Neighbors

When he knocked on my door that afternoon, I knew he'd seen everything: the wig, the dress, the woman I kept hidden. And in his eyes there was no mockery, only hunger.

I saw him get out of the car in that light-colored suit and knew I wouldn’t be sleeping alone in the borrowed apartment that night.

It was nine on a Sunday morning, and I was the only person out on the street. That’s why I was the only one who saw her leave the shop almost naked, unaware that I was watching.

We had spent half our lives silently measuring ourselves against each other. Until the woman he pursued knocked on my door one August night and chose to stay.

She screamed at me in the elevator, and ten minutes later she was dragging me into her apartment. I was a virgin, clumsy, and terrified; she knew exactly what she wanted from me.

I raised the blind just a little, as always. But that night Marina was standing in front of the mirror, and for the first time she didn’t look away from my window.

I texted him, “Door ajar, if you dare,” and turned off almost all the lights. When he came up the stairs, I knew there was no turning back.

Her husband spent months at sea and she was climbing the walls. I only went to move some furniture, but that afternoon the house was empty and the door was open.

All her life they’d looked at her like an object. That afternoon, in the stone house at the end of the street, she decided to look first.

For years no man had looked at me the way he did from the next balcony, and that afternoon I discovered I didn’t want to stop being watched either.

We don't expose ourselves so people can watch us; we simply stop hiding. And if a blind shifts beyond the hedge, she smiles and spreads her legs a little wider.

I went down for coffee with the woman from the fifth floor and came back stunned: she told me, in vivid detail, what she did with the married man from the eighth floor.

She unhooked her bikini top with the natural ease of someone who has already decided everything. “You told me to feel free,” she said. And I could barely breathe.

Everyone hated her before she returned to the neighborhood. I only drew her tattoos from my side of the wall—until she decided to make me pay for being her muse.

For weeks he watched her from his window; the night he climbed the fence, he understood that she would decide everything that happened between them.

I crossed half the city thinking we were going to eat. When I opened the wardrobe in room ten, she stepped out with a lit cake and an anything-but-innocent smile.

Everyone hurried past his kiosk so they wouldn’t have to hear his filth. One summer afternoon, Dalia stopped for an ice cream and didn’t know how to go home anymore.

I was twenty and had never seen a naked man when Mariela took my hand to the back wall and whispered that I should look through the crack.

When she asked me to help with the washing machine, I never imagined I’d end up staring at her without hiding it. A woman like that shouldn’t be left alone so often.

When I blindfolded her, I didn’t expect to see the old man on the balcony watching us. And instead of lowering the blind, I offered my girlfriend to him.