Neighbors

The image was crystal clear: her lying on his lounger, in a bikini, with a smile that wasn’t for me. What came next left me speechless.

Carmen appeared at my window as if she had been waiting for that moment. She didn’t leave. She made me come downstairs. What happened next was beyond anything either of us imagined.

Lorena had a reputation for liking women. I never paid it any mind until that spring morning when we ended up trapped together.

When I was left alone with Marcos, the lifelong neighbor, something shifted between us. He came closer slowly and kissed me without asking permission or forgiveness.

When she invited me up to her apartment, I knew I couldn’t say no again. She was almost seventy and I was thirty-six, and that had never mattered so little.

We’d spent years avoiding those childhood games, until one winter afternoon I asked him to take me on his bike and my hand landed where it shouldn’t.

The two wineglasses on the coffee table and the dim bedroom light told me I was about to see something I should never have seen.

I'd gone a month without touching anyone when he appeared across the hall in sweatpants that left very little to the imagination. And I was in my boxer briefs.

When I lent Bruno the red brief that morning, I had no idea my neighbor would come looking for us and that the path to the river would end in something none of us had ever done before.

Years later I still remember her panties in the breeze, her hand between her legs, and the kiss she blew me from the sidewalk before disappearing. We never said a single word.

That afternoon on the beach, I knew the four of them were watching us. What I didn’t know was that that night everything Roberto and I had imagined would come true.

Daniela asked me to drive her home. When we arrived, two neighbors were drinking beers outside. One had a secret my friend already suspected. I decided to find out.

My boyfriend didn’t show up to the Christmas party. Instead, his godfather—my neighbor across the street—offered me a drink, and that extra glass changed everything.

Going out in a thong and bra under my leggings was my secret ritual. I didn’t expect anyone to dare follow me. Or that I’d want them to so badly.

I grabbed the binoculars almost without thinking. When I focused them, she was already looking at me from her window. And instead of closing the curtain, she pulled it all the way open.

Sandra needed help with a blind. I needed to forget the worst day of my life. Neither of us expected Valentina to arrive so soon.

I announced myself, as we always did. He told me to come in. I found him in the bathroom, shaving, naked. He had the body I’d tried not to look at for months.

I got off the bike half a block away and slipped in through the back door. From the bedroom came voices I took a moment to recognize.

I went to fix his washing machine with a red thong under my pants. I only had to find the moment for him to notice. He said nothing, but he kept watching.

Daniela was twenty, lived on the fourth floor, and had never been with a woman. That day, all of that changed at once.