Peeping through the keyhole became a habit

The house had three floors and a shared bathroom on the second. When Daniel first came to see it, the landlord explained in complete seriousness that the bathroom lock hadn’t worked for months. It wasn’t serious, he said. The door closed. It just didn’t have a latch.

Daniel signed the rental contract that same afternoon.

He had been living there for five weeks when she arrived. The landlord mentioned it to him on Tuesday morning: from Friday on, there would be another tenant in the back room on the second floor. She was quiet, worked during the day, and the room had been empty for two months.

All of that turned out to be true.

Sofía was quiet. Soft-spoken. She went up and down the stairs with barely a sound, which for an old wooden house was almost an art. She cooked at reasonable hours, left the countertop clean, and every night, around eleven, went up to the shared bathroom to shower before bed.

Daniel knew it the first night because he was awake, as he almost always was when he took a while to fall asleep, and he heard her steps in the hallway, the soft click of the bathroom door closing, the sound of hot water running through the house’s old pipes. Nothing extraordinary. The noise of someone showering in the next room.

He closed his eyes and took a few minutes longer than usual to fall asleep.

***

The second night he left the book on the nightstand earlier than usual.

The third night he turned off the light before she went up and stayed seated in the dark, listening. He heard the steps on the stairs, the soft creak of the third step, the click of the door. The water.

The fourth night he stopped in the hallway.

There was no plan. He simply left his room with the most transparent excuse he had ever used in his life —to go to the kitchen for water— and when he passed in front of the bathroom door he stopped. From inside came the sound of the water still off. She was undressing.

The bathroom lock was one of the old kind, with a large iron key and a keyhole the landlord had never covered up. Daniel looked at it for a moment. Then he looked down the hallway in both directions. Then he looked back at the hole.

He crouched down.

***

It wasn’t a perfect angle. He could see a strip of the bathroom: the white tile floor, part of the sink, and if he adjusted the position of his head, the area in front of the mirror.

Sofía was standing in front of the mirror.

She had shoulder-length brown hair and tied it up to get into the shower. But she hadn’t tied it up yet. She was looking at herself in the mirror with that expression people have when they’re truly alone, when no one is watching them. Effortlessly, shapelessly.

She took off the tank top she wore as pajamas.

Daniel didn’t breathe.

Her back was straight and her shoulders were still tanned from summer. She looked at herself in the mirror for a moment without any hint of display, simply looking, and then folded the tank top with a mechanical gesture and set it on the edge of the sink.

The shorts came off after that.

She was wearing plain beige underwear. She took that off too without ceremony, like someone who has nothing to hide because she is alone, and suddenly Sofía was completely naked three meters from him with only one door between them.

Daniel pressed the palm of his hand to the wall.

Sofía gathered up her hair, turned the shower tap, and waited with her hand under the stream for the water to warm up. In that everyday gesture, standing there with one arm extended and her body relaxed, Daniel thought it was the most intimate thing he had ever seen in his life. Not because it was especially erotic. But because it was completely real.

He watched her lower her chin, flick a drop from her wrist, touch one side of herself like someone soaping up before stepping in. He saw the curve of her breasts move with her breathing, the soft line of her belly, the pubis barely covered by a brief shadow before she turned in profile. There was nothing theatrical about her. No pose. No invitation. Just a naked woman alone, getting ready to get wet under the water, and that naturalness loosened and tightened his body at the same time.

Daniel slid his hand into the pajama pants almost without deciding to. The fabric brushed his skin and the contact sent a dry shiver through him, a current that shot from his lower belly to the nape of his neck. His mouth was slightly open, his breathing held back, and the noise of the house —the pipes, the faint creak of wood, some distant car— fell away, crushed beneath the pounding in his ears.

Sofía was still there, on the other side of the door, with her skin exposed, her nipples barely tightening in the cool bathroom air before the steam covered her. Daniel clenched his teeth when his own hand found the hardness of his cock, still half asleep but growing fast, hot beneath his palm. He imagined her touching herself the way he touched himself, spreading her legs, sinking two fingers into her wet cunt while she looked at herself in the mirror. The image drove a brutal jolt between his navel and his groin.

Then the sound changed.

Not suddenly. Gradually. The stream of water kept falling, but there was something else, something beneath that sound, a difference in rhythm that took a few seconds for him to identify. When he understood it, he squeezed his eyes shut hard.

Sofía wasn’t just showering.

He couldn’t see her. He could hear, faintly, something different mixed in with the sound of the water. It wasn’t a clear moan, nothing that would have reached his room with the door closed, but in the hallway, with his attention sharpened to the limit, it was unmistakable. There was a tiny tremor in her breathing, a brief sway, as if she were rubbing her clit with her wet hand or pinching one nipple between her fingers. Daniel stayed still, his knuckles white, while his imagination filled the gap in the shower stall with her body arching, opening her legs under the spray, water sliding over her mound, over her thigh, over her round ass, over her mouth now half open releasing air with an urgency that was no longer about washing or resting.

His hand moved faster. The foreskin slid up and down with wet friction, the tip of his cock sensitive, charged, and the heat began to build at the base with a pressure that made him breathe in short gasps. He thought of pushing the door, of putting his face through the crack, of seeing her properly from the front, with water running over her tits and her slippery vulva, open, throbbing. He thought about what face she would make if she knew he was there, crouched like an animal, masturbating to the rhythm of her low gasps.

Daniel came before she did.

He stayed still for a moment, braced against the door, his hand motionless and his heart hammering against his ribs. He felt the cum rise in short, thick waves, hot against his fingers and pants, his whole body tightening in a silent spasm that bent his back for a second. From inside came the sound of the water still, her changing rhythm.

Then he left.

***

He went into his room without turning on the light and sat on the edge of the bed. He listened to the tap turn off. The shower curtain slide open. The steps on the tiles. The towel being lifted from its hook.

The bathroom door opening.

Sofía’s steps crossing the hallway to her room.

The soft click of her door closing.

The house fell silent.

Daniel lay back in the dark with his eyes open. He couldn’t see the ceiling, but he looked at it anyway. He thought he should feel ashamed, and in fact something like shame was there, mixed with another thing that left him no room. His fingers were sticky, his pants wet, and still what burned most was not the semen cooling on the fabric but the certainty of having heard her breathe naked behind an unlocked door.

It took him almost two hours to fall asleep.

And while he waited for sleep, at some point between midnight and two in the morning, he came to a conclusion so simple it almost seemed strange: tomorrow night he was going to be back in that hallway. It wasn’t a decision. It was simply what was going to happen.

This time he would stay until the end.

***

The fifth night arrived with the same punctuality as the previous ones.

Daniel ate quickly. He pretended to read for an hour. At ten-thirty he turned off the light in his room and sat in the dark, waiting. If for some reason Sofía opened the bathroom door and looked into the hallway, she would see only darkness in the strip beneath her door. Nothing that would draw attention.

When he heard her steps climbing the stairs, the third step creak, the bathroom door open, he got up.

This time he stood in the hallway without excuses. Without the kitchen-water story. He crouched in front of the keyhole and adjusted the angle until he found the strip he was looking for.

Sofía was already taking off her pajamas.

This time he could see her from the front. The belly first, smooth under the bathroom’s yellow light. Then the torso when she took off the top, and briefly touched herself with both hands, not with intent, just the automatic gesture of someone checking whether she’s cold. In that lack of intent there was something Daniel found more overwhelming than anything else.

Sofía looked at herself in the mirror.

He watched her watch herself.

Then she lowered her gaze, let her hair down, and began running her fingers through her scalp as if she were massaging it. She closed her eyes for a moment. Opened her mouth slightly. It was a small gesture, unimportant, the kind of thing someone does at the end of a long day when they are finally alone.

Daniel noticed that he had gone too long without breathing.

Sofía opened her eyes, looked at the tap, and turned it. The water began to fall. She waited for it to warm up with one hand extended under the stream, and when the temperature seemed right she stepped into the shower and closed the curtain behind her.

The silhouette of her body appeared on the other side of the fogged glass.

Daniel braced one knee on the floor to keep the angle, eyes fixed on the keyhole, though there was not much left to see. Only her shadow moving under the water. But something in him was still there, crouched in the cold, unable to leave. He imagined her sliding a hand over her belly, parting the lips of her cunt with two fingers, letting herself fall against the wall while the water struck her chest and ran between her thighs. Every blurred movement of the silhouette made him clench his jaw, as if he could complete the rest by sheer need.

Tomorrow I’ll be here too, he thought.

And next week. And the one after that.

Until something changed. Or until he changed. Or until the lock stopped being broken, something the landlord had been promising for months and that, suddenly, Daniel hoped would never happen.

The water kept falling.

He kept waiting.