The Curtainless Window in the Apartment Across the Way

I moved into that apartment by accident. The previous tenant had left everything half-finished, and the rent had dropped by almost a quarter. It was on the sixth floor, overlooking the inner courtyard of an old downtown block, and the windows looked straight across to another identical building on the other side, no more than fifteen meters away. That was the problem, according to the landlord. Most people preferred light, views, distance from the neighbors. I didn’t care. I worked nights and slept during the day, and the last thing I wanted was a bright apartment.

It took me three weeks to notice her.

It was Thursday, or maybe Wednesday. I was smoking on the balcony around eleven at night, with the light in my living room off so the smoke wouldn’t drift inside. I looked up on instinct, not searching for anything, and I saw her cross the lit rectangle of the apartment across the way. She was completely naked.

It wasn’t a one-second scene. She walked slowly, with her hands at her sides, as if she were strolling. Her hair was pinned up and her body was lit from behind by a yellow lamp. She crossed from left to right and disappeared through an interior door. The window was left empty, glowing like a turned-off screen.

I crushed the cigarette between my fingers until it burned me. I hadn’t moved. I don’t think I’d even breathed. I felt my cock harden against the fabric of my pants, an immediate, brutal jolt, as if my body had understood before my head what I had just seen.

I waited. Ten, fifteen minutes went by. She appeared again, this time with a mug in her hand. She stood in front of the window, blew on the rim of the mug, and took a sip. She was looking down, toward the street, toward nowhere in particular. Her tits were heavy, white in the yellow light, the dark, large nipples outlined against the glass, and a thick triangle of dark hair between her legs made me look away for a moment to swallow. My mouth went dry imagining that cunt up close, the flesh gathered in the hair, how it would smell, how it would taste.

That night I didn’t sleep. I jerked off twice before three in the morning, the first time standing in the kitchen, braced against the counter, with the fresh image of her tits swaying as she moved, the second time lying in bed, spitting into my hand and stroking my cock slowly, drawing it out, imagining her on her knees sucking me off. I came over my stomach with a grunt clenched between my teeth. I got up three or four more times to check whether the light was still on. It was. At five in the morning, when it began to get light, someone switched off the lamp from inside and the window sank into shadow.

The next day I bought a chair.

I know that sounds ridiculous. But up to then I’d only used the balcony for smoking while standing, and I needed something that would let me sit still without my silhouette being visible. A low, dark folding chair. I set it behind the inner frame, in the shadow thrown by the jamb. From outside, from her apartment, it was impossible to see me. I checked several times, turning lights on and off, leaning out and pulling back.

At eleven that night I was already sitting there.

She didn’t appear until close to one. She came out in a short robe, poured herself a drink, and sat on the sofa in front of the window. She turned on the television. She stayed like that for half an hour, legs crossed, nothing interesting for me. I was starting to think the night before had been a stroke of luck and wouldn’t happen again.

Then she got up and took off the robe.

She did it without theatrics, like someone taking off a coat at home. She let it fall onto the sofa and walked to the window. She didn’t draw the curtains. She rested one hand on the glass, looked down for a second, and turned back toward the interior. That night she was naked for almost an hour. I watched her idly stroke her tits while she changed channels, pinch one nipple between thumb and forefinger until it stood hard, let her hand drop between her legs and stay there, with her fingers brushing her cunt without going inside, almost like an unconscious gesture. I had my cock out of my pants before I realized it, hard and throbbing in my hand, and I started jerking off slowly, following the rhythm of her fingers, coming onto the handkerchief when she took two fingers to her mouth and sucked them. I didn’t move from the chair, not when my back started to ache, not when my left leg fell asleep.

The next morning, in the bar on the corner, while I ordered a coffee, I found myself searching the female customers for her face. As if I’d recognize it. As if I could recognize it. I’d only ever seen her in silhouette, through a pane of glass and fifteen meters of air. But the search was automatic. Some part of me was already thinking of her as someone I knew.

By the third night I understood it wasn’t a coincidence.

She always appeared around the same time, between eleven and twelve. She turned on two lamps: one on the ceiling, one standing by the window. The standing lamp was clearly out of place. If she wanted to read, she should have put it on the other side of the sofa. It was positioned to light her. So she could be seen.

Then came a ritual. She took off her clothes, unhurriedly, standing in the middle of the living room. Sometimes she’d walk around the apartment for a while — I couldn’t see her completely when she went into the kitchen or the hall, but her shadow moved behind the half-open doors —. Then she’d return to the living room and stay there, in my field of vision, until after one.

I learned to recognize her. I learned that she scratched her right shoulder when she was distracted. That she had a small mole just below her left breast. That she usually read with her head tilted, biting her lower lip. That when she got up to pour another drink she would do it glancing toward my balcony for a moment, without focusing, without knowing I was there. Or so I thought.

One night, the fifth or sixth, I did what I’d been avoiding doing.

I pulled my pants down while I was in the chair. I took my cock out, already hard and leaking at the tip, and gripped it with my right hand. She was sitting on the sofa, legs open to one side, reading. I started slowly, pinching the head firmly with my thumb and forefinger, sliding the foreskin up and down in long strokes. I spat into my palm and grabbed it again, and this time I worked it faster, fist closed to the base, imagining her putting the book down, coming to the window, licking her lips, and crooking a finger at me. Imagining her climbing the stairs, coming into my living room, kneeling between my legs, and taking my cock into her mouth until it hit her throat. I came in less than three minutes, with a violent spasm that bent me forward, the load blasting in two thick streams onto the balcony floor. I wiped myself with a towel I’d left under the chair and stayed still, breathing slowly, with a strange heat at the back of my neck. A mix of shame and something darker, more pleasurable. The feeling of having crossed a line without anyone watching me cross it.

Except that someone had been watching me.

***

I understood it two nights later.

She was sitting on the kitchen counter — from my balcony you could see through the double doors, one of those open-plan kitchens that face the living room —. She was drinking something, white wine I suppose, from a narrow glass. Her legs were apart, one hand resting on her knee, the other holding the glass. The light hit her left breast and left the other one in shadow. Her cunt was open between her thighs, shining under the kitchen fluorescent light, with the full lips parted just enough for the pink inside to show.

Suddenly she lowered the hand from her knee and stroked her thigh. Slowly, upward, to the crease of her groin. She stopped. Lowered it again. Raised it again. This time she didn’t stop. She slipped her fingers between the lips of her cunt and began rubbing her clit in small circles, never taking her eyes off the front. I watched her belly tense, the hand holding the glass tremble for an instant, her mouth part slightly.

And then she turned her head toward the window.

It wasn’t a vague gesture. She turned her head with intent, slowly, with two fingers still inside her cunt, and fixed her eyes on my balcony.

At that distance and in that light, she couldn’t see me. I knew that. I was in the shadows, behind the frame, and my chair was another handspan back. I had checked a thousand times. But even so I stayed motionless, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped animal and my cock painfully hard inside my pants.

She smiled.

A small smile, almost imperceptible, just the faint movement at the corner of her mouth. Then she pulled her fingers out of her cunt, took them to her mouth, and sucked them one by one, never taking her eyes off me. She stepped down from the counter, set the glass on the marble, walked to the window, and placed both hands on the glass. Her tits flattened against the pane, the nipples hard as stones, her breath fogging the glass from the inside. She stayed like that for ten seconds. Maybe fifteen. Looking at me.

And then she went back to the sofa and kept reading, as if nothing had happened.

***

From that night on, everything changed.

I didn’t rush to move, didn’t stop watching, didn’t do any of the things a sane man would have done. I did exactly the opposite. I learned to wait for her more carefully, to watch better, to hold my breath when she came close to the glass. I took my cock out as soon as I saw her enter the living room and didn’t put it away again until she turned the light off.

And she, she started giving me more to look at.

One night she sat on the sofa with a vibrator. A big black one, with a thick, shiny tip. She leaned back against the cushions, spread her legs wide with her feet on the coffee table, and ran it first over her tits, circling her nipples until they stood so hard I could see them from my balcony. Then she lowered it over her stomach and brought it to her cunt. She rubbed it over herself without inserting it, grinding it between her lips, arching her back. When she finally shoved it in, she did it in one go, all the way, and I saw her mouth fall open in a moan I couldn’t hear but could almost feel in my chest. She started fucking herself with it, first slowly, pulling it almost all the way out and pushing it back in to the hilt, then faster, with her free hand clutching one breast and pinching the nipple. She changed position: got on her knees on the sofa, with her back to the window, and kept driving it in from behind, offering me her round white ass parted by her own hands. I was jerking my cock at the same pace, biting my tongue so I wouldn’t moan out loud, and I came before she did, a long thick stream that stained my thighs and the floor. It took her a long time, much longer than I had ever lasted, letting herself go and coming back and letting herself go again. When she was finished she stayed still on the cushions, on her back, with her legs still open and the shiny vibrator between her thighs, one breast rising and falling with her breathing, her hand still between her legs. Then she stood up, walked to the window naked and sweaty, and rested her forehead against the glass. That night she didn’t smile. She closed her eyes. And she stayed like that for a while, as if resting against me.

Another night she approached the window, lifted two fingers, and placed them on the glass. She moved them slowly, with an exact gesture, imitating the way she would open a cunt for me, or the way a mouth would suck a cock. Then she put those same two fingers in her mouth, drew them out shining with saliva, and lowered her hand to her cunt, rubbing her clit very slowly against the glass, with her tits flattened against the pane and her eyes closed. I didn’t move. I didn’t open my window. I didn’t turn on any light. But I jerked off in silence until I came twice in a row, the second time almost dry, with the head so sensitive it almost hurt. I felt in my throat that sensation of someone receiving a message in a language they’ve understood for the first time.

Another night, she didn’t appear. I stayed in the chair until four in the morning, smoking, waiting, convinced something had happened to her. She appeared the following night in a short black dress. She stood in front of the window, looking at me — if it was at me, I couldn’t be sure, but I wanted to believe it was — and very slowly unbuttoned the dress, one button at a time. Underneath she wore nothing. When she was done, she let the dress fall at her feet and stood naked, both hands at her sides, not moving. As if saying: “You wanted this? Here it is.” Then she turned around, bent down slowly at the waist with straight legs, and showed me her spread ass and her pink cunt shining between her thighs. She stayed like that for a long while, moving her hips just barely, offering herself. I came without barely touching myself, with two quick strokes of my hand.

***

I don’t know how it’s going to end.

Two months have passed. I haven’t spoken to her. I don’t know her name, or the name of the street where her entrance is — though I could find out in five minutes, if I wanted to —, or what she does for a living. I know she eats late, sleeps with the lamp on, has a black cat that sometimes crosses the sill and looks at her the way she looks at me. I know she prefers white wine to red and reads novels, not magazines. I know that last Tuesday she cried on the sofa and I had no idea why, and that that night she didn’t get undressed.

What I don’t know is what she expects.

Some nights I imagine that one day I’ll find a note under my door. That she’ll buzz the entryphone with some random name and come upstairs and sit on my sofa and say: “I’ve been waiting for you for two months.” And then she’ll kneel between my legs, pull my cock out of my pants, and suck me to the hilt, her tongue circling the head, looking up at me with the same eyes she used to look at me with through the glass. Other nights I think that would ruin everything. That what we have lives exactly in that distance, in that fifteen-meter pane of glass that separates us and joins us. That if I touched her, the two of us would stop being what we are: her, the woman being watched, me, the man who watches. And we’d go back to being two clumsy strangers in a small kitchen.

There’s a moment, every night, when she comes to the window before turning off the lamp. She rests her right hand on the glass, right at breast height. She looks toward my balcony. And she stays like that for a second, two, three, before moving.

I lift my hand. I press my palm against the air, against the night, against the idea of her glass. It’s ridiculous and she can’t see me. But some nights I would swear she smiles հենց at that moment, before turning off the light.

Then the window goes dark and the street starts breathing again.

And I sit in the shadows, in my low chair, with my cock still hard in my hand and my load drying on the floor, and wait for the next day.