The New Neighbors Caught Me Naked on the Terrace

There are habits that form without you even noticing, and others you cultivate with the slowness of a secret. Mine began when I went back to my grandparents’ village for the first time to spend a few weeks there on my own. I was nineteen, just out of student housing, and that apartment on the second floor seemed like a miracle: absolute silence, blinds nobody looked at, an empty fridge, and the whole day to myself.

The village, Aldea del Roble, had once been bustling in a way I only knew from my mother’s photos. By the time I started going there, it was already almost a skeleton. Ten or twelve old people in winter, a family passing through in summer. In my building, four floors with two doors on each, nobody had lived there for years except me, and only from time to time. The elevator had been shut off to save on communal electricity. The stairwell smelled of cold stone.

That first afternoon, after hauling up my bags and checking that the boiler still worked, I did something I hadn’t planned: I stripped completely naked before cooking. It wasn’t an erotic decision. It was a small, almost childish act of testing the silence. Nobody was going to hear me. Nobody was going to see me. The kitchen looked onto an enclosed inner courtyard, and the light coming through the living-room window only lit a couple of slate rooftops. I cooked pasta naked. I ate naked. I washed up naked. When I sat on the sofa to read, my body had gotten used to the air of the house as if it were another layer of clothing.

That habit became my little ritual of solitude. Every time I came back, at Christmas, at Easter, on some long weekend, I repeated the same gesture: I left my bag by the door, took everything off, and started moving around the apartment with nothing on but my skin. At first it turned me on. A lot. I walked around half-hard for hours, my dick swinging between my legs with every step, without needing to touch myself, just from the thrill of knowing I was doing something forbidden in a place where no one could forbid me anything. Some afternoons I’d sit on the sofa, spit into my hand, and jack off staring at the ceiling until I came across my belly in hot spurts that dripped down to my navel. Over time, that excitement faded. What remained was routine, which is a kind of tenderness toward yourself.

What never lost its charge was the terrace.

The glassed-in terrace was at the back of the living room. It was a cube of tempered glass with sheer curtains made of that translucent fabric that lets light through by day, but also, as I had checked many times, lets silhouettes show through from the outside. If you walk behind those curtains in the late afternoon, naked and in the sun, the only thing that gets hidden is the detail: the shape of the body, the curve of the shoulders, the thighs, everything that makes a naked body a naked body, is projected perfectly onto the fabric. And if you’re hard, the silhouette tells that story without any need for words: the stiff dick stands out with almost obscene clarity, head pointing upward, cutting through the light.

I discovered that by chance the second time I came back. I went up to the terrace to hang a T-shirt, looked down, and saw myself reflected in the window of a parked car: a white, upright ghost, with my dick pointing forward like the hand of a clock stuck at nine. I laughed to myself for a long time. Then I stopped laughing. I grabbed my cock in my right hand and started pounding it right there, pressed up against the curtain, watching my own shadow grow between my fingers. I stroked slowly at first, closing my fist at the base and sliding up to the glans, then faster, until I came in bursts against the fabric and two dark stains were left at hip height, as if signing the discovery.

After that, hanging laundry on the terrace stopped being a chore. It became something else.

***

I came back for work reasons in March of that year. My company had given me the option to work remotely for three months from wherever I wanted, and I chose Aldea del Roble without thinking about it too much. I wanted to clear my head. I wanted to sleep without traffic noise or an alarm. And, though I didn’t say it to myself in so many words, I wanted to feel the cold kitchen floor under the soles of my feet again.

The first few days were the usual. I set up the second monitor on the dining table, plugged in the router, called my boss to confirm that the VPN reached me. Through the office window — which was my uncles’ room, a room that smelled of old bedding — you could see the cobbled street, the two streetlamps, the bar that had been closed for a year. No one passed by. Not even the mailman, who left the few letters that arrived in a communal mailbox at the building entrance.

On Wednesday I put on the first load of laundry. I hung it out naked, without looking twice. I went back to the computer, finished the morning meeting, made myself a coffee. The normality of a secret life.

On Friday I heard the moving truck.

The first thing I thought was that it had turned onto the wrong street. Then, when I saw through the peephole two men carrying boxes up the stairs, I assumed it must be for some house on the other floor, maybe an inheritance that had changed hands. I didn’t think anything more of it. I shut the door, went back to the computer, and worked until midafternoon.

The next day, when I went out to buy bread, I ran into an older woman in the entryway — white hair pulled back, glasses on a chain — and two young women unloading a box from the trunk. One blonde, tall, wearing a tank top from some university basketball team I didn’t recognize, with tits that bounced every time she bent to pick up another box. The other brunette, shorter, with straight bangs and freckled shoulders, in tight jeans that showed off a round, firm ass. They greeted me with a quick “hola” that didn’t expect a reply. I sized up their ages without meaning to: twenty-two, twenty-three at most. The woman’s niece and granddaughter, I guessed. Or two friends who had come to help. I didn’t ask.

I went home with a loaf of bread under my arm and one very specific thought: now there are people here, you have to be careful.

For three days I did. I put on underwear in the morning. I closed the living-room curtains. I went out onto the terrace only in shorts. I worked with the discipline of a boarding school.

And then Monday came.

***

Monday dawned with a slanted March sun that came through the kitchen window and drew a yellow rectangle on the tiles. I got up at seven, made coffee, checked my emails. No meetings until eleven. The house was so quiet you could hear the fridge. Without thinking — that’s the important part, without thinking — I took off my shorts in the middle of the hallway and tossed them onto a chair.

I was me again.

At nine-thirty I put on a load of laundry. Short cycle, thirty degrees. I poured myself another coffee. I worked on a spreadsheet for an hour. When the cycle ended, I got up, opened the drum, filled the basin, and went up to the terrace with the ease of someone who had done it a hundred times.

The terrace was flooded with light. The curtains trembled in the slightest breeze. I knelt beside the clothesline, started taking out the first T-shirts, shook them out, hung them up. I was thinking about anything else — a presentation I had at four — when I heard the laughter.

Two voices. Female, young, with that high frequency you recognize without seeing anyone. They were coming from below, from the sidewalk in front of the building, just a few yards from my window. I froze, a T-shirt in my hand, not understanding at first what was happening. Then it hit me: the curtain. The sun. The silhouette.

My first impulse, just as it had been years earlier, was to duck. Press my body to the floor, crawl out, make myself invisible. I thought about it. I actually bent my knees.

But something faster than thought stopped me.

I felt myself getting hard. Not slowly, not in a gentle progression, but all at once, as if someone had flipped a switch in the center of my body. A hot current shot up through my legs, shoved blood downward, and within five seconds I was fully erect, standing behind the curtain, with the T-shirt still in my hand. My cock throbbed with every heartbeat, thick, taut, pointing up toward the ceiling with the thick vein standing out underneath. The glans was so swollen it hurt where the foreskin had pulled back, and I already had a thick bead of pre-cum peeking out at the tip, shining in the sun like a pearl.

The laughter came again. One of the girls said something I didn’t quite catch, and the other answered with a nearly shouted “you’re kidding me.” Then there was silence. A brief, heavy silence, the kind that forms when two people are looking at the same thing and neither wants to be the first to admit it.

I didn’t move.

I could have stepped aside. I could have taken three steps to the left, hidden behind the main wall, regained control. I didn’t. I stayed where I was, light at my back and my silhouette projected perfectly onto the fabric, knowing — feeling it in my scalp, in my fingers, in my shallow breathing — that they were still looking at the shadow of my hard cock outlined against the curtain.

I lifted my hand and hung the T-shirt. Slowly. As if no one were below.

I took out the next one, shook it out. The light fell directly on my shoulders and down my back, slipped between my ass cheeks and brushed my balls from behind. I knew exactly what they were seeing: a completely naked man, completely hard, with a cock stiff against the fabric like a stake, hanging laundry with the calm of someone who has nothing to hide. And I knew, above all, that they had already made the decision to keep looking.

“Fuck,” one of them murmured, very softly, and I caught it by pure chance, because the air was rising upward.

That word, said like that, went right through me.

“Girl, that dick is real,” the other whispered, and though she didn’t want me to hear that either, I heard it.

“Shut up, shut up, he’ll hear us.”

“I don’t care if he cums on himself, look at that.”

My whole body tightened. My cock gave such a violent twitch that it moved on its own, rising and falling in the air, and I knew they had seen it because one of them let out a broken, muffled laugh, like someone biting their lip not to scream.

I grabbed the next garment. It was underwear, ironically. I hung it up with the same slowness, giving the silhouette time to move, letting the curve of my arm be drawn fully against the curtain. My cock, hard and slightly shifted to one side by my posture, must have cast an unmistakable shadow. I could feel my heart pounding in my throat.

The blonde — because for some reason I decided at that moment that it was the blonde speaking — let out a choked laugh. The brunette hissed at her to be quiet, and it was heard perfectly. Then they whispered to each other, too low to understand, and from the kind of pauses and little laughs I knew they were arguing about whether to stay or go.

They stayed.

And then I did something I had never done before behind that curtain with witnesses: I lowered my right hand and grabbed my cock.

I did it slowly. I closed my fingers around the base, pressing my balls with my little finger, and slid my fist up to the glans in a long, slow motion, letting the silhouette account for every centimeter. I felt the skin glide, tight, slick with the bead of pre-cum that had run down to my hand. I brought it back down. I brought it up again. I was jerking off the curtain, the two girls below, myself, years of accumulated fantasy on that terrace.

“Oh my God, he’s jerking off,” one of them said, and by then she wasn’t even trying to keep her voice down.

“Don’t look, don’t look,” the other answered, without stopping looking.

The shadow of my hand moving up and down over the shadow of my cock must have been as clear as a film on a white sheet. I sped up. I spat into my palm without stopping, and the wet sound of my hand sliding along my dick had to have reached them, because in the silence of the village any noise falls down the facade like through a funnel.

My legs were trembling. My balls, tight and hot, had risen up to the base, tense, ready. With my left hand I grabbed the curtain, pressed my forehead to the fabric, and kept pounding my cock with my right, faster, harder, thrusting my hips forward to fuck my fist like it was a pussy. The curtain brushed my glans with each thrust and that friction was driving me insane.

Down below, one of them moaned. It was a low, involuntary moan, the kind that slips out when you’re looking at something you shouldn’t and your body betrays you. The other said something that sounded like “shut up, fuck,” but it also sounded horny, like she wasn’t exactly holding it together either.

When I hung up the last piece — I don’t even remember how I managed to do it with one hand — a whole sheet, I raised both hands to spread it properly across the line and the silhouette suddenly opened out, arms stretched wide, the whole body displayed against the light, with the stiff cock jutting between my legs like the mast of a cross. I grabbed it again. I couldn’t hold back anymore. I pumped it three, four times, squeezing the glans at the end of each stroke, and I came.

I came in torrents against the curtain. The first spurt came out with such force that I heard the impact against the fabric perfectly, a wet, dull thud. The second ran down the curtain leaving a thick, white trail, translucent backlit. The third and fourth dripped over my fingers and fell at my feet, onto the tiles. A groan escaped me, rough, from my throat, and that had to have reached them too.

This time, I heard both breaths from below. Fast. Broken. One of them said, “Let’s go,” and the other answered, “Wait.” They didn’t leave. They took another long minute, a whole minute watching the stain of my semen slide down the curtain like a fat tear, before I heard footsteps moving away along the sidewalk, and even then they weren’t in a hurry.

I carried the empty basin back down, still dripping, left the terrace, and closed the sliding door behind me.

***

What happened inside the house after I closed the sliding door I’ll save for another day. But that same afternoon, when I went down to the lobby to pick up a package I was expecting, I ran into the brunette on the stairs. She was alone, her hair tied back, holding a book against her chest. She looked up and held my gaze for a long second, unsmiling. Her eyes dropped, very clearly, to the fly of my trousers. She paused there. Then she looked back up, bit her lower lip, and kept climbing the stairs without saying a word. As she passed close enough that I could smell her shampoo, she murmured something that took me two seconds to make out: “same time tomorrow.”

I stayed on the landing longer than necessary, my cock swelling again inside my pants.

The next morning, when I went up to the terrace, the curtain was pulled back. I hadn’t touched it. And down below, on the sidewalk, two girls were sitting on the curb, pretending to look at their phones.

But I’ll tell that part in the second installment. If you want it.