The cleaner caught me from the courtyard

Tuesday began like any other telework Tuesday. Marina left at seven-thirty, gave me a distracted kiss on the cheek, and I heard her close the door while I was still lounging in bed. At eight I got up, hopped in the shower, and, as always, put on my robe to go downstairs for coffee. No underwear, no trousers, nothing. In summer, with the house to myself, that was the uniform.

We live in a strange building, split in two. The left side is long-term apartments, like ours. The right side is tourist flats, people coming and going every Saturday with suitcases, children, and wet towels. In the middle there’s an inner courtyard, a rectangle of white tiles with four flowerpots and a communal clothesline almost no one uses. The windows of the two blocks face each other. If you have your blind open and the person opposite does too, you can see perfectly what’s happening in their kitchen, their living room, or wherever.

I know because I’ve been looking for a while. Not systematically, I’m not a stalker, but I have sometimes seen a couple arguing, a man in boxers making a sandwich, a girl drying her hair. Harmless things I catch out of the corner of my eye while I write emails.

That morning the day was dragging. A video call meeting at nine, another at ten, and in between a spreadsheet that wouldn’t give in. Around 11:15 I decided to reward myself with a good old-fashioned break. I closed the laptop, flopped into the office armchair, and started flicking through videos on my phone. I’d been doing this for years and I’d exhausted the catalogue. I’d seen everything, or so it seemed.

And then I remembered the laundry basket.

The dirty clothes basket was in the bathroom, full of Marina’s things from the weekend. On Saturday we’d gone out to dinner, on Sunday we’d walked along the promenade and then stayed home with the windows open and a fan that barely moved the air. Marina had gone two days without a proper shower, she’d sweated, she’d been pressed against me on the sofa. I knew exactly what kind of panties I’d find if I rummaged a bit.

I pulled them out with my left hand, not looking. Light grey cotton ones, thin, with the elastic a little worn. I brought them to my nose right there, standing beside the basket. The smell was intact, dense, salty, unmistakable. I felt myself hardening under the robe, before I’d even touched myself. I went back to the office with the panties in one hand and the other already inside the belt, steering things into place.

***

I was about to sit down and put something on the screen when, out of pure reflex, I glanced at the window.

In the building across, exactly two floors opposite mine, there she was. The cleaner from the tourist block. A woman in her forties, more or less, slim, with long arms and dried-out blonde hair tied back in a low ponytail. I’d run into her in the entrance hall a hundred times and we’d never got past “hello, good morning.” She usually wore a blue uniform robe over an old tracksuit. She always smelled of bleach and cheap perfume.

That morning she was alone in the apartment opposite. The tourists must have gone to the beach because the suitcases were still by the door but the bed was rumpled and empty. She had come in to do the intermediate clean, the one you do halfway through a stay when guests ask for more towels or fresh sheets.

I saw her stop in front of her window. She sighed, fanned her face with her hand, brushed her fringe aside. It was the kind of heat that weighs on you, that sticks to your shoulders. She looked for a moment toward the courtyard, not at me, but downward, and went back to work with a gesture of annoyance.

And then she unfastened her trousers.

I thought she was going to pull them up or adjust them, but no. She lowered them to her ankles. She stood there for a moment like that, with the tracksuit bunched around her feet and the short robe barely covering half her thigh. She bent down to take off her sneakers and, without knowing it, gave me an image I’ll take months to forget.

Her arse, showing beneath the robe, stuffed into a pair of big white cotton panties that were no longer entirely white. The elastic marked her skin. She had more flesh than she seemed to with clothes on. The panties cut into her hips, formed a groove at the bottom, exactly where the thigh meets the buttock. There was a sweat stain, a damp shadow, in the centre of the fabric.

My cock shoved the robe forward as if it had a mind of its own.

***

I sat down in the office chair, slowly, without losing the angle on the window. I placed Marina’s panties over my nose and mouth like an improvised mask and breathed deeply. My wife’s smell on my face, the cleaner undressing opposite, my own hand closing around my cock. It was one of those situations that seem like cheap script until they happen to you.

“She probably hasn’t showered either,” I thought. Those panties, when she takes them off, probably smell just like these. The idea left my mind blank for a couple of seconds. I started moving my hand up and down at a very slow, controlled pace, like someone pacing himself.

She, on the other side of the courtyard, finished taking off her sneakers, stepped out of her trousers, and folded them carefully over the back of a chair. She stayed like that for a while, in her short robe and panties, fanning herself with a tea towel. Then, as if the heat had made the decision for her, she started undoing the buttons on her robe.

One. Two. Three.

The robe fell to the floor in a yank.

She wasn’t wearing a bra. She had small, wide-set breasts, with large, very dark nipples, almost brown. The skin of her torso was paler than her legs, a giveaway stripe from years of one-piece swimsuits. Her belly formed a little fold when she bent. She wasn’t a model. She was a real woman, tired, sweaty, left in her panties in someone else’s apartment because she couldn’t stand the heat anymore.

And she was driving me crazy.

***

She grabbed the mop and started running it over the floor. Every so often she bent down to wring it out, opening her legs to keep her balance. Every time she leaned forward, her arse pointed straight at my window. The panties pulled tight on her, the sweat-wet fabric worked its way between her cheeks. Once, when she crouched to pull something out from under the bed, I caught a glimpse of the dark trail in her crotch, the hairs peeking out from one side of the elastic. She wasn’t shaved. It was a neglected cunt, real, a woman who lived in her body without thinking about who might be looking.

I was jerking off with my head thrown back against the chair, Marina’s panties held against my face in my left hand, my right hand pumping faster and faster. My cock was rock hard, shining with pre-cum, the veins standing out.

The cleaner stopped for a moment. She left the mop leaning against the wall, straightened up, and took her hand to the waistband of her panties. I thought she was going to take them off and I nearly came just from the possibility. But no. She only slipped a finger under the elastic, peeled them away from her thigh, and settled them with a little tug. A ridiculous, domestic gesture, with no intention at all. And yet it was enough for me.

I felt the warning rise at the base of my cock.

I yanked Marina’s panties down at full speed, pressing them against the glans just in time. The first spurt soaked through them, thick, hot. The second stayed in the fabric. The third slid out and hit the parquet, in a line from my foot to the chair leg. I let out a moan, louder than I wanted, bit into the cloth to keep quiet, and kept squeezing my cock with my hand until nothing else came out.

I stayed there for a couple of seconds with my eyes closed, breathing through my mouth, while my heartbeat began to settle. I lifted my gaze to say goodbye to the show, to see her one last time mopping away from everything, and then the air caught in my throat.

She was still. Standing. Looking straight at me.

***

I don’t know how long she’d been like that. I don’t know exactly when she spotted me. Maybe the moan, maybe a sudden movement when I came, maybe the sun glinting on the window. The point is, there she was, standing in the middle of the apartment living room, in her panties, arms hanging at her sides, staring at me with the same annoyed face she’d had when she fanned herself before.

There was no surprise in her eyes. No outrage. Nothing, really. It was a long, cold, almost professional stare, the kind you give a dripping tap or a stain on the wall.

I didn’t move. I didn’t know what to do. My robe was open, my cock still half-raised and slick with semen, my wife’s panties hanging from my right hand like any old handkerchief, a small glossy puddle at my feet. The situation was so absurd I didn’t even have time to feel ashamed. I just looked back at her too.

And against all logic, I felt my cock stirring again.

She didn’t move either for several eternal seconds. Then, without taking her eyes off me, she slowly bent down, picked up the robe from the floor, and put it over her shoulders. She didn’t fasten it. She crossed it over her front with one hand, like someone taking out the rubbish in a hurry. She took two steps back, disappeared for a moment into the shade of the room, and reappeared beside the apartment door.

Before leaving, she did something I still haven’t managed to decipher. She lifted her chin toward me, toward the window, a tiny gesture, neither greeting nor reproach, and lowered the tourist apartment blind halfway. Exactly halfway. Enough to hide her face, enough to leave, for a little while longer, her legs and the elastic of her panties in view.

Then she closed it completely and I saw her go out into the courtyard, cross it with her cleaning cart, and disappear through the entrance of the other block without looking back once.

***

I stayed seated in the chair for a long while, robe open, Marina’s stained panties on my thigh. I cleaned the floor as best I could, with kitchen paper, with the slow movements of someone who still can’t quite believe what has happened. When I was done, I showered. I didn’t jerk off. I put on underwear for the first time in weeks and went back to the office to answer emails as if nothing had happened.

On Wednesday, when I went down to take out the rubbish at lunchtime, I ran into her in the entrance hall. She was taking a huge bag out of the bin room. She lifted her head, recognized me at once, and for a moment I thought she was going to say something. She didn’t. She just held my gaze for a fraction of a second longer than necessary and carried on with what she was doing.

On Thursday, at 11:15, the blinds of the tourist apartment opposite were wide open and the sun was pouring in. The cleaner was inside. Her robe was unbuttoned down to the fourth button. And she was looking, exactly, toward my window.