Neighbors

I had been bathing naked in that creek for years, believing it was mine alone. That afternoon, among the brush, two young eyes watched me without shame.

For twenty years behind the desk, I've learned to read people. I knew she couldn't make rent long before she dared ask me for help.

I asked my neighbor for help with a pipe I could have fixed myself. The truth is I just wanted to see him walk into my house knowing we were both alone.

She asked me to come up as a guinea pig for a new oil. Her husband was sleeping in the next room, and I knew that massage would end very differently.

They called me the old maid with the cats, but no one in the neighborhood imagined what went on in my house every morning, every afternoon, and every night since that summer Tuesday.

No one answered the intercom, but the door opened anyway. That’s when I knew there was no turning back and that man was going to do whatever he wanted with me.

I had just turned twenty-two and had never been with anyone. Iván was three years younger, but one stupid bet was enough to show me who was in charge.

He challenged me to one last sprint with a condition neither of us intended to honor. But that night the pool was empty and nobody was watching us.

That stone basement beneath his neighbor’s house became my secret school, where Tomás and his brother taught me everything I was afraid to name.

His hand slid from my knee to my thigh without haste, as if he already knew I wasn’t going to push it away. And I didn’t.

He lost his keys in front of the door of the only neighbor everyone had warned him about, and that summer afternoon he decided to find out why there was so much mystery.

For years I’d been stealing her flip-flops to get off with them. The afternoon she caught me on a ladder, she knew exactly how to use my secret.

The neighbors’ complaints didn’t scare her; they turned her on. In that elevator it smelled of beer and dirty man, and she was already on her knees before reaching the top floor.

I learned to count the hours until she fell asleep. Only then, in the darkness of the bunk bed, were her sandals mine and no one could see what I did with them.

It was exactly midnight when I crossed the patio barefoot. Her pink flip-flops were still there, warm, with the imprint of every one of her toes waiting for me in the dark.

When I saw the video on her phone, I knew there was no way back: my neighbor knew exactly what she wanted from me, and I had fallen into her trap.

She cranked the heat all the way up so none of them would stop sweating. She wanted them to arrive tired, dirty, and hungry to do to her all the things no one dared ask for.

I went up to help her like a good neighbor. I came down as something very different, kneeling in her bathroom and obeying every word that came out of her mouth.

I went downstairs thinking it was just a harmless favor between neighbors. She greeted me with a smile that allowed no questions and an order I couldn’t refuse.

The first time she put the collar on me, I knew there was no turning back: I would come down every time she called, ready to obey any order that came out of her mouth.