What Started as Jokes with the Neighbors Across the Hall

A young couple in their early thirties, with no children, moved into the apartment across from ours. They bought it a couple of months earlier and spent weeks on renovations, with the usual noise and dust. Their living room shared a wall with ours, because the building layout was identical on both sides of the landing.

The first one we met was him. The doorbell rang one afternoon, in the middle of the renovation, and Lucía opened the door.

“Hi, I’m Rubén, the neighbor across the hall,” he said. “I came to apologize for the inconvenience from the work and, while I’m at it, to introduce myself.”

I came out to the foyer and shook his hand.

“Don’t worry about the noise, that’s normal,” I replied. “If you need anything, we’re here.”

I liked him from the start. He was a friendly, straightforward guy, the kind who fills a conversation without effort. His wife, Daniela, was still in Seville wrapping up the sale of their apartment there, so he’d come ahead to hurry the builders along and was sleeping alone among boxes and paint buckets.

“What a nice guy!” Lucía said when he closed the door.

“You liked his face more than anything,” I teased.

“That too,” she laughed. “We’ll see if you say the same when his wife gets here.”

***

The days passed and we ran into each other several times in the lobby. One night, when I was alone, Rubén ate dinner at our place because they still hadn’t connected his gas. Another afternoon he rang the bell with a resigned expression.

“I’m asking you a favor,” he said. “I’ve just been for a run and the plumbers still haven’t installed my shower tray. Would you let me shower here? Just a quick one.”

“Of course, man. Look, I’m making dinner too. Lucía will be home from work any minute, so shower and stay.”

I took him to the big bathroom, the one in our bedroom, and went into the kitchen. I was beating the eggs for an omelet when I heard the front door and, a minute later, a nervous laugh in the hallway. Lucía appeared in the kitchen with a stricken face, trying not to burst out laughing.

“I didn’t realize he was here,” she whispered. “I went straight into the bedroom to change, opened the wardrobe in my underwear, and then the bathroom door opened. He caught me completely.”

“No way. What did he do?”

“He rushed back in apologizing. Red as a tomato.”

Rubén came out a little later, his ears still burning, apologizing so much we had to beg him to stop. We sat down to dinner and opened a bottle of wine, something we didn’t usually do on weeknights.

Halfway through dinner his phone rang. It was Daniela. We could follow the conversation in bits and pieces: she was arriving in two days and asking about the renovations.

“That was my wife,” he said when he hung up. “She’s coming the day after tomorrow.”

“Well, you must be looking forward to that,” Lucía said. “You’ve been here alone for three weeks.”

“Three weeks in a drought,” he blurted, and immediately covered his mouth. “Sorry. The wine.”

“And that’s what neighbors are for,” I said, playing along. “Today for you, tomorrow for me.”

“You’re an idiot!” Lucía scolded me, but she was laughing along with us.

The jokes kept getting dirtier as the bottle went down, always skirting that border no one dares cross but everyone grazes with the tip of a toe. When Rubén left, Lucía was gathering the plates, smiling to herself.

“He really gave you a thorough once-over,” I told her. “Every time you got up for something, he couldn’t take his eyes off your ass.”

“Well, if he’s already seen me naked, what difference does it make?” she said with a shrug.

“Imagine what he must be like now. Poor guy, all alone at home.”

***

That night in bed, we didn’t need to talk much. My hand slipped under the shorts of her pajamas and I found her wet before I’d barely touched her.

“Look at you,” I murmured.

“And whose fault is that? With all those little jokes.”

Her hand wrapped around my cock, already hard, and she knelt on the mattress. She pulled my underwear down slowly and ran her tongue over the head before taking it all the way into her mouth, going up and down with those soft moans I know by heart. I pushed her T-shirt up and grabbed one breast, feeling the hard nipple between my fingers, while my other hand found her clit and rubbed it in circles until I could feel it swell.

I turned her and positioned her over me, her sex at mouth level, her mouth still on my cock. I worked her cunt with my tongue and slid two fingers inside, slowly at first and then faster, until she went rigid and came against my face without warning, soaking my beard.

Without even recovering, she sat up and lowered herself onto me, impaling herself in one movement. She let out a long moan and started moving.

“I’ve been waiting for this all day,” she gasped.

She rode me up and down, taking me to the hilt, her breasts swaying over me. I grabbed her hips to match her rhythm and heard her go wild until she arched her back and came again, clenching around me. I came a second later, buried in her, while she collapsed onto my chest.

“I can’t wait to meet Daniela,” she said afterward, half asleep. “If she’s half as nice as him, we’re going to get along great.”

***

Daniela arrived on a Sunday afternoon. I was in the garage cleaning the motorcycle—Rubén and I shared that hobby—when a car parked in the space next to mine. Out of the passenger seat got a tall, slender woman with dark, curly hair and green eyes that took your breath away. When she smiled, two dimples appeared at the sides of her full lips.

“You must be Mario,” she said, offering me her hand, and in the end she gave me two kisses that left me dizzy with her perfume. “Rubén never stops talking about you two.”

I carried one of their suitcases upstairs with them. In the elevator she stood between us and, when we got out, I couldn’t help looking at her ass, round and pert, stuffed into tight jeans. Rubén opened the door to their apartment, set the suitcases on the floor, and lifted her in his arms to carry her over the threshold.

“This is the fourth house we’ve lived in,” he explained when he saw my face. “And she always comes in like that the first time. Habits.”

“Well, fair enough,” I said. “I’ll leave you to it, you’ll want to settle in. Lucía’s dying to meet you, Daniela, but take it easy.”

“Give us a couple of hours,” she replied, and looked at Rubén with a mischievous smile. “Better yet, three. To recover from the trip.”

When I told Lucía about the scene, she burst out laughing.

“Recover? They’re going to make up for three weeks in a drought in one go.”

***

We hit it off right away as couples. On weekends we went out together, usually on the bikes, and Daniela and Lucía started meeting up during the week to go shopping or to the gym. Rubén’s jokes kept aiming at the same target, and nobody did anything to steer them away.

“We’re switching,” he said one afternoon, as we were saying goodbye after a ride. “You with Daniela, Lucía with me.”

“For the motorcycle outings,” Lucía clarified, raising an eyebrow, “because otherwise I’ll get my hopes up.”

Rubén swallowed when he realized what he’d just said, and then he laughed.

What nobody said out loud started showing in the silences. One night, after dinner at their place, Rubén casually mentioned, as if commenting on the weather, that the living room wall was so thin they could hear us perfectly from their sofa.

“You should’ve heard how worked up you got us the other day,” he said, looking at Daniela. “Both of you.”

Daniela never once took her eyes off me. That look left no room for doubt.

***

We spent the last Saturday of that month at their place, with wine and low music, and at some point the four chairs became a single sofa too small for four people. Lucía was sitting next to Rubén; I was beside Daniela, her thigh pressed against mine.

“Are we really going to keep pretending all night,” Daniela said, setting her glass on the table, “that we haven’t been circling around this for months?”

No one answered. I looked at Lucía and she gave me a look I knew well: the same one she wore when something both scared and excited her in equal measure. She gave the slightest nod.

It was Daniela who broke the ice. She turned toward me and kissed me, slowly, her tongue slipping gently into my mouth, while at the other end of the sofa Rubén slid a hand up Lucía’s thigh. I heard my wife sigh and knew there was no turning back.

Daniela took my hand and we switched places without words, only looks, until each of us was facing the other couple’s partner. I lifted her T-shirt and uncovered her breasts, small and firm, her nipples already hard. I licked them while she unbuttoned my pants and reached inside for me.

“Lucía was right,” she murmured against my ear. “You’ve got a beautiful one.”

A meter away, my wife was kneeling in front of Rubén, licking him slowly, her eyes closed. Seeing her with him, after so many jokes, after so many nights imagining him out loud, made me harder than I could ever remember being.

I laid Daniela down on the rug and pulled off the jeans I had admired so much in the elevator. I spread her legs and lowered my mouth to her sex, already soaked, teasing her clit until she grabbed my hair and arched her back. When I slid my fingers inside her, she moaned so loudly that Lucía turned her head and looked at us from the sofa, never stopping riding Rubén.

“Yes,” Daniela gasped. “Don’t stop.”

I got on top of her and slid into her slowly, feeling her tighten around me. I started moving and she wrapped her legs around my waist to take me even deeper. Beside us, Lucía was moving on Rubén to the same rhythm, as if the four of us were following some invisible beat, and the moans mixed together until we no longer knew whose was whose.

“Look at her,” Daniela told me in my ear, her voice broken. “Look how much your wife is enjoying herself.”

I looked. Lucía held my gaze as she came on the neighbor, mouth open, breasts bouncing, and that image drove me to the edge. Daniela felt how close I was and tightened her legs, whispering for me to keep going, not to stop, until I came inside her in spasms, my forehead resting on her shoulder.

The four of us stayed lying there, catching our breath, not quite knowing what to say. Of course it was Rubén who broke the silence.

“Well, that ice is broken,” he said, and all four of us laughed.

Lucía crawled over to me and kissed me, still breathless, with a smile I hadn’t seen on her in years.

“You and your neighbor jokes,” she whispered. “Look where they’ve brought us.”

Across the landing, our apartment waited empty. That night, for the first time, we were the ones fighting back against the thin wall.