Neighbors

He had the kind of arms you notice even when you try not to. He said goodbye in thirty seconds and went back upstairs. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

I showed up in lace and high heels expecting Héctor. Diego opened the door with an ironic smile and I couldn’t get a single word out. But the heels changed everything.

I was about to close the app when the tap came in. Three hundred meters. Close. Too close to ignore on a Sunday with no plans.

We put the TV on mute so we could hear them better. We didn’t know they were hearing us from the other side of the ceiling too.

For weeks we’d been passing each other in the hallway without going beyond a hello. That night at the bar, what Valeria revealed changed everything.

He adjusted the binoculars toward the lit fourth-floor window and found something that hadn’t been meant for him.

Carlos told me he was a dangerous man. He was right. But no one had looked at me like that in months, with that kind of raw hunger that doesn’t know how to hide itself.

She was alone at the water’s edge when he arrived. Ricardo watched them from above, unable to look away. What happened wasn’t meant for anyone else.

When Marta told me she’d found the four perfect women for my punishment, I knew there was no turning back. That same afternoon I signed the contract without reading half of it.

I got up at three in the morning because of moans I couldn’t ignore. My mother’s door was ajar, and I stood frozen in the hallway.

Martín arrived with a ladder and a toolbox. Doña Carmen watched him take off his shirt in the sun and knew the job would take a long time.

It didn’t stop me to know Nadia was there with her eyes fixed on us. On the contrary: her gaze on me made everything more intense.

I went to his house just to help him install an app. I never imagined his gallery concealed a secret that would completely shake me.

When my husband left town, the two old men from the fifth floor invited me to celebrate a birthday. What happened on the dining table never should have happened.

The doorbell rang just as I was starting to get bored of my perfect life. It was him—the neighbor my husband hated—with a clumsy excuse and a gaze that wasn’t clumsy at all.

The back curtain didn’t close properly, and the voice I heard from the bedroom wasn’t the neighborhood Carla who greeted me every morning.

I went down to the bar courtyard at two in the morning because I couldn’t breathe in my room. I never imagined I’d follow her to the little room out back.

Forty-three degrees, four in the afternoon, and her on the balcony with the camisole stuck to her body, knowing full well I was going to climb five floors.

For twelve years, no one had looked at her like that. Rodrigo was twenty, he came with a ladder and a smile, and all she wanted was for him to fix her roof.

We played strip poker with my neighbors. Nobody said what else was being played for, but when I was left naked in the middle of the living room, we didn’t need the cards anymore.