The Neighbor Who Knew I Was Spying on Her

I had been living in that building for almost two years before I noticed her. It wasn’t love at first sight or anything like that. It was one October afternoon, I was out on the balcony smoking halfheartedly, and she appeared with a basket of wet laundry. I kept staring because I had nothing else to look at. That’s how it all started.

She was a woman in her early thirties, dark-haired, with wide hips that her short skirts made no attempt to hide. Married, I gathered from the man who left every morning with a briefcase and the look of someone in a hurry. He was the kind of husband who never notices what he has at home. I, from the apartment opposite, on the third floor left balcony, did notice. I noticed everything.

The building had a narrow inner courtyard that acted like an amplifier for sounds and sightlines. From my balcony I could see her clothesline almost at the same height as mine. The courtyard, barely four meters wide, didn’t offer much privacy to anyone not actively looking for it. She wasn’t looking for it. Or so it seemed.

I started reorganizing my mornings. Coffee, the paper edition I still bought out of habit, and waiting. She didn’t come out at the same time every day. Sometimes she appeared midmorning with the basket on her arm; other times, after noon, in the same clothes she’d worn the day before. But she always appeared. And I always found a reason to be on the balcony.

Her short skirts were what caught my attention most. When she bent down to pick up a garment from the floor or rummaged through the basket looking for something, the fabric rode up enough to show the bottom of her panties. Always white. Always snug. I stored that detail away somewhere in memory, where recollections blur with fantasies and you’re never quite sure how to untie the knot.

I built a map of her body out of glimpses and favorable angles. I knew how she moved when she leaned forward, I knew the exact shape of her hips under her clothes, I knew she didn’t wear a bra on hot afternoons because I could see it when she lifted her arms to reach the higher lines. It was intimate knowledge and completely one-sided. She knew nothing about me. Or so I thought.

There was a moment, three or four months after I’d started my silent surveillance, when it seemed to me that she was looking at me. It was only an instant: she turned her head in my direction while hanging out a white sheet, and her eyes stopped at the exact point where I was leaning on the railing. I didn’t hide. She didn’t avert her gaze right away either. She stood still for a second and then went back to what she was doing, as if nothing had happened.

After that day, I kept going out to the balcony at the same hour. But something had changed, though I couldn’t have said exactly what.

That year’s July was exceptional. Temperatures went above thirty-eight degrees for more than a week, and the whole city reduced movement to a minimum. I was on the balcony in swim trunks with a glass of water that got warm before I finished drinking it, when I heard her come into the courtyard.

It took me a second to understand what I was seeing.

She wasn’t carrying a laundry basket. She was wearing only white lace panties, small ones, with a tiny bow at the waist. Nothing else. She settled into the plastic hammock propped against the courtyard wall, leaned back with her arms behind her head, and closed her eyes. Her thighs were barely apart. The two o’clock sun was beating down on her full on.

I stood frozen.

It was the first time in months I’d seen her without the clothesline as an excuse, without the ritual that gave the whole thing the appearance of normality. This was different. This was, if I wasn’t lying to myself, deliberate.

I dropped my gaze to her belly. The lace revealed the shape of what it covered. I could see the soft pull of the fabric and the way her thighs, only slightly parted, left a triangle of shadow that my imagination completed without effort. I felt the heat in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with the day’s temperature.

My swim trunks got tight in seconds.

I don’t know the exact moment I lost control. I remember leaning on the railing, trying to maintain some kind of composure, when I realized I had a completely visible erection and that she was looking at me. Not with surprise. With something that looked a lot like the satisfaction of someone confirming something they’d already known in advance.

She didn’t do anything right away. She held my gaze for what felt like a whole minute. Then, slowly, with the calm of someone who has made up her mind and isn’t about to back down, she brought one hand to the center of her panties. Not urgently or dramatically. With the same ease she used to hang laundry on Tuesday mornings.

Her fingers started moving over the lace. I could see the motion from where I was, small but unmistakable. She spread her thighs a little more. She didn’t look away from me.

I did the only thing I could do. I took my cock out of my trunks and grabbed it in my hand. There was no conscious decision. It was simply what happened, as if the rest of my reasoning had disconnected and all that was left was this: her, me, the four meters of courtyard between us, the July sun flattening the still air.

I took barely two minutes. The tension built up over months of mornings with cold coffee and afternoons of waiting burst all at once, with no warning, in an intensity that left me bent over the railing. When I looked up, she was still in the hammock. Still looking at me.

She slid her panties down her legs with a slow, almost choreographed movement. She let them fall to the courtyard floor. She turned her back to me, and for a long moment she showed me perfect ass under the July sun, skin slightly reddened by the heat, the curve between waist and hips I had guessed at so many times without being able to confirm. Then she turned back toward me.

Her thighs were spread wide open. Her hand went back to work, this time with no fabric in the way. The distance between our balconies wasn’t large, but it wasn’t small either. Even so, I could see enough. The little shivers running through her every so often. The rhythmic movement of her fingers. The way her back arched slightly every few seconds.

I gripped my cock hard, the head swollen and wet, and started jerking off without taking my eyes off her. The glans went red instantly, taut, throbbing, as if it wanted to split the skin. The hot air made the foreskin stick to my fingers, and I moved fast, clumsy at first, then hungrier, feeling my balls tighten under the swim trunks. She never took her hand off her cunt. She opened and closed her fingers over her vulva with almost obscene precision, parting the wet flesh, rubbing her clit with her thumb until it shone.

“Look at me,” she said, so low it almost vanished in the courtyard, but I heard her.

There was no way to pretend I hadn’t. She was giving me an order and I obeyed without thinking. I yanked off my swim trunks and let them fall to my feet. The air hit my whole cock, long, heavy, already leaking pre-cum from the tip. She barely smiled, a tiny curve of the mouth, and spread herself wider. Her thighs tensed. Her cunt, shaved and wet, was exposed in brutal clarity. The pink entrance, the parted lips, the sheen of her own juices running down toward her perineum.

She propped herself up on her elbows and, without stopping touching herself, lifted one leg, resting her ankle on the edge of the hammock to offer herself better. Then she shoved two fingers inside herself. Not slowly, not timidly. She jammed them in and started pumping them with filthy frankness, sloshing in her own wetness while she looked at me as if I were the one who was really naked.

“Do you like watching?” she asked.

I nodded. I couldn’t say anything. My throat had closed up.

She wet her fingers with spit and pushed them back in, this time with a clearer, stickier sound. Her breathing changed. Her stomach tightened. I kept stroking my cock, the shaft hard as a rock, the skin so sensitive from the friction it hurt. I came against my palm before I meant to, a short, thick load that burst out in spurts, hot, white, splattering my fingers and my stomach. I stood there panting, shaking, watching her touch herself with the same fierce calm as before.

When she finished, I knew because she went completely still and threw her head back. It lasted only a moment. Then, unhurriedly, she got up, picked her panties up off the courtyard floor, and without looking at me a second time, went back into her apartment. The door closed softly.

***

That same afternoon, as the sun went down, I started hearing the elevator more often than usual. Up, down, up again. I leaned out the window and saw the truck parked double-parked in the street, its back doors thrown wide open. Two men were loading boxes and furniture wrapped in clear plastic. She supervised from the sidewalk, a travel bag over her shoulder and her hair pulled back in a low ponytail.

I put on shoes and went downstairs, without really knowing why. By the time I reached the street, the truck was almost full. I saw her under the streetlamp on the corner. Her husband was three meters away, talking on the phone with a hurried expression, oblivious to everything else. We looked at each other.

It was a second, no more. No smile, no gesture, no movement from either of us. Just eyes. Hers were dark, the exact color things have when it’s already too late for them. They said nothing I could translate into words, but they didn’t need to.

She raised her hand slowly and blew me a kiss from the sidewalk, with the same calm she had shown in everything else. Then she turned and walked toward the truck. I went into the entryway.

When I opened my apartment door, there was an envelope on the floor. White, rectangular, no return address, no stamp. I picked it up and opened it right there in the doorway, with the key still in my hand.

It was a short note. Four lines written by hand in small, neat lettering, with no flourishes or decorations.

I won’t reproduce what it said here. What I can say is that it was direct, to the point, and that it answered questions I had never voiced aloud. I can also say that if I had found that envelope before that July afternoon, I would have acted differently. Much differently.

But I didn’t find it before. I found it after, when the truck had already turned the corner and the streetlamp was lighting up a completely empty stretch of sidewalk.

I kept the envelope in the bedside table drawer. It’s still there.

Sometimes, when summer heat presses in and the inner courtyard fills with that heavy silence that only exists at two in the afternoon, I think about her. The new tenant on the third floor barely uses the clothesline. There are no hammocks in the courtyard. There’s nothing to look at.

There are nights when I wonder whether what happened between us needed words to be real. Whether the fact that we never spoke, never even greeted each other in the elevator with anything more than the slightest nod, took weight away from what it was or, on the contrary, added to it. I always come to the same conclusion. What is left unnamed sometimes weighs more than everything else.