What I Saw in the Window Opposite That Night

My apartment looks onto a narrow interior courtyard, the kind in old buildings that serves no purpose beyond hanging laundry and letting neighbors learn about each other’s lives without meaning to. Opposite, barely six or seven meters away, is Marina’s bedroom. And every night, when I came back from dinner or finished closing up the kitchen, I would glance toward her window before lowering the blinds. A silly habit. Or so I told myself.

Marina is a mature woman, around forty, with a body that draws attention effortlessly and a smile she dispenses in the elevator as if she had no idea what effect it has. We had never talked about anything important. The weather, the construction noise, how expensive the intercom had become. Landing small talk. But in my head, Marina was something entirely different.

The furthest my spying had gone was seeing her cross the room in her underwear, hurrying as she looked for a robe or a charger. Three seconds. Enough to fuel what came afterward, when I was already in the dark and alone with the image stored away, my cock in my hand and my mouth dry as I imagined those tits bouncing above my face. That was enough for me. I told myself it was enough for me.

That night was different from the very beginning.

***

I got home late, after one in the morning. The entire building was asleep and the courtyard was a well of silence. I raised the blind just a few inches, enough to peek out, and the warm light from her lamp was on. Marina was standing in front of the wardrobe mirror, giving me her profile.

She was taking off her blouse.

I froze behind the glass without deciding to. My body simply stopped obeying the routine of every night. I didn’t lower the blind. I didn’t look away. I watched her slowly unclasp her bra, studying herself as though calmly examining her body at the end of the day. And I discovered that my neighbor had tits far more beautiful than my imagination, generous as it was, had managed to draw: heavy, white, with dark nipples already hard as stones, pointing upward the moment they were freed from the cups.

But that wasn’t what left me breathless.

It was the way Marina brought her hand to her chest and began caressing herself. Slowly. She pinched her right nipple between her forefinger and thumb, tugged it, let it bounce, and repeated the gesture on the left. Her eyes half-closed, her lips parted, lost in something of her own, completely unaware that on the other side of the courtyard a man was holding his breath, his cock already pressing against his fly.

Turn off the light and go to bed. You have no right to be watching this.

I didn’t move.

She sat on the edge of the mattress, still facing the mirror, and got rid of the rest of her clothes with a slowness that seemed calculated for an audience that, in theory, didn’t exist. She slid her panties down her thighs, pulled them off her ankles, and let them fall to the floor. She opened her legs in front of the mirror, and even from six meters away I could see the dark thatch of neatly trimmed hair and, between her spread thighs, the gleam of her already-wet pussy. I felt the blood rush down to my sex, the sudden pressure against my jeans, my cock completely hard and demanding room. A scene I had only ever seen on screens was happening six meters away, in the flesh, starring the woman I greeted every morning with a routine “good morning.”

Marina spat on two fingers, brought them to her pussy, and began stroking her clitoris in slow circles. I was so absorbed that I made the mistake.

***

I wasn’t conscious of the order in which it happened. Marina turned her head toward my window—maybe because of a reflection, maybe because of a sound—and I, purely on instinct, turned off the light. Almost at the same time. Far too much at the same time.

My heart pounded in my throat. She saw me. Of course she saw me. Her lamp went out a second later, and the courtyard was plunged into complete darkness. I remained standing in my dark bedroom, my pulse racing and hot shame climbing up my neck.

They were endless seconds. I counted to ten, then twenty. I imagined the awkward elevator conversation the next day, the reproachful look, perhaps a complaint to the building superintendent. I was already rehearsing an impossible excuse when her window lit up again.

I stayed motionless, expectant, pressed against the wall so the darkness would swallow me.

I expected her to yank the curtains shut. To make a symbolic show of slamming the door, closing off her privacy and ending the matter. It was logical. It was what anyone would do after discovering a peeping tom in the building.

She didn’t draw the curtains.

Marina sat back down on the edge of the bed, exactly where she had been, in the same posture, offered to the same viewing angle. And she resumed what she had been doing as if the interruption had never happened. Or as if the interruption were exactly what she needed to continue. She spread her legs even wider, braced one foot against the edge of the mattress to open herself completely, and pushed two fingers into her pussy up to the knuckles.

***

I can’t explain what I felt then. Fear transformed into something else, a thick current that ran through my entire body. Had she not seen me after all? Or had she seen me, knew I was still there, and simply didn’t care? The second possibility was infinitely more disturbing. And far more exciting.

I sat on my own bed in the dark, so I wouldn’t give myself away as a silhouette in the window, and kept watching. Marina fucked herself with her fingers with a confidence that left no room for doubt. She pulled them out glistening, brought them to her mouth, sucked them with obscene calm, then buried them inside herself again, all the way in. She threw her head back. Bit her lip. With her free hand she pinched one nipple, stretched it, let it go. And every so often, though I might have been fooling myself, her eyes seemed to search for my window in the darkness, as if confirming that her only seat was still occupied.

I pulled down my jeans without thinking, dragged my underwear to my knees, and my cock sprang free, so swollen that the stretched skin hurt. I was harder than I could remember being in a long time. I spat into my palm, closed my fist around it, and began jerking off to the rhythm she was setting without knowing it. Or knowing it. That uncertainty was everything. That uncertainty drove every sensation I felt.

I imagined her within reach. I imagined crossing the impossible courtyard, opening her door, finding her in that same position, her fingers inside her and her pussy soaked. I imagined her showing no surprise, looking up at me with that half-smile from the elevator, which I suddenly understood differently, as if she had been waiting for months for me to finally stop pretending I wasn’t watching her. I imagined her pulling out her glistening fingers and bringing them to my mouth so I could taste her own flavor. I imagined her on her knees before me, gripping my cock with both hands, spitting all over it before taking it into her mouth down to the throat, looking up at me as she gagged on my dick, then drawing it out slowly and leaving a long strand of saliva hanging from her lips. I imagined her riding me, those tits swaying above my face, impaling herself over and over, squeezing her pussy around me as if she wanted to milk my load out of me by force.

The silence between the two buildings was absolute. Only the distant hum of a refrigerator, the rasp of my own breathing, the small, obscene squelch of her fingers going in and out of her wet pussy—a sound that might have been impossible to hear at that distance, and yet I heard it perfectly clearly inside my head. Two strangers who knew each other’s names and nothing more, separated by six meters of air and bound by a complicity neither of us had agreed to, but which was happening, undeniable, in plain sight.

Marina brought her free hand to her chest and squeezed one tit hard enough to leave a mark. With the other she quickened her pace between her legs, three fingers now, thrusting all the way in, coming out, twisting her wrist. The bed must have been creaking. Her hips rose to meet her hand. I jerked myself faster and faster, squeezing my cock as if it were her pussy wrapped around it, biting the inside of my cheek to keep from moaning.

***

Marina came before I did. I knew by the way her back arched, by the hand that closed around the sheet and crumpled it into a fist, by the way her thighs trembled and her hips lifted off the mattress two, three times, bucking against her own hand. She pulled out her dripping fingers, brought them to her belly, and let her pussy throb on its own for a few seconds before touching her clitoris again, very gently, prolonging the trembling. Then she lay still, breathing deeply, her chest rising and falling as she composed herself. It wasn’t a porn-movie performance. It was better: it seemed real, intimate and genuine, not performed for anyone. Or performed for one person alone.

Her orgasm dragged mine along behind it. I came without making a sound, my forehead pressed against the cold glass, still looking toward her lit window. The first spurt splattered my hand and stomach; the next ones fell between my legs, hot and long, the kind that leave your legs weak and your mind blank. I remained there with my cock in my hand, still hard, still dripping cum onto the floor of my bedroom.

When I recovered some semblance of reason, I still didn’t understand anything. Was it really possible that she hadn’t noticed? After the shock, after the two nearly simultaneous blackouts? No. I didn’t believe it. Something inside me, deep down, was certain that Marina knew perfectly well she had an audience, and that certainty had aroused her as much as it had aroused me.

That certainty left my cock halfway down, without fully softening.

***

Then I did something I had never done during those nights of cowardly peeping.

I turned on my lamp.

I turned it on slowly, deliberately, knowing what it meant. It was a wordless confession. It was putting myself on display too, no longer being the hidden eye in the darkness and becoming someone with a face, a name, a body standing in front of the window, my cock still out of my pants and shining with cum. It was telling her, without saying a word: yes, it was me. I was here. I saw everything.

And then Marina did the last thing I expected.

She looked up toward my now-lit window, now clearly occupied by me. She didn’t startle. She didn’t cover herself. She didn’t yank the curtains shut with a muffled cry. She remained naked, her legs still spread, her pussy still on view, and held my gaze across the six meters of courtyard for an instant that seemed to stretch forever. Her eyes dropped for a second to my open fly, to the cock I hadn’t even had time to put away, and that half-smile appeared on her lips—the elevator smile, the “good morning” smile—but now charged with everything that had just happened. She brought two fingers—the ones that had been inside her—to her mouth and slowly sucked them while looking at me, then pulled them out clean.

Then she pressed one finger to those lips. Shhh. A shared secret. A pact.

And she turned off the light.

***

I barely slept that night. I went over every second, every gesture, trying to decide what had been coincidence and what had been an invitation. I reached no conclusion, and I think that was precisely why I couldn’t sleep a wink. What truly kept me awake wasn’t what I had seen. It was everything left to see.

The next morning we ran into each other in the elevator, as so often. Marina stepped in with her gym bag, her hair tied back, a cup of coffee in her hand. She pressed the button for the ground floor.

—Good morning, she said in her usual tone.

—Good morning, I replied.

The elevator descended. Four floors of silence. And just before the doors opened, without turning her head, staring straight ahead, Marina said in a very low voice:

—There was a really good movie on last night.

The doors opened. She walked out first without waiting for an answer, with the calm stride of someone who knows exactly what effect she has. I stayed inside the car a second too long, my heart once again in my throat and my cock beginning to press against my trousers.

That night, when I got home, I didn’t raise the blind just a few inches.

I raised it all the way.

And across the courtyard, right on time, Marina’s lamp came on.