.

The park welcomed her with the five o’clock light and the same route as always. Valeria ran more slowly than usual, without thinking about pace or time, with something concrete and warm settled in her chest —and a taste still lingering in her mouth— that didn’t have a name yet but also didn’t resemble the silence of the last few weeks at all.