Neighbors

“Do you want to try it before you decide?” he said, and Mariana understood that neither of them was going to be talking only about the projector that afternoon.

Every morning I spied on him from the window without admitting it. That rainy afternoon he showed up at my door soaked, and I knew there was no way to keep pretending nothing was happening.

I didn’t find him attractive, but feeling desired turned me on. When he climbed onto the stool to check the fan, I knew exactly how I’d repay him.

That night the dare was simple and insane at the same time: cross the property naked, on all fours, right past the window where anyone could see me.

She knew that every Thursday she hung the laundry at the same time. That morning I decided to step out wearing nothing at all, just to see her face. I didn’t expect her to smile like that.

When she told him she was “hanging in there,” Tino understood that word weighed the same as his own: years of cold sheets. And in the middle of the street, they decided to fix it.

The first time I walked into her apartment, I found a thong hanging in the shower, and I knew that food-for-hot-water deal was going to cost me far more than a few empanadas.

We were two lesbians on holiday looking for one last night together; I never thought a simple kiss would end with everyone tangled up on the same sofa.

A week after the party I was still thinking about them. So I wrote to all of them, put on my shortest dress, and went to the house where I knew no one would interrupt us.

I was looking for silence and a garden. What I found was an entire family ready to share me, one after another, without any of them knowing about the others.

That swimsuit barely covered them, and each day the pool showed a little more skin. No one suspected how far the neighbors would go when the last garment fell.

Iván and Lucía were the new ones in the building, the youngest, the ones still learning. That night we showed them that in our group, nobody was left wanting.

When she moved into the apartment across from mine, I never imagined that one afternoon, while her son slept, her hand would climb up my thigh and I’d spread my legs without thinking.

I had just moved in and didn’t know anyone. Bruna was the first to talk to me; I never imagined she and her partner had a plan for me that night.

I remember her in the doorway of her bookstore, with her nearly white hair and those impossible eyes. Ten years passed before I had her close again, and this time I wasn’t going to let her go.

Renata called me to ask for a favor, but the one who left me breathless that afternoon was the woman who finished cleaning and waited for me by the elevator.

When she started crying on my shoulder and confessed that her husband no longer touched her, I knew that afternoon’s massage was going to end very differently.

She’d been greeting her in the lobby for months, barely containing herself. That afternoon the grocery bags slipped from her hands and finally gave me a reason to go upstairs.

I had been training submissive women online for years, but I never imagined that behind my new slave’s mask would be the face of the woman who lived right across the street.

When she took off her blouse in front of the open window, I knew she wasn’t going to stop even if half the neighborhood was watching. And I didn’t want her to stop either.