Neighbors

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.

The first night in the new apartment, I heard the neighbor on the other side of the wall. I had to go to the bathroom to finish while Laura slept.

You’ve been swallowing midnight sighs for years. That night someone was watching you from the doorway, and your body knew before you did.

He went to the river to fish and found something unexpected among the bushes: his neighbor and a stranger. He did not move or speak. He only watched.

At eleven-thirty I went down to the laundry room with an excuse. She was turned away, and didn’t turn when she heard me come in. That changed everything.

There had been something in her eyes when she turned away that should have worried me. It wasn’t an annoyed neighbor’s anger. It was a promise.

When the two neighbors from downstairs knocked on my door with a bottle of wine, I’d been alone in the house for ten days with a body in a state that was anything but calm.

When I realized she had seen everything, the first thing I felt wasn’t shame but something much harder to control.

First we heard their moans from upstairs. Then they heard ours. None of the four of us stopped.

Ernesto hadn’t looked at me like that in years. Then the neighbors moved in, and one dinner lit something we thought had been asleep forever.

When she caught me in her room with the slipper in my hand, her look mixed surprise with something darker. That day changed everything between us.

When I stepped out of the elevator, my thong already soaked and my dress clinging to my sweat, I knew that tequila wouldn’t remain just tequila.

I have a gift that lets me know people just by looking into their eyes. That night I used it to destroy a lie.

Seven in the morning, my husband still asleep, and I already feel that heat settling between my legs without asking permission. Another day like this. Or worse.