My Neighbor Spotted Me from the Window Across the Way

Everything I’m about to tell you happened one summer that isn’t so close anymore, in a small coastal town, one of those places that fills up with people in August and empties out in September as if nothing had ever happened.

There were five of us, and we’d rented an apartment for a week. It wasn’t right by the beach, but the price was reasonable and, split between all of us, we barely noticed it. It had three bedrooms, a tiny kitchen, and an interior courtyard overlooked by the windows of half the building.

That afternoon, we’d gone down to the sand early. We spent the hours the way you do at that age: playing cards on a towel, getting into the water whenever the heat became too much, stealing glances at the girls walking along the shore in their bikinis. The sun was sinking at an angle, golden, and the air smelled of salt and suntan lotion.

Around seven, I decided to head back before the others. I wanted to shower in peace and be the first one ready to go out that night; if I waited for everyone else to return, the shower turned into an endless line and I always ended up with lukewarm water.

“I’m heading up,” I said, shaking the sand from my legs.

“Coward,” Marcos laughed without looking up from the cards. “Save us a spot in the bathroom.”

I went up alone. The apartment was silent, with that thick stillness of homes shut up all day beneath the sun. The blinds had kept the heat in, and the air felt heavy. I went straight to my bedroom, one of the ones facing the inner courtyard, and dropped my bag on the bed.

I took off my T-shirt. My back felt tight from all those hours in the sun, and my skin was still hot. I sat on the edge of the mattress for a moment to take off my sandals and, without meaning to, started thinking about one of the girls on the beach, one who’d been wearing a blue thong and had stayed near us for quite a while, adjusting her bikini every couple of minutes. I remembered the way her pussy showed beneath the wet fabric, that unmistakable cleft outlined when she came out of the water and the swimsuit clung to her, and just that was enough to make me feel my cock hardening against my shorts.

Just a minute, I told myself. I’ve got plenty of time.

I took off my swimsuit too—it was damp and rough with salt—and lay down. The room was dim, lit only by the open window letting in the last of the afternoon. I began touching myself slowly, closing my fist around my cock and pulling the skin down until the head was fully exposed. The tip was already wet, and I used that drop to lubricate the first stroke, up and down, unhurried, recreating the image of the blue thong, the curve of her hip, the way she bit her lip while talking to her friends.

I stroked myself up and down, deliberately stopping, prolonging every movement, squeezing hard at the base and loosening my grip when I reached the tip. I was so lost in my own head that it took me a moment to notice something strange.

A light had changed on the wall.

My shadow was projected onto the wallpaper, sharp and clearly defined, as if someone had switched on a spotlight directly opposite. I turned my head toward the window. I’d left it wide open, without lowering the blind, and across the courtyard, in the apartment opposite, there was an illuminated window.

And there was a woman in that window.

I guessed she was around forty. Dark-haired, with long hair half tied back, her skin still bronzed from an entire summer. She was taking off a beach wrap in a slow, almost distracted gesture, and underneath she wore a dark bikini that outlined the kind of figure capable of stopping a conversation halfway through a sentence.

I froze, my cock in my hand and my heart racing.

I was completely naked, lying there, my hard cock pointing at the ceiling and everything on display, while a stranger watched me from the other side of the courtyard. The sensible thing would have been to cover myself, jump to my feet, and slam the window shut. But I didn’t move. And then I realized she wasn’t looking away either.

She was watching me. And smiling.

It wasn’t a smile of surprise or discomfort. It was a smile that knew exactly what was happening and had no intention of stopping it. Her gaze went straight to my crotch, lingered there for a moment, and then rose back to my eyes, confirming that she’d seen perfectly well what I had between my legs.

This isn’t happening, I thought. This doesn’t happen to anyone.

For a few seconds, neither of us did anything. The inner courtyard, with its echoes of distant televisions and the sound of someone washing dishes one floor above, seemed to disappear. There was only her, me, and the hot air crossing from one window to the other.

And then, without taking her eyes off me, she brought her hands behind her back.

She undid the clasp of her bikini top with deliberate calm, like someone with all the time in the world. The fabric came loose, and she let it fall onto the windowsill. Her tits were full and firm, her nipples dark and already hard, and her breathing was barely visible in the way her breasts rose and fell. She lifted one hand to her hair and let it down completely, allowing it to fall over her shoulders. Then she lowered her fingers and slowly pinched one nipple, pulling it outward until it was hard as a stone, without taking her eyes off me for a single second.

Any last trace of embarrassment evaporated at that moment. I tightened my fist around my cock again, this time watching her, and only her, having completely forgotten the girl in the blue thong. I began masturbating slowly, letting her see every movement, sliding my hand up until I was fully unhooded and then bringing it down until my knuckles struck my balls, because it was obvious that was what she wanted: to watch and be watched.

She tilted her head as if assessing me, and her smile widened a little. She leaned one hip against the window frame and, with her other hand, slowly moved down her own stomach, running her fingertips beneath her navel until she slipped them inside the bottom of her bikini. I watched her arm tense, watched her begin moving in small circles down there, and saw her mouth open for a moment before closing again into that smile of hers.

The heat in the room had become unbearable, but not because of the temperature. My forehead was beaded with sweat, my chest flushed, and my heart was pounding. Every time I thought she was going to get tired, close the window, and break the spell, she did the exact opposite: she took one more step, showed a little more, held my gaze a little longer. She pulled her hand from inside her bikini and brought her glistening fingers to her mouth, sucking them slowly, and showed me her tongue for a second before lowering them again.

She hooked her thumbs into the sides of the bikini bottom and, with the same deliberate slowness, slid it down. She did it without theatrics or exaggerated gestures, with a naturalness that made her a thousand times more disturbing. The triangle of fabric caught around her thighs for a moment, and she kicked it aside with the tip of her foot. Her pussy was almost completely shaved, with only a thin strip of dark hair above it, and from where I was, I could see her lips perfectly, swollen and glistening from what she’d been doing to herself. Now we were both equally exposed, separated by barely a few yards of summer air, without having said a single word.

She spread her legs slightly, bracing one knee against the frame, and lowered her hand again. This time I watched it all. I saw her part her pussy lips with two fingers and begin rubbing her clit in slow circles with her middle finger, squeezing every few seconds, throwing her head back while still watching me from beneath her lashes. From time to time she lowered her fingers, pushed two of them inside herself, and then brought them back up, soaked, to her clitoris, continuing to pleasure herself with her own wetness.

I don’t know how long it lasted. It could have been two minutes or ten. Time had turned liquid. I jerked off to the rhythm she set with her eyes, speeding up whenever she narrowed them and quickened her fingers down there, slowing when she bit her lip and threw her head back with her mouth open. My cock was so swollen it hurt, and the tip was leaking a thick string that ran over my fingers and smeared my whole hand.

At one point she brought two fingers to her mouth, slowly, sucked them to the knuckle, and then lowered them straight back to her pussy, plunging them in with one thrust. I saw her back arch, her stomach tense, and her lips lick themselves while she kept pumping her hand. That was when I understood that she wasn’t only watching either. She was coming, or very nearly, right there in front of me, while I jerked off just a few yards away.

I felt myself slipping, felt that I was right on the edge, that I wouldn’t be able to hold out much longer. I squeezed harder, quickened my fist, and showed her my entire cock, leaning a little forward on the bed so she wouldn’t miss a thing. And just when I thought the whole world had narrowed down to that illuminated window, a voice cut through the air.

A man’s voice, deep, from somewhere inside the apartment opposite, calling her by a name I couldn’t make out.

She reacted instantly. She snatched the bikini from the windowsill, covered herself with the wrap, and moved away from the window in two quick steps. The spell shattered like glass.

I was left hanging, my cock in my hand and my breathing ragged, on the verge of coming and unable to finish, convinced it was over, that it would remain one of those impossible moments you tell people about years later and no one believes.

But then she came back.

Only for a second. She leaned out again, already wrapped in the beach cover-up, checked over her shoulder to make sure no one was behind her, and searched for me with her eyes. When she found me, she glanced down at my hand closed around my cock, bit her lip, and looked back up. She brought two fingers to her lips—the same ones that had been inside her pussy moments before—and blew me a kiss. It was a small gesture, almost shy after everything else, but it pushed me over the edge.

I came while looking at her. Like I never had before, with an intensity that left me trembling against the mattress. Four or five thick spurts of cum leapt onto my chest, hot; one reached my collarbone, and the last ones dripped over my knuckles while I kept squeezing my cock through its spasms. And she saw it. She saw every spurt. She saw exactly what she had caused, how I emptied myself completely because of her, and her smile, before she disappeared, was one of pure satisfaction.

Then she lowered the blind on her window, slowly, sealing off the courtyard as if nothing had ever happened.

I lay there for a long time, smeared with my own cum, staring at the ceiling and listening to my heartbeat gradually slow. The usual sounds began filtering back through the courtyard: the television, dishes, a motorcycle in the distance. As if the whole world had kept turning while the most extraordinary thing of the summer was happening to me.

***

When my friends came up half an hour later, I was already showered and dressed, sitting on the sofa with a beer, pretending to feel a calm I didn’t.

“Look at Mr. Prepared—already ready to go,” Marcos complained, dropping down beside me. “And what’s with that goofy face?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Summer suits me.”

I didn’t tell them anything. I wouldn’t have known where to begin, and besides, there was something I wanted to keep just for myself. That night we went out, drank, and laughed until late, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the window opposite and whether it would light up again.

That day was unforgettable. And it wasn’t the last. But that’s another story.