Neighbors

I thought it would be a fifteen-minute scolding. I didn’t count on the bag Bárbara brought, or on the woman that furious mother would become.

She stood still against the mirror, breathing through her nose, letting me do as I pleased in silence while the rest of the building rode up without suspecting a thing.

I thought my secret was safe between these walls, until I heard his window slam shut and knew someone had just seen who I really am.

The elevator was old and narrow, and she was right in front of me. I only had to slide my hand around behind her and pray her husband kept his eyes on his phone.

At four in the morning, alone in the bakehouse, he discovered that the divorce had not awakened his usual desires: it had awakened others, with a neighbor’s name.

I’d been crossing paths with her in the lobby for months, avoiding her gaze. That afternoon, trapped in the elevator with her drunk husband beside us, I stopped avoiding her.

She was on her sofa, her skirt hiked up and her cunt wet, and all she had to do was say one sentence for me not to leave her there, waiting for her husband.

She knocked on my door in desperation: her husband had been arrested. I agreed to go, but on one condition, and she was in no position to refuse anything.

The key had been warming my pocket since the night before. I knew she’d be awake, waiting for me, with her robe open and the coffee pot on the heat.

He had spent forty years dreaming of a free, empty morning. What I hadn’t planned on was starting that Monday seeing my neighbor naked and feeling my breath catch.

They knew him as the good-natured old man on the corner, the one who greeted everyone and never raised his voice. One closed afternoon was enough to discover the man he really was.

I had watched her go from shy boy to stunning woman. That hot afternoon, with the pizza cooling on the table, she was the one who leaned in and kissed me first.

Every time I got up for the lighter he caught me looking, and my boyfriend smiled like he already knew how that night was going to end.

Three months alone with her daughter and a cold bed. When a message offered her a summer away from everything, she never imagined two men were waiting there.

We had spent years looking for the right woman for our bed, until the girl across the hall started cleaning our home and showed too much curiosity about my magazines.

I watched her direct the move in that rough voice and knew I’d never get her out of my head. What I didn’t imagine was everything hidden under that corset.

The first night he slept at home, my mom’s moans came through the wall. At nineteen, I knew nothing would ever be the same.

I went up to his landing in jeans that showed everything and my heart in my throat. No one answered. When I gave up, the elevator doors opened and there he was.

“Come downstairs at nine. Well-showered, shaved, and without underwear. Today the two of us are going to use you.” I turned off the phone with trembling hands and began counting the hours.

My parents said that neighbor was trouble. I only knew that every time I ran into her in the elevator, I struggled to breathe and didn’t know why.