What I Discovered Looking Between Skirts and Curtains
There was a period in my life when I didn’t know what excited me more: seeing a woman completely naked or catching her with only her underwear on. Because of my almost pathological obsession with lingerie, I always ended up leaning toward the second. A tiny garment, a bit of lace, a strip of fabric covering just enough: to me, all of that said more than total nudity.
Back then, the technology we have now didn’t exist. There were no hidden cameras in pens or phones capable of recording on the sly. I had to make do with whatever was at hand, and the most common trick was the old mirror gag. I carried one in my briefcase, propped it up for any excuse, slid it across the tile floor, and prayed I’d catch, even if only for a fraction of a second, the curve of a round ass wrapped in some delicate lace.
That tiny fraction of a second fed me for weeks.
Over time I grew bolder. I began frequenting hallways where I knew there were women’s bathrooms, staying in the elevator when a coworker got on wearing a short skirt, inventing excuses to bend under a desk if a secretary wore a miniskirt. Without quite intending to, I became a methodical voyeur.
***
I remember, above all, one afternoon in a downtown department store. I was in my early twenties. I walked past the restroom area and saw that the women’s bathroom door was poorly shut. I bent down under the pretext of tying my shoelace and looked through the lower gap. A mature woman, about forty-five, was pulling down her stockings and her peach-colored cotton thong to sit down. I watched her for long eternal seconds. She never knew.
What I did find out was that her son, a child no older than six, was standing just across the hall and had seen me crouched there, peering inside, eyes wide. The kid looked at me without saying anything, as if trying to figure out what that man was doing on the floor. I stood up, smiled as naturally as I could, and left almost running. He didn’t rat me out. For days I thought about that with a mix of shame, fear, and, I have to admit, a tingle that wouldn’t let me sleep.
***
Around the same time, I lived alone in a studio apartment. There were three parallel buildings with balconies facing a shared inner courtyard. One ordinary night, leaning out on my terrace to smoke, I looked unintentionally toward the apartment across from mine. Elena, my neighbor, was lying completely naked on the bed, on her back, legs slightly open and her pubic hair pointing straight at me. Her brown hair was loose over her shoulders. I stayed motionless, not blinking, until her husband appeared, walked calmly to the window, and drew the curtains.
I spent the rest of the night with that image fixed in my head, trying to reconstruct it detail by detail.
The strangest part came a few weeks later. Those apartments were so small that from the front door you could see everything: the dining area, the bed, the terrace at the back. That afternoon I was coming up with shopping bags and noticed that Elena and her husband’s door was slightly ajar, not latched. I assumed they were out. I wanted to peek in out of simple architectural curiosity, to see whether they had the same furniture as I did. I pushed the door open just a little.
What I found left me rooted to the floor.
Elena was on top of her husband, astride him, moving with a silent fury. She was slender, very white-skinned, almost translucent under the dim light of a table lamp. Her hair, very long, fell all the way to her waist and swayed in time with her hips. Her husband, underneath, was gripping her small breasts with both hands and, from time to time, digging his fingers into her hips to shove her down harder.
I stood there in the half-light of the hallway, holding my breath. I couldn’t stop looking. She threw her head back and a deep moan tore through her throat. And then, I don’t know how, she sensed something. She stopped dead, like an animal hearing a twig snap. She turned her head just slightly toward the door.
I didn’t wait to find out whether she’d seen me.
I backed away silently, left the bags on the landing, and ran down the stairs. That same night, in front of the bathroom mirror, I shaved off the beard I’d worn for two years. I convinced myself that if either of them had caught a glimpse of me, they wouldn’t recognize me without that very distinctive feature of my face.
We never said a word about the episode. But for months Elena held my gaze a second longer than necessary whenever we happened to be in the elevator together.
***
At work, my obsession found fertile ground. I ran a small department, had a lot of people coming into my office, and I quickly learned that a clean CD-ROM, placed on the floor at the right angle, worked as a discreet mirror. My coworkers came in with files, sat down in front of me with their legs crossed, and while I pretended to review paperwork, I watched.
The director’s wife was a lean woman with dark skin and fine features. She always wore flared miniskirts, the kind that lift with the slightest breeze. She came by the office twice a week. I discovered she favored fluorescent thongs: pink, neon green, electric yellow. They stood out against her cinnamon skin like carnival signs. And because she was so thin, from the right angle you could clearly see the outline of her vulva and the full curve of her ass, barely separated by a thread of fabric.
The controller’s secretary was the exact opposite: blonde, average height, with long, muscular legs from climbing stairs in heels every day. Her ass was round, high, pillowy. Curiously, her underwear was almost all worn out. More than once I saw bikini briefs with hidden holes or stretched-out elastic. It amused me: that woman who always arrived immaculate, in a perfect suit and salon-styled hair, wore underneath clothes any bride would have thrown in the trash.
The human resources manager had an even more curious pattern. When she had a partner, she favored tiny thongs in bright colors and lace. When she was single, she went back to stockings with a garter belt and sober cotton panties. It was as if her love life could be read through her underwear. I learned to know, before the rest of the office did, when a romance was ending or beginning.
And always, in every meeting, there was no shortage of the coworker who, when bending down to pick something up or stretching for a file on a high shelf, showed the famous whale tail: that band of lace peeking above tight pants. Some did it without meaning to. Others, I suspect, did it on purpose.
***
Renata was an accountant from upstairs. Brunette, tall, almost six feet, with a porcelain-doll face and hips that seemed drawn with a compass. She was strangely shy for someone with that body. She dressed sexy but not provocative: fitted pants, blouses with one button undone, never a deep neckline. She went to the gym five times a week, and it showed.
At a small party I hosted at my house, when I was still married to my second wife, I ended up sitting next to Renata at the bar I’d set up in the living room. We talked about nonsense for an hour. At one point she stretched back to reach her glass, raised her arms over her head, and with that movement her jeans slid down a few centimeters and her black lace thong rode up her hip, gleaming under the bar’s yellow lights.
I couldn’t hide it. I kept staring, unblinking. She, instinctively, ran a hand along her back to adjust her pants and the garment. When she sat back down, she looked up and our eyes met. Mine were still fixed on her hip, spellbound.
Renata blushed to the tips of her ears. She let out a barely audible whimper, some embarrassed little “oh,” and dropped her head with a nervous smile. I held her gaze and smiled back, without apologizing. She didn’t take offense or move away. She stayed there, finishing her drink, her cheeks still flushed.
Nothing else happened that night. But there was, between us, for months afterward, an underground current made of glances and silences.
***
Something similar happened with Carolina. She was my wife’s friend, newly divorced, with an easy smile and a fatal habit: always wearing the thinnest thongs, which showed under her tight dresses. At a family birthday party, Carolina stretched across the table to reach a piece of cake and the black strip of her underwear appeared intact above the waistband of her pants. No one else looked. I couldn’t look at anything else.
Weeks later, at another party, she wore a tight red jersey mini dress. The music was loud and we were dancing in a group. At some point that night we ended up with our arms around each other’s waists, pretending to keep the rhythm, and my fingers stayed still on the fabric. I felt the exact outline of her string thong: a thin line crossing her hip, separating the small of her back from her ass. I ran my fingers over that line again and again, under the pretext of dancing, and she didn’t pull my hand away. She only rested her head for a second on my shoulder, as if tired of the music.
Nothing else happened that time either. But the brush of that string beneath the dress fabric stayed burned into me for years.
***
Mariana was different. She dressed with an almost nun-like sobriety: long skirts, high-neck blouses, low shoes. When she talked about men, she did so with disdain, as if she found them all clumsy. And yet, beneath that schoolmistress outfit, she wore exclusively thread-thin thongs, almost nonexistent. I knew because once, sitting in front of me during a visit to her house, she opened her legs without realizing it and I saw everything.
I confirmed it completely the day she asked me to help her move and I, while putting the laundry room in order, saw her hamper. Every one of her thongs had the gusset stained with discharge. So many years of façade to hide, in reality, a wildly sexual woman.
Daniela, a Ukrainian woman who had worked as a model in her youth, trusted me enough to leave me the keys to her apartment so I could water the plants when she traveled. I went in, did my job, and when I had time left over, I explored carefully. In the top drawer of the dresser I found an arsenal from Victoria’s Secret: white lace, burgundy satin, unworn garter belts. In the second bathroom drawer, three dildos of different sizes, arranged by length. And under the bed, inside a cardboard-lidded box, a photo album of professional shots: Daniela in lingerie, Daniela in a tiny bikini, Daniela looking at the camera with a smile that said exactly what it had to say.
I closed the box carefully, left it exactly as I had found it, and walked out of the apartment as if nothing had happened. But that night, in my bed, I couldn’t think of anything else.
***
The life of an underwear fetish voyeur comes down, in the end, to a handful of tiny moments. Fractions of a second. Glimpses in the reflection of a storefront window, a flash when legs are crossed, a lace strip peeking out under a pair of pants. These are not grand scenes. They are flashes. But each flash, added to the ones before it, builds an erotic memory vaster than any porn film.
And there are always surprises. The most modest coworker, the one who makes the sign of the cross when she enters church, turns out to be the one wearing garters under her suit. The one who dresses like a magazine model, the one who seems insatiable, wears under everything a pair of gray cotton panties from her grandmother.
Knowing a woman’s underwear is knowing a secret she doesn’t confess even to her closest friends. It is understanding a small part of her intimacy, one she doesn’t show even when making love in the dark. And on more than one occasion, that knowledge helped me understand how to approach her, what to say, how to seduce her.
In another installment I’ll tell you what happened when technology finally started to be on my side. When phones began to have decent cameras and the advantages, and the risks, multiplied.
For now, greetings.