My Neighbor Didn’t Know I Was Watching Her

On his first weekend in the new apartment, Marcos realized he had chosen the right floor. Not because of the spacious rooms or the light that came in each morning, but because of the view. From the dining-room balcony, with the blinds halfway lowered and his body reclined in the chair, he could see the windows of the building opposite with a clarity he hadn’t expected.

It was an old building, the kind they no longer built. Four-meter ceilings, double-hung windows with white-painted wooden frames, plaster moldings on the façade. The kind of construction where the inside of every apartment was exposed to anyone who knew how to look, because its owners had grown up in another era and had never learned to cover themselves.

He had spent three afternoons watching without seeing anything interesting. A middle-aged man reading the newspaper. An older couple eating in front of the television. An empty living room with an enormous plant beside the window and no one to water it.

But that Saturday afternoon, something changed.

It was on the fourth floor, the second window from the right. A soft yellow light, different from the others. And inside it, a woman’s figure.

She was around thirty, maybe a little older, and had a body that apologized for nothing. Wide hips, solid legs, a waist defining the transition between one and the other. She wore her dark-brown hair loose and curly, falling over her shoulders. When she moved, her curls bounced.

Marcos narrowed his eyes. Too far away to make out any details. He went inside to get the binoculars he had bought for the trekking trip he never took. He found them in the box at the back of the closet, still with the instructions inside.

Back on the balcony, he lowered the blinds until only a slit remained. From outside, there was no way to make him out. From inside, he could see everything.

The woman was sitting on the edge of the bed with an open book on her lap. She was smoking something Marcos recognized from the leisurely rhythm with which she released the smoke: it wasn’t a cigarette. She held it between two fingers with a calm that could only be learned over time, and every so often she closed her eyes for a second, as if the music playing somewhere in the room reached her with a delay.

She was wearing a beige bra, made of soft fabric, and a black thong. Nothing else.

Marcos adjusted the binoculars’ focus.

Her nipples showed through the bra with breathtaking precision, thick, swollen, pressing against the lace as if trying to escape. Her skin was dark and warm, and the floor lamp to her left bathed her in a yellow glow that made her look like a painting. Marcos wondered what that room smelled like. Sweet tobacco, warm fabric, old perfume, and beneath it all, the smell of a wet pussy he was already beginning to imagine.

She placed the book facedown on the bed, like someone losing the thread of her reading and in no hurry to find it again. She straightened up and stood there for a moment. Marcos held his breath. But she wasn’t looking at him: she was looking at the full-length mirror hanging on the side wall, directly opposite the bed.

What followed wasn’t calculated. Or at least it didn’t seem to be.

She approached the mirror slowly, as if coming upon someone she hadn’t seen in a long time. She stopped less than a yard away and looked at herself straight on. First her face, then her shoulders, then the whole length of her body. With one hand, she traced her left side from hip to waist, unhurriedly, her palm flat. Her fingers rose to her breast, squeezed it through the bra, and her thumb rubbed the nipple until it hardened even more against the fabric.

Marcos stopped breathing.

She studied herself with a seriousness that had nothing narcissistic about it and everything to do with recognition. It wasn’t a pose. It was the gesture of someone looking at herself because she wanted to see herself, because your own body sometimes demands attention. She brushed her fingers along the edge of her bra. She did it slowly, exploring the outline of what the fabric barely contained. Then she slipped her hand inside and pulled one breast free, letting it hang loose and heavy, its dark nipple pointing toward the mirror. She licked her fingers and rubbed it again, wet and shining beneath the yellow light.

Then she blew smoke toward the mirror.

Marcos had never seen anything like it: the smoke traveling toward the reflection, dissolving into the glass, as if she were trying to merge with the image. She repeated the gesture once more. Then she ran the tip of her tongue over the cold surface of the mirror, from bottom to top, very slowly, her eyes half-closed. Her tongue was long and red, leaving a wet trail that evaporated almost immediately. She lowered one hand to her thong and squeezed her pussy through the fabric, a brief movement, like a promise she was making to herself.

My God, Marcos thought.

He was getting hard without meaning to. An erection without any urgency yet, clean and sustained by the tension of watching without being seen, of witnessing something that wasn’t meant for him. He felt his cock pressing against the fabric of his pants, looking for room.

The woman picked up her phone from the nightstand. She framed her body on the screen and began taking pictures of herself. Not with the anxious urgency of someone documenting, but with the patience of someone creating. She moved through different poses: facing forward, in profile, bent over with her back to the mirror. She displayed her hips with authority. She made the texture of her skin visible, its natural folds, the curve of her ass. She hid nothing. In one pose, she pulled her thong down to the middle of her thighs, spread her legs in front of the mirror, and photographed the reflection of her open pussy, her thick lips shining with moisture, a strand of thick fluid between them.

Marcos’s jaw was clenched. He squeezed his cock through his pants, long and hard, its shape outlined against the fabric.

She set the phone on the bed and went to the nightstand drawer. She took out a long vibrator, matte black, thick, with a rounded tip. She held it in her hand for a moment, as if weighing something, and then lay back on the comforter.

She put on her headphones.

Marcos watched her settle in: her head resting on the pillow, her knees slightly raised, her breathing visible in the movement of her chest. She closed her eyes. For almost a minute, nothing happened except the barely perceptible movement of her chest rising and falling. Marcos watched without moving, the binoculars pressed to his face, without blinking.

Then her hand began to move.

First over the fabric of her thong, in slow circles. The pressure varied. Sometimes she stopped for a second, as if calibrating something, then resumed with greater intent. Her left ankle tensed. A muscle on the inside of her thigh stood out faintly beneath the skin. She pushed the fabric aside, and Marcos saw, even at that distance, the dark stain of moisture that had soaked the thong. She slipped two fingers slowly into her pussy, up to the knuckles, and pulled them out gleaming with wetness. She brought them to her mouth and sucked them one by one, closing her eyes as if tasting what her own body had produced.

Marcos shifted in his chair without taking the binoculars away.

She brought the vibrator to her lips. She ran it slowly into her mouth, closing her lips around it, pushing it to the back of her throat as if she were sucking a man’s cock. Her cheek hollowed every time she sucked. In and out, in and out, and the strands of saliva left behind when she withdrew it gleamed for a moment before breaking against her chin. Then she brought it downward, pulled the thong all the way off her legs, and was left with her pussy completely exposed, her lips swollen and dark, shining with moisture. She spread herself with two fingers of her free hand and pressed the tip of the vibrator against her clitoris.

The first contact made her arch her back slightly.

It wasn’t a performance. It was the involuntary movement of a body responding to something that truly affected it: the slight curve of her spine, her toes pointing downward, her lower lip caught between her teeth. The tip of the vibrator circled her swollen clitoris, and her hips rose on their own to seek it.

Marcos unzipped his pants and pulled his cock out.

He was hard in a way he hadn’t been for a long time, his flesh hot, the tip already wet with the fluid it had begun to release. The situation had something no video could replicate: the imperfect angle, the distance that forced him to complete with his imagination what the binoculars couldn’t show, the absolute certainty that she didn’t know he existed. He began to jerk off slowly, gripping himself with his whole hand, sliding the skin of his cock up and down at the same rhythm she moved the vibrator.

She changed the angle. She placed the vibrator against the entrance to her pussy and pushed it inside, slowly, letting it swallow the entire black length inch by inch. When she had it all the way in, she stayed still for a moment, her mouth open, and then began fucking herself, sliding the toy in and out with a precision Marcos could read in every muscle of her arm. Her free hand grabbed her exposed breast and pinched the nipple hard.

***

The woman sped up.

The vibrator moved in and out of her pussy at an accelerating rhythm, and her breathing, though inaudible at that distance, could be read in her body: her neck slightly arched, the fingers of her free hand clutching the comforter after letting go of her breast, her hips beginning to follow the rhythm, thrusting against the toy. Every few seconds she bit her lower lip. Released it. Bit it again. Marcos could imagine the moans her headphones kept from escaping, muffled in her throat, choked back. She pulled the vibrator out for a moment, brought it to her mouth, licked up her own juices with her broad tongue, and shoved it back in all the way.

Marcos jerked off slowly, holding himself back.

He wanted it to last. He wanted to keep watching. There was something about being invisible that made the scene more intense than anything deliberately sought out. It wasn’t catalog voyeurism; it was someone’s real life accidentally leaking toward another place, and he was capturing it without permission. A thread of pre-cum ran over his fingers; he used it as lubricant and kept moving his hand in time with the vibrator across the courtyard.

She changed position. She got on all fours on the bed, sideways to the mirror, so she could watch herself while she continued. With one hand she spread a cheek of her ass, exposing both holes, and with the other she slid the vibrator back into her pussy from behind. She fucked herself with short, rapid thrusts while watching the reflection of her breasts bouncing beneath her chest. She licked one finger and pressed it against her asshole, rubbing in circles until Marcos saw, even with the binoculars at their limit, how she pushed it in up to the knuckle.

Marcos’s cock throbbed in his hand. He clenched his teeth so he wouldn’t come yet.

She was taking herself from both sides. The vibrator in her pussy, her finger in her ass, her open mouth against the pillow. Her brown curls stuck to her forehead with sweat. Marcos saw her back tense with every thrust, her ass jolt each time she pushed the vibrator all the way in. He sped up his hand over his own cock, unable to stop himself.

Her body tensed.

It happened visibly, though subtly: her legs drawing slightly inward, her shoulders lifting barely an inch from the bed, her mouth opening without emitting any perceptible sound. Marcos saw her pussy clench around the vibrator, saw a brief gush of thick fluid run down the inside of her thigh. It lasted a few seconds, which Marcos counted without realizing it.

Then she went still.

Her muscles relaxed one by one. The hand holding the vibrator loosened, and she let it fall onto the comforter, glistening and soaked. Her chest rose once, slowly, and fell even more slowly. The sigh Marcos imagined more than heard. She pulled her finger from her ass, looked at it for a second beneath the lamp’s light, and rested it on the pillow.

He still hadn’t come.

His cock was hard between his fingers, his gaze fixed on the silhouette recomposing itself on the other side of the courtyard. She turned onto her side, facing the mirror, the vibrator still within reach. She looked at herself for a moment, and something in her expression—which Marcos could barely distinguish with the binoculars at the limit of their focus—seemed satisfied. She ran two fingers over her open pussy, brought them to her mouth, and sucked them slowly until she had licked them clean.

He came silently against the blinds.

Hot, thick spurts struck the plastic slats with a dull sound. He kept jerking off until the last drop, squeezing the swollen head of his cock, feeling each pulse discharge semen against the half-closed blinds. It wasn’t a spectacular orgasm. It was more like a full stop: the inevitable resolution of a tension that had lasted too long, piled layer upon layer from the moment she had first stood in front of the mirror.

***

Marcos closed the blinds. He cleaned himself with the first thing he found, a dish towel that had been hanging over the back of a chair, smeared with still-warm semen. He remained seated in the dim dining room for several minutes without thinking about anything specific, his cock still out, limp, glistening with his own remains.

Then he went to the kitchen to make himself a coffee.

The kitchen window offered a different angle. All he could see was the side of the building opposite, a blank wall with a damp stain in the upper corner.

She didn’t know he existed. He would never know her name, what music she listened to through those headphones, or what book she had been reading before it all began. He wouldn’t know any of those things because distance had its own rules: you could watch or you could get closer, but not both at the same time.

That night, as he tried to sleep, he returned to the image of her standing in front of the mirror, the smoke traveling toward the reflection, her tongue moving across the cold glass, one breast out of her bra, the black vibrator sliding in and out of her soaked pussy. He jerked off once more before falling asleep, flat on his back in the darkness, and came across his own belly thinking of her ass spread open in front of the mirror.

He didn’t know what to call what had happened. He didn’t care that much.

The next day, when he got up to make breakfast, the first thing he did was step onto the balcony. The fourth-floor window was closed. The blinds were down.

Marcos made his coffee, sat in the chair, and waited.