The Summer I Spied on the Fifth-Floor Neighbor

Valencia in August. The heat rises from the cobblestones like a thick breath that won’t dissipate even when night falls. I’ve lived in this penthouse for five summers, and the telescope still points at the sky in name only. I bought it with the excuse of Saturn, Jupiter, the full moon. The truth is that I stopped turning it upward long ago.

Across from my terrace rises a narrow seven-story building, with big windows and no shutters. Tenants move out every few months, so the show renews itself. I’ve seen couples arguing in silence, an elderly woman sewing on the balcony at three in the morning, a guy practicing guitar in his boxers every Monday and Wednesday.

And then, in July, she arrived.

I discovered her one Friday afternoon, when the light falls diagonally and comes in through the west-facing windows as if it were passing right through them. Fifth floor. Only one room visible from my terrace: the study, with the desk, the chair, and the computer.

What I saw made me let go of the glass.

She was kneeling on the chair, back to the window, with her nightgown hiked up to her waist. Her naked ass, round, pointed at the glass. One hand sunk between her thighs, two fingers buried to the knuckles in a cunt that shone with moisture even from that distance. The other hand braced on the chair back, gripping it, while she moved her hips against her own hand in short, slow circles. The computer screen lit the curve of her arched back and the hair gathered in a loose bun, with stray strands falling at the nape of her neck.

I moved my eye away from the telescope. Looked again.

She was still there, exactly the same, fingers going in and out, her thumb rubbing her clit between thrusts, oblivious to the fact that a stranger thirty meters away was watching her in silence with a cock already hard under his trousers.

Or so I thought.

The next day, at the same time, I looked again. She was in the same position, in the same chair. But this time she wasn’t showing me her back.

She was facing me. Looking straight at my terrace. At the telescope.

And she was touching herself.

Her legs were spread over the armrests, her nightgown rolled up under her tits—two small, firm breasts with stiff, dark, marked nipples—and one hand between her thighs opening her cunt in two with her index and ring fingers while the middle finger stroked her slit from top to bottom. She slid two fingers in, pulled them out shining, ran them over her clit, pushed them back in. All of it slowly, with a calm obscenity, never taking her eyes off me.

The blood dropped to my feet and then to somewhere else. My mouth went dry. My cock went hard against the fabric with a jolt that tore a gasp out of me. I wanted to look away and couldn’t. She kept her eyes fixed on my window as if she could see through the glass, as if she knew exactly where my pupil was against the eyepiece. She bit her lower lip and breathed deeply. I saw her shudder all over, saw her thighs tense, saw her mouth open in a silent O when she came with three fingers inside and the other hand crushing one breast. When she finished, she didn’t turn off the light. She stayed seated, her fingers shining with her own release, watching me. She brought them to her mouth and sucked them one by one.

Then she stood up, walked to the glass, and lowered the curtain.

That night I didn’t sleep. I jerked off three times thinking about her tongue cleaning her fingers.

***

The third day was when the first signals appeared.

At nine I went up to the terrace with a coffee I didn’t need. Her window was open, and taped to the glass was a sheet of graph paper. I had to focus twice to read it. Just one word, written in black marker.

Hello.

It took me half an hour to decide how to answer. In the end I took a sheet from my notebook, wrote one word, and taped it to the terrace glass with adhesive tape.

Hello.

The fourth day a schedule appeared. “23:00” written on the glass in red ink, in huge digits.

At eleven sharp I was behind the telescope, the terrace light off, my cock already out of my fly and my heart banging against my throat. She entered the frame as if she were arriving on stage. She was wearing a short ivory kimono. She opened it slowly, without theatrics, and underneath there was nothing. Tits out, shaved cunt, an entire naked body under the lamp’s warm light. She sat in the chair facing me and spread her legs with a calm that struck me as obscene.

She started with her tits. She squeezed them, pinched her nipples until they stood hard as stones, took one into her mouth, folding over in the chair to suck it herself. Then one hand went down. Her fingers slid over her belly, paused for a second on the mound, and sank between her lips. I watched her split herself open, watched her cunt flood, watched the juices run down her perineum and stain the wood of the chair. She took three fingers inside and started fucking herself with a brutal rhythm, while with her other hand she rubbed her clit in tight circles.

I unzipped my trousers. Pulled my cock all the way out, already leaking at the tip, and grabbed it with my right hand, imitating her rhythm. She saw me do it. She smiled. Spread her legs wider. Turned around in the chair, got on all fours on the seat, arched her back and shoved her fingers in from behind, two in her cunt and her thumb against her asshole. She was showing me everything. Every hole, every fold, every tremor. I let her watch me cum on the terrace floor while she came in her chair, biting the backrest so she wouldn’t scream.

What happened that hour can’t be told. It has to be breathed.

***

The game settled in like a summer habit.

There were nights of black lingerie and others of an open robe. There were days when she pretended to talk on the phone while her hand sank under her skirt and she pulled out her soaked fingers to lick them in front of the eyepiece; days when I shaved in front of the bathroom window, naked, my hard cock swaying against the sink, knowing she was watching me. We learned a wordless code: a lit candle meant that night she’d take it slow; a half-lowered blind, that she preferred to wait. A shirt hanging from the balcony meant, “not today, but tomorrow, yes.”

Sometimes we played at not looking at each other. At ignoring each other for hours. I’d walk around the terrace with a book, pretending the telescope didn’t exist. She’d sit reading in her armchair, bare feet crossed over the armrest and one hand shoved inside her shorts without bothering to hide it. Neither of us gave in. The tension built like a heat storm, and in the end it always broke: a hand sunk to the wrist, a glance, an impossible pose with her ass lifted against the glass.

Once, only once, she took off her underwear without touching it with her hands. A white lace panty. She lowered it with her legs, slowly, twisting in the chair, until it dropped to the floor like a snake shedding its skin on its own. Then she spread her thighs, opened her cunt with two fingers in a V, and showed me the pink, shining, soaked inside. It took me days to get that image out of my head. I came thinking about burying my tongue in there, about sucking her clit until she screamed.

Another night, I jerked off in the shower knowing she was watching me through the frosted glass. I spent a long while giving myself a slow handjob, my hand full of soap, letting my cock press against the fogged-up pane, until I came in streams against the tile with my mouth open. When I came out, wrapped in a towel, I found a new word in her window.

More.

Every night ended with the same emptiness: someone else’s skin, the same distance, and the feeling of having drunk without ever getting my fill, my cock raw from coming so much with no body underneath it.

***

One Sunday in August, I finally made up my mind.

I wrote on a white piece of cardboard in big letters and taped it to the glass before dark.

What if we go downstairs?

There was no answer that night. Nor the next morning. Her window stayed shut for two whole days. I thought I’d scared her. I thought she’d moved out. I thought about going down to the entryway, crossing the street, standing under her building with some excuse or other, but I didn’t dare.

On the third day, just as I was about to take down my cardboard, she appeared. She was wearing a short black dress and holding a glass of wine. She was smiling, but not with her eyes. She stuck her note to the glass with a sharp, almost violent gesture.

No.

And she crossed her legs the way someone closes a door.

***

Summer went on. I respected the rule. I never suggested anything again. She came back to the game as if nothing had happened, and I learned that this wasn’t the prelude to something else: this was the thing.

There was a feverish week when she spread her legs for me every night, shoved the handle of a brush all the way inside, came three times in a row with a black vibrator pressed to her clit while I jerked off in parallel until I went dry. Another rainy week, the only rain in August, when she just kept staring at the wet glass with a sadness that came through the telescope like a hand. There was a night when she fell asleep in the chair, lamp still on, laptop open between her thighs and her fingers still inside a relaxed cunt. I covered her with my gaze until dawn.

And then the last night came.

***

It was late September. The temperature had dropped just enough to open the terrace without the air feeling heavy. I was in position: naked from the waist up, behind the telescope, cock already out of habit, waiting.

She didn’t undress.

She appeared dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, her shoulders bare. Her hair was down for the first time. She switched on the lamp on the desk and sat in the chair, not taking her eyes off me. Then she picked up her phone and started typing.

A minute later, she projected something onto the wall of her study. A large, sharp image, meant for me to see.

It was a photo. Taken from her window toward mine. You could see my terrace, the telescope, the open curtain, my silhouette bent over the eyepiece, my cock in my hand. There it was, my exposed body, my routine, my ritual. She had been photographing me for weeks.

But that wasn’t what nailed me to the floor.

In the foreground, inside the photo, next to her windowsill, there was an empty wheelchair.

Below the image, written in white on the projected wall, a sentence in her handwriting.

Up here, we play too. But we don’t go down.

It took me a while to understand. Then it took me a while to breathe. Then it took me a while to look again.

She was still sitting in the desk chair, not moving. The same chair I’d imagined for weeks as a throne, as a pose, as a whim. The same chair in which she knelt for me, opened herself for me, slept with the laptop between her thighs. That chair.

I sat up without knowing what to do with my hands. I thought about writing something. About holding up a sign. About closing the curtain and never looking again. About crossing the street, ringing the buzzer, going up and telling the whole thing to fuck off—her “no,” the distance, the whole summer.

I did none of that.

I sat on the terrace floor, my back against the glass, and let the telescope keep pointing at her. I heard her light a cigarette. I watched her exhale smoke into the yellow light of the lamp. I watched as, very slowly, she unbuttoned her jeans, pulled them down to her thighs with both arms, slipped her hand into her panties, and started rubbing herself while staring straight at me. I lowered my trousers very slowly, as if I had all the time in the world, grabbed my hard cock, and started touching myself with my eyes open, watching her come in her chair with her fingers buried in her cunt and her mouth opening in a gasp I couldn’t hear but felt on the head of my dick.

I came in streams against the terrace glass, in silence, without taking my eyes off her.

Upstairs, we play. Downstairs, we don’t go down.

I understood that night, and I understood it every night of the following winter, when I went back to the terrace and to her window, and she was still there, and we were still two bodies thirty meters apart, burning in silence, coming at the same time without ever touching.