My Norwegian Neighbor Didn’t Know I Was Watching Her Through the Window

My name is Adrián. A couple of months ago I opened a small office in a village on the Murcian coast, one of those places where you can tell winter has arrived because all the blinds come down at once, and summer because they all go back up on the same day. I won’t say exactly what I do; it’s enough to know that I see clients, that I have a desk with a monitor and a swivel chair, and that my window looks out onto the neighborhood’s main street, right across from Ingrid’s villa.

I met Ingrid, if you can call it that, the day I decided to invite the neighbors to a little opening aperitif. I wanted to make a good impression, win the neighborhood’s trust, hand out business cards. I went door to door distributing printed invitations. Everyone on the street opened their door. Everyone except the one across from me. At number fourteen lived, according to the woman at the tobacconist’s, a Norwegian woman who had been there for a couple of years and kept to herself almost entirely.

—She’s very pretty, though —she added, with a smile that didn’t quite say everything.

When I went back to press her doorbell with the invitation, it took her almost a minute to open. And when she did, I understood the tobacconist’s pause. Ingrid had to be around forty. Blonde, with short hair cut to the jawline, eyes such a pale blue they seemed imported from another latitude. Slim, without being fragile. She was wearing jeans and a white shirt buttoned two buttons more than was decent. I held out the invitation, explained the aperitif, and she looked at it like someone studying a menu in a language they don’t quite understand.

—Thank you, I’ll try —she said, with a soft accent that stretched out her r’s—. Though I won’t promise anything.

She didn’t come. I knew because I spent the entire opening staring at the door. The tobacconist’s woman came, the couple from the first floor, the guy from the bar on the corner, the elderly couple from the fourth. Even a couple of girls in their early twenties from the back block showed up; they flirted shamelessly for half an hour and left without finishing their beer. Ingrid didn’t come.

I thought I had lost her forever.

***

Over the following weeks I barely saw her. One day I ran into her at the supermarket and we smiled at each other from three meters away, nothing more. Another day I saw her carrying bags from the car into the entrance hall, wearing huge dark sunglasses and a beige dress that clung to her body just enough. Her villa had two floors and a garage. On the first floor, right at the height of my work desk, there was a sliding glass door opening onto a small balcony. I sat at that desk eight hours a day, with my computer screen and Ingrid’s window aligned on the same diagonal.

For weeks, that window was just a rectangle of frosted glass with a white curtain. Until this morning.

It was nine twenty. I had just opened my laptop, my coffee still only half-finished. I looked up to rest my neck and saw a shadow moving behind the curtain. A silhouette. Her silhouette. I recognized the straight shoulders, the line of her neck, the way she tilted one hip slightly to one side. She was wearing a turquoise blue robe, one of those long robes that falls to mid-calf. The curtain suddenly pulled back.

And then I saw her in full.

Detail by detail, with nothing in the way. Ingrid was standing in front of the glass, looking at something that had to be a mirror, outside my field of vision. She was smoothing her hair, running her fingers over the nape of her neck, adjusting the collar of the robe. The morning light hit her face full on. She was alone in that room, I knew that right away from the way she moved. A woman who knows she’s being watched doesn’t look at herself in the mirror like that.

I stayed frozen in the chair. For a fraction of a second, I thought about getting up and lowering the blind in my own office. I didn’t.

***

She picked up a book from somewhere and sat on a sofa placed directly in front of the window. The distance between her sofa and my desk couldn’t have been more than fifteen meters. The sun was hitting her legs. She crossed one over the other, slowly, with that unhurried rhythm people have when they’re alone and in no rush. The robe opened an inch at her thigh. I dropped my eyes to the screen, counted to five, and looked back up.

She was still reading. Her left leg was swaying softly. The robe had opened a little more. Her knee shone in the sunlight and, below it, the skin of her thigh disappeared into a pale shadow until the fabric covered it again. Every time she turned a page, her whole body shifted a little. With every movement, the fabric rode up another finger’s width.

Don’t look —I told myself—. Don’t look.

I was looking.

Some client could walk through my door at any moment. My lock wasn’t turned, my screen didn’t have anything useful open, and my face must have been a poem. But I couldn’t tear my eyes away. It was like one of those scenes where the actors don’t know they’re being filmed. I was the only viewer, and she had no idea, couldn’t know, that she had an audience.

At one point, Ingrid uncrossed her legs to rest the open book on her thigh. She lifted the other foot and set it on the edge of the sofa. The robe opened all the way. Under the fabric there was nothing. No panties, no stockings, nothing. The sunlight hit her directly between the legs for a couple of seconds, just long enough for my brain to register the image and file it away under permanent archive. Pale skin, completely shaved, a clean, exact slit.

Then she put her foot back on the floor as if nothing had happened, and went back to reading.

I had been hard for a while by then. Hard in an almost painful way, pressed tight against the zipper of my trousers. My desk hid me from the waist down from the street, but anyone who walked in through the door would have noticed at a meter away. I put both hands on the keyboard and pretended to type something. I wasn’t typing anything. I was barely breathing.

***

I later figured she had been like that for almost an hour. An entire hour with her reading on the sofa, the sun falling over her, the robe opening and closing with the rhythm of the pages. Four or five more times she gave me, without knowing it, the same shot. Her breasts were visible through the neckline, not very large but exactly the size a hand asks for. Her hair, her nape, that mouth she had kept half-open the whole time. At some point she brought her index finger to her lips, moistened it, and turned the page.

That nearly finished me off.

Don’t come in your pants without touching yourself —I thought, and almost laughed alone at how ridiculous the situation was—. Not here, not like this.

Close to ten-thirty she got up. She stretched—just one gesture, arms above her head—and disappeared inside. She took five minutes. Five minutes in which I, idiot that I was, went to the office’s little kitchenette, splashed cold water on my face, looked at myself in the reflection of the coffee maker, and went back to my chair thinking it was all over.

It wasn’t over.

She appeared again at the window, this time standing beside the glass, looking off to one side as if she had another mirror on the wall. She was still wearing the robe. In her hand she had a pair of small black panties, thin as paper. She lifted one leg, slid the fabric up to her knee, lifted the other, and pulled them all the way on. She adjusted them with her fingers at the hip and stood there for a moment looking at the glass in profile.

Then she untied the robe.

The fabric fell back very slowly, held for a second by her shoulder and then spilling over the sofa. Ingrid was left in panties, completely turned toward my side, without seeing me, looking at her invisible mirror. Her breasts were exactly as I had imagined them. Small, firm, with pink nipples hardened by the cool morning air. She ran both hands over her neck, over her collarbones, down to her waist, as if checking herself or simply enjoying the touch of her own fingers against her skin.

She turned sideways. The curve of her breast, her flat stomach, the arc of her back down to the beginning of her ass, all of it fifteen meters from my face, framed by an aluminum border and a pane of glass that she probably had never thought would become a stage. I was breathing through my mouth.

Then she reached for the clasp of the bra she had laid out on the back of the sofa. She held it for a moment in front of her breasts, fastened it behind her, and put it on with calm, as if that calm were another kind of provocation. She closed it under her back, settled the cups, and pressed her breasts into them with a slowness that made me clench my teeth. Then she slipped a finger under the edge, adjusted one breast and then the other, letting each nipple find its place and push the fabric forward. There was no hurry in the gesture. There was in me, though.

She opened the drawer of the living-room cabinet and took out a light-colored dress. She shook it out in front of her, stepped in with one leg, then the other, and pulled it up over her thighs to her waist. The fabric clung to her stomach, shaped her hips, and marked the exact hollow of her pussy beneath the underwear. She bent slightly forward, smoothed the fabric over her ass with both palms, then straightened again. Every movement seemed measured to show me a little more than the last.

And she wasn’t satisfied with showing me that. Not yet.

She took her hands to the neckline of the dress, opened a couple of buttons, closed them again, opened them once more. I imagined she might be able to see me, that she was gambling on that, but no, there was no way of knowing. The truth was that the fucking bitch was still there, standing calmly, modeling the dress in front of the glass, as if my presence were a rumor, a current of air, an impossible possibility.

She leaned one hip against the edge of the table, spread her thighs just a little, and ran her hand over the top of her leg, slowly moving up to where the skirt no longer showed anything. She sank two fingers between the fabric and her cunt, not to touch herself fully, but to adjust the seam, to press the cotton against her pussy and make it clear that there was still heat underneath. When she pulled them out, she moistened the tip of her index finger with her tongue, almost absentmindedly, and looked at the glass again.

I felt my cock jerk hard inside my trousers. The base of it was burning, the glans, everything. Sweat was sticking my back to my shirt. My mouth was dry as paper.

For a full three minutes she occupied herself like that, looking at herself. At last she chose the flesh-colored bra and put it on. She picked a dress from an invisible rack and pulled it over her head. She adjusted the skirt, the lapel, the neckline. She took a lipstick from somewhere and painted her lips while looking at the glass itself, her lips forming that perfect O women make when they put on lipstick. That O was the last image my morning kept.

Then she disappeared.

***

Five minutes later, her street door opened and she came out. Same dress, bag over her shoulder, sunglasses. She locked up, turned for a second to check that the door had shut properly, and I used those four seconds to look at her one last time. The dress outlined the line of her ass in a way that seemed deliberate. When she started walking to the left down the street, I forced myself to look away.

I stayed seated, hands still on the keyboard, for a couple of minutes. My head was full of questions I had never asked myself before. Had it been a coincidence? A woman alone in her house, with the confidence of someone who thinks she’s invisible, and me in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or was the opposite exactly what was wrong? Did Ingrid know my work desk faced her window? Had she calculated it? Was she one of those women who get turned on by the idea of being watched without ever having to say it out loud?

I don’t have an answer. But tonight, when I get home, I know I’m going to lock the bedroom door, turn off the light, and remember every one of those minutes one by one, slowly, with the detail that comes from replaying something. The robe, the book, the foot on the edge of the sofa, the pause in front of the mirror, the black panties sliding up her legs, the O of the lipstick. And tomorrow, first thing in the morning, I’m going to open my office and sit in my swivel chair, and I’m going to pretend I’m checking emails with my eyes fixed on anything but the window across the street.

Let’s see if she comes back.

If she comes back, it won’t be a coincidence anymore. Neither on her side, nor on mine.