Neighbors

A blue robe, a book, and one careless moment. One look through the window across the street was enough to change my morning forever.

I turned off my bedroom light so I could watch him better without being seen. One dawn he turned toward my window, smiled, and I knew I’d never been the only one watching.

I’d only been in the alley for a month when I was put in charge of the punch with house 207. I didn’t expect the woman who opened the door and her husband to change my idea of desire that very night.

His hands were no longer seeking the pain in my back. I knew it, he knew it, and still I said nothing when they traveled down the cleft to places they had never reached before.

Thirty-two years old, red nails, and a way of looking at women that seemed like a greeting and a question. I was a married woman. That is, until the night I forgot my keys.

When I saw my underwear on the glazier’s nightstand, I knew he’d been watching me for weeks. Instead of exposing him, I decided to give him something better to remember.

For days I hid among the bushes, watching her ride another man every night. When he was laid up with a fever, I took his place.

When I leaned out the car window to see if my sister was still awake, I found him in his window, smoking. And I knew he wasn’t going to look away.

She told me a thousand times that she liked me; that night she came down with wine, turned off the TV, and said what she’d been wanting to tell me for two years.

For months I kept running into him in the elevator, knowing he was out of my reach. That night I found a yellow sign with a phone number and a binding spell.

I had the house to myself, four drinks in me, and the certainty that four men were watching me from the scaffolding. I wasn't going to waste the morning.

We saw him among the lilies, watching us from the shadows. Daniela knelt without warning, and I knew that night would change everything we were as a couple.

My mother had sent me to ask her for a couple of eggs. Doña Marisol opened the door in her robe, her hair still wet, and looked at me in a way I would never forget.

I opened the curtains, turned on the corner lamp, and knew he’d be peering in from the next terrace over. That night, we were going to give him something he’d never dare ask for.

The bed creaked to the rhythm of restrained moans. I walked barefoot to the crack in Camila’s door, and what I saw left me frozen in place for an hour.

The towel barely covered me when I knocked on my neighbor’s door on the seventh floor. He agreed to help me open my apartment only if I let the last thing I had on fall away.

We happened to meet in the elevator by chance. She was carrying boxes and I had my hands free. I agreed to help her without knowing that storage room would close with both of us inside.

I got out of the car just to pick up a package, and there he was—the skinny boy who used to watch me in a bikini—now a man, looking at me like he still had a thousand questions.

It was two in the morning, I opened the window looking for air, and saw her lying on the sofa across the way, with no idea anyone was watching her.

The glassed-in terrace lets my silhouette show from the outside. That morning, while I was hanging laundry naked, I heard two girls’ voices laughing right below my window.