Neighbors

She’d go up to her room, open the closet, and change knowing we were watching from the street. I was the youngest in the group, but I was the first to go through her door.

I was sixty and my marriage was asleep when I noticed the boy next door spying on me through the hedges. I didn’t cover up. I played along.

I had seen him only once and couldn’t forget his body. When I learned he was looking for me too, I waited for my mother to go to work and let him in.

I thought I was alone among the hanging laundry. Then a voice behind me asked if I liked her panties, and I knew there was no turning back.

I only meant to be nice and carry her grocery bags up to her apartment. She offered me a soda, changed clothes, and left her bedroom door ajar.

For fifteen years I’d greeted him on the beach without imagining what that man saw every night through the bathroom glass while I thought I was alone.

Our bedroom window faced his rooftop exactly. That night I realized the idea of being watched aroused me more than I’d ever admit.

I opened the curtain just enough to confirm my suspicion: he was outside, with his hand inside his pants, waiting to see something he shouldn’t have seen.

I left the curtains open on purpose and pretended not to see him. He, standing on his rooftop, didn’t miss a single detail of my naked body.

From below, while she pushed the guide wire at the top of the ladder, her top lifted from her body and Adrián realized that summer would not be like the others.

When I felt his gaze pinned to my back from the window across the way, I knew that afternoon I wasn’t going to buy bread—I was going to give him something much better.

I’d been imagining it for weeks. That dawn I opened the gate, stepped onto the asphalt, and knew I wouldn’t stop until someone saw me.

When I moved to the capital I thought I was only looking for work. My roommate taught me something else: that men look at what they shouldn’t, and one gesture is enough to prove it.

He was almost forty, lived door to door, and one day invited me for a drink. That night I stopped being the girl on the landing and became his desire.

That afternoon I turned the telescope expecting nothing new, and I saw her: kneeling on the chair, oblivious to the fact that a stranger thirty meters away was watching her in silence.

Her wife was leaving on a trip the next day, and I was still sleeping on a mattress on the floor. When he rang the bell with his toolbox, I knew something was about to happen.

I went out to get some air while he slept. The lights in the apartment across the way were still on, and then I heard a moan that wasn’t mine and knew I was going to keep watching.

The first time I aimed my sons’ old telescope toward the window across the street, I knew I had become something my husband would never imagine.

I hit send and left the phone face down. I wasn’t expecting a reply that same night. When he answered, I knew there was no going back.

Three hours reading stories on my phone were enough to make me accept Iván’s proposal. The next day, that hidden camera changed my whole life.