That Night My Neighbor Forgot to Lower the Blinds
That story happened many years ago, during my third year of university. I lived alone in a residential complex on the outskirts, one of those developments that sprang up out of nowhere in the nineties: two parallel rows of low buildings separated by an inner courtyard with eucalyptus trees and a swimming pool that almost nobody used. My apartment faced the courtyard, third floor, and from my bedroom window I could see perfectly into the windows of the block opposite.
I never did learn her name. I’ll call her Camila. I had seen her several times at the university, usually in the cafeteria with a book open on the table and a coffee going cold in front of her. She was in advanced classes, that much I knew. She wore her dark hair tied up in a high ponytail, big glasses she was always pushing up with a distracted gesture, and she had a firm, unhurried way of walking, as if the whole university belonged to her. I had only exchanged two words with her, in a photocopy line, and I still remembered the husky tone with which she had said thank you.
That Friday night was unbearably hot. Summer had arrived all at once and the ceiling fan wasn’t enough. It was past one in the morning and I’d been tossing and turning in bed for over an hour, with a half-hard cock stuck to my briefs, unable to decide whether to jerk off quickly and get it over with so I could sleep. In the end I gave up, got up in my underwear, and opened the window wide. The air that came in was still warm, but at least it was moving.
And then I saw her.
In the building opposite, ground floor, a yellowish light outlined the inside of a living room. The blinds were completely raised. There wasn’t even a sheer curtain to hide anything. Camila was there, stretched out on a maroon sofa, completely naked.
At first I thought she was asleep. Her head slightly tipped back, one arm hanging over the edge of the sofa, the other hand resting carelessly on her stomach, very close to the dark, trimmed hair of her pussy. One leg on the floor, the other stretched along the cushion, so that her tits spread a little to the sides, soft and heavy, with the large dark nipples pointing each in a different direction. I had to step back half a pace from the window, because for a moment I thought she was going to open her eyes and catch me. She didn’t open anything.
I stood there staring at her, trying to decide whether she was all right. Drunk, probably. There was a bottle on the coffee table and, beside it, two glasses. The clue that she wasn’t alone hit me only then, and before I had finished processing it, I saw the man.
He came out from the back of the living room, also naked, with a small towel in his hand. He was thin, tall, with short hair. He had his back to me, so I never saw his face; but from the way he moved, from the lack of awkwardness, I knew this wasn’t the first time he had been in that apartment. When he turned for a moment toward the table, I managed to catch a side view of his cock: thick, long, still half-erect, hanging heavy between his legs as he set the towel on the back of the sofa.
I should have closed the window. I should have stepped away, turned off my bedroom light, done anything else. I thought it, I swear. But I didn’t move.
Until that night, my sexual education amounted to a few magazines folded under the mattress and an occasional borrowed VHS among friends. I had never seen a real body, alive, real, without the hygienic distance of a screen. And suddenly there in front of me was this: a woman I had up to then considered curvy, almost full-bodied because of the way she dressed, and who now, naked under the direct light of the living room, was something entirely different. Her waist was narrow, her stomach flat, her legs long and firm. Wide hips and breasts, yes, but everything in proportion, everything arranged with a geometry that went unnoticed at university under her loose sweaters. Her tits hung full, with that heavy shape only real tits have when a woman is lying down, and between her slightly parted thighs you could make out her swollen cunt, already shiny, with the dark lips peeking through the trimmed hair.
The man sat on the edge of the sofa. He ran his hand along her side, slowly, from shoulder to hip, and Camila finally reacted. She didn’t open her eyes, but she turned her head just a little and let out a sigh I guessed more than heard. The man’s hand went up to her breast, covered it completely, kneaded it slowly, pinched her nipple between thumb and forefinger until it stood hard and pointed, and then let it go. He moved down toward her stomach. He stroked her pubis with an open palm, very slowly, and kept going lower. He brushed her cunt with his fingers, just over the top, a slow stroke that went from top to bottom and back again, and then he hooked an arm around the knee of the stretched-out leg and gently pushed it toward the back of the sofa.
I understood what was about to happen a second before it happened. I braced my left hand on the window frame and dropped my right hand straight inside my briefs. I was already fully hard, hard like I hadn’t been in months, the tip wet with fluid, and I grabbed myself at the base harder than I meant to. It wasn’t a conscious decision. My body moved ahead of my modesty.
The man stroked the inner side of her thigh, slowly, as if drawing a path. He opened the lips of her cunt with two fingers, spread them wide, and ran his tongue all the way from bottom to top, very slowly. I saw Camila jerk with her whole pelvis. He lowered his head again. He buried it between her legs. I couldn’t see exactly what he was doing, but I could see his back rising and falling with a slow rhythm, I could see the man’s hair moving between her open thighs, and I could see Camila’s hand groping for his neck, grabbing him, letting go, grabbing him again and pressing his face down against her cunt.
I pulled my briefs down to my knees without taking my eyes off them. I started jerking off slowly, very slowly, squeezing every time he pressed a breast with his free hand.
***
I had never done that to any girl. I hadn’t even dared to seriously think about it. The few times I had been with someone, in the back seat of a car or in a borrowed bed, everything had been quick and clumsy, almost a formality: pull out the cock, stick it in, come in a minute, apologize. What I was watching now was another language. It was a completely new grammar, and I was learning to read it from across a courtyard, with my cock in my hand and my mouth open against the glass.
Camila started moving. First just her hips, a barely perceptible sway that pushed her cunt against his face. Then the other leg, the one on the floor, came up onto the sofa too, and then she opened completely. I saw her cunt spread wide open, shining under the yellow light, and the man’s tongue working there without rest, going in and out, climbing up to the clit and down again. She took her free hand to one breast and started squeezing it herself, pinching her nipple, tugging it upward. I saw the exact moment she threw her head back and arched her neck. I still couldn’t hear anything, but I knew she had made some sound, because the man lifted his face, chin shiny, said something to her, and went back down to lick her.
My hand was moving by itself, up and down the whole length of my cock, squeezing hard at the tip every time it came up. I had my forehead pressed to the windowpane, also half open so the air could get in, and I could feel sweat running down my temple and over my chest. I didn’t dare look away for a second, as if I might miss a word of the new language.
After an endlessly long while, the man sat up. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said something to Camila. She answered by raising both arms toward him, an unmistakable invitation, and then she lowered one hand and grabbed his cock, already rock-hard, pointing at the ceiling. She stroked it two, three times, with her wrist loose, brought it to her face, and licked the tip from underneath, sticking out her whole tongue. Then she took it into her mouth. I watched it sink in halfway, watched Camila close her lips around it and start moving back and forth, sucking him with hunger, her cheeks hollowed. He grabbed her ponytail and set the pace for a while, pushing her head against his groin until she pulled away coughing a little and laughed.
He settled himself on top, placing one knee between her legs and then the other. I watched him adjust his cock with one hand, watched him run it up and down the lips of her cunt a couple of times to wet it properly. I didn’t see any condom, and that seemed to me, even then, reckless. But at that hour, in that living room, recklessness seemed to be part of the script.
He entered her slowly. I knew it from the way Camila held her breath and let out a muffled groan, different from the earlier ones, an open, husky “ah” that came from deep inside her. From the way he stayed still for a few seconds, his cock buried to the hilt, holding himself up on his arms before starting to move. At first it was all him, short, controlled thrusts, his cock coming out halfway and sinking back in to the balls. Then, little by little, she joined in. Camila’s hips began to answer, first timidly, then with a frankness that made me gasp against the glass. She returned each thrust by pushing her ass against the sofa, trying to bury his cock deeper herself.
They sped up. He braced himself better on his knees; she brought both hands up to his ass and pressed with both open palms, setting the pace, pulling him in every time he drove forward. The living room light drew a beautiful shadow on Camila’s side and on the breast bouncing against her chest with each thrust. I followed every shove, every movement of hers answering his, and my own body went in parallel, learning the rhythm. I spat into my hand to make it slicker and went back down, faster now, following the rhythm of the other man’s cock going in and out of Camila’s cunt.
***
At some point Camila lifted both legs into the air. She wrapped them around the man’s waist, as if she wanted to hold him there, synchronize with him, bury him to the hilt. Then she let them go. She stretched them upward again, apart, feet pointing at the ceiling. From where I was, you could see perfectly her cunt swallowing his cock whole, the cock coming out shiny with juices and going back in, the guy’s balls slapping her ass with a sharp sound every time. She started opening and closing her toes in a rhythm she didn’t seem to control, and it was then that, thanks to the open window, the first clear sound of the night reached me: a long, open, filthy moan that crossed the courtyard as if nothing separated it from my room.
“Oh, like that, like that, don’t stop,” I heard her say, with a broken voice. “Harder, harder, fuck me harder.”
I bit my lip so I wouldn’t answer with another groan. I felt short of breath, as if the whole courtyard had shrunk to the size of that window. I didn’t care if the sound could be heard on other floors too. I didn’t care about anything. I was jerking off openly now, with my cock aimed outward, toward the courtyard, toward her, as if somehow what was coming out of me could reach the other side.
The man thrust harder. Faster. He grabbed one breast with one hand and put the other on her neck, not squeezing it, just holding it, and he drove his cock in with his whole hip, all the way in, every time. Camila began to let out one shout after another, short, almost angry, as if pleasure offended her by demanding so much from her.
“I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m gonna come,” I heard her scream, higher and higher. “Don’t stop, bastard, don’t stop, give it all to me…”
And then she curled her toes into a fist, dug her heels into his back, dug her nails into his ass too, and let out a cry longer than any of the previous ones, a real orgasm scream, starting high and breaking downward as her whole body trembled on the sofa.
The man arched his back. He froze for an instant, in an impossible posture, with his cock buried to the hilt, and I heard him let out an animal grunt from deep in his chest. I saw his ass tense, saw him push one, two, three more times, no rhythm now, emptying himself completely inside her, and then he collapsed onto Camila with all his weight. She kept moving her pelvis underneath him, squeezing him with her legs, milking him dry. My own body answered in the same second: I felt the cum rise from very deep down, unstoppable, and I came in a spray against the window frame, a muffled groan against the glass, my cock throbbing in my hand after every spasm, cum hanging from my fingers, from the sill, from my briefs fallen to my knees. I had to brace myself with my free hand on the window frame so I wouldn’t fall. Forehead against the glass. Heart pounding out of my chest. Breath in pieces.
It took me a while to breathe normally again. Camila was stroking the back of the man’s neck with a limp hand while he was still inside her, breathing against her neck. Then he withdrew slowly and I saw his cock come out shiny, a thread of semen dripping down onto her thigh. She picked it up with two fingers, absentmindedly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and brought them to her mouth. He also took a while to stand up. When he did, he kissed her somewhere I couldn’t see and, without getting dressed, walked barefoot toward the back wall. He passed in front of the lamp and switched it off.
The living room went dark.
***
I pulled away slowly from the window. I didn’t close it. I wiped my hand and the frame with my briefs, in a sorry state, and sat on the edge of my bed for a long while, my back wet, my cock still half hard and my hands trembling, trying to understand what had just happened. The question wasn’t what I had seen. The question was what I had done with it. And the answer, that night, with the semen already drying on the hair of my stomach, disturbed me less than I had expected.
I ran into Camila a couple more times at the university over the following months. One morning in the cafeteria, another afternoon in the library. Both times she looked at me with the same courteous neutrality as always. Both times I held her gaze as if nothing were going on and returned the polite greeting, though inside me the image of the opened cunt, the screams, the way she had wiped semen from her thigh with her fingers was crashing down on me. We never got past that thank you in the photocopy line.
That summer I moved at the end of the next term and never again lived opposite a window like that, open onto other people’s intimacy without anyone knowing. But the lesson, if that was a lesson, stayed with me: that night I discovered that looking can be an act in itself, complete, capable of standing on its own. I didn’t need to repeat it to know that voyeurism, when it meets chance and the right darkness, is a form of pleasure as precise as any other.