Neighbors

She stood still against the mirror, breathing through her nose, letting me do as I pleased in silence while the rest of the building rode up without suspecting a thing.

I thought my secret was safe between these walls, until I heard his window slam shut and knew someone had just seen who I really am.

The elevator was old and narrow, and she was right in front of me. I only had to slide my hand around behind her and pray her husband kept his eyes on his phone.

At four in the morning, alone in the bakery, he discovered that the divorce had awakened not his usual desires, but new ones, with a neighbor’s name.

I’d been crossing paths with her in the lobby for months, avoiding her gaze. That afternoon, trapped in the elevator with her drunk husband beside us, I stopped avoiding her.

She was on her sofa, her skirt hiked up and her cunt wet, and all she had to do was say one sentence for me not to leave her there, waiting for her husband.

She knocked on my door in desperation: her husband had been arrested. I agreed to go, but on one condition, and she was in no position to refuse anything.

The key was still warming my pocket from the night before. I knew she’d be awake, waiting for me, with her robe open and the coffee maker on the stove.

I’d spent forty years dreaming of a free, empty morning. What I hadn’t planned on was starting that Monday by seeing my neighbor naked and feeling my breath catch.

They knew him as the good-natured old man on the corner, the one who greeted everyone and never raised his voice. One closed afternoon was enough to discover the man he really was.

I had watched her go from shy boy to stunning woman. That hot afternoon, with the pizza cooling on the table, she was the one who leaned in and kissed me first.

Every time I got up for the lighter he caught me looking, and my boyfriend smiled like he already knew how that night was going to end.

Three months alone with her daughter and a cold bed. When a message offered her a summer away from everything, she never imagined two men would be waiting.

We’d spent years looking for the right woman for our bed, until the girl across the hall came to clean the house and started eyeing my magazines with too much curiosity.

I saw her directing the move with that hoarse voice, and I knew I’d never get her out of my head. What I didn’t imagine was everything she hid under that corset.

The first night he slept at home, my mom’s moans came through the wall. At nineteen, I knew nothing would ever be the same.

“Come down at nine. Well-showered, shaved, and without underwear. Tonight we’re going to use you between the two of us.” I turned off the phone with trembling hands and started counting the hours.

My parents said that neighbor was trouble. I only knew that every time I ran into her in the elevator, I struggled to breathe and didn’t know why.

She was cleaning the terrace in a thong and little else, not knowing two men were spying on her from across the building. And me, seeing her desired, drove me insane.

I’d been watching her out of the corner of my eye on the stairs for weeks. The afternoon I came home and found her on my sofa, I learned desire doesn’t care about labels.