What My Neighbor Did When Her Mother Was Away

I moved in July, three months after signing the divorce papers with Lucía. The separation had been simmering for a while; at some point the previous year we stopped touching each other, and what came afterward was pure inertia: arguments over the refrigerator, the balcony light, a colleague from the firm who appeared in the middle of everything. When we finally sat down to talk seriously, neither of us cried. I grabbed two suitcases, an old mattress, and moved into this studio apartment on the twelfth floor, apartment D.

The building was new; the hallways still smelled of fresh paint. The only thing of practical value was the laundry-room window: narrow, without a curtain, opening directly onto the balcony of apartment C on the same floor. From inside my kitchen I could see the kitchen opposite as if they were two slides stuck together. Only the air over the inner courtyard and a couple of meters of glass separated us—glass that at night became a screen.

Two women lived in C: a woman of about fifty, with short hair and a tired walk, and her daughter, around twenty-two or twenty-three, chubby, pleasant-looking, and very much a homebody. I saw the mother for the first time one August afternoon, coming downstairs with a miniature poodle that started barking whenever anyone coughed in the elevator. The daughter went out less often. Some afternoons I saw her pass through the kitchen wearing headphones, talking to herself against the glass.

During the first few weeks, I didn't set out to watch. I smoked with the laundry-room light off because I liked the trick of making sure nobody knew I was there. It was my private corner: two steps, an ashtray on top of the dryer, the window open. I'd light my cigarette, exhale against the glass, and already be somewhere else. The problem was that the screen opposite had begun showing me scenes I hadn't gone looking for.

One afternoon the woman from C went down to the common courtyard to clean up after the dog. She crouched with the little bag in her hand and, as she bent over, her dress rode up above her hips. I saw her whole ass: broad, white, marked with cellulite, with an old pair of panties that wedged between her buttocks and outlined the slit of her cunt. I kept watching that soft flesh move when she shifted position, the fabric digging into her fat vulva and emphasizing her lips beneath the worn cotton. Something about that utterly ordinary image gave me a stab in the fly. My cock hardened in my pants without warning, throbbing against the zipper. I lit another cigarette and thought that it was the first time in months I'd gotten hard without intending to, and I grabbed it through the fabric just to confirm I wasn't imagining the bulge.

I never saw her like that again, but something inside me had been touched. I started staying in the laundry room a little longer every night. Sometimes the mother and daughter ate dinner in front of the television, plates on their laps, both of them silent. Other times there was nobody there and the light stayed on all night, as if they'd forgotten about the world. The feeling of watching without being seen became a ritual. I think the mother caught my eyes once or twice through the air between us. We crossed paths in the elevator a couple of times and she greeted me with a brief smile. I don't know if she suspected. I think she did. And that she didn't care.

***

When summer came, everything changed. It was December, sticky-hot, half the apartments in the building closed up for vacation. One morning I saw the woman drag a blue carry-on suitcase to the door and hug her daughter with a look that said, “Behave yourself.” The daughter smiled with the calm of someone who already had plans her mother wasn't going to know about. The mother closed the door from outside. The girl remained on the inside.

I poured myself a beer and sat smoking with the light off, waiting to see what she would do. It took her a while to reappear. When she did, she wasn't the same. She had put on a ridiculously short denim skirt that barely covered her ass, a white top clinging to her body with no bra underneath, and platform sandals. Her hard nipples showed through the thin fabric. She had let her hair down, and it covered half her face. She stood in front of the kitchen's picture window as if it were a mirror, lifted her tits with both hands, and arranged them inside the top until they were on the verge of spilling out, squeezed together and offered up. She slipped her fingers beneath her skirt and adjusted her panties too, pulling them upward so they sank between the lips of her cunt. She smiled. She liked what she saw.

I stood still, cigarette between my fingers, holding my breath. My cock was already beginning to strain against my underwear. For a second it seemed to me that she was looking toward my window, right where I was standing. Then I understood that she was looking at herself in her own reflection, not at me. But something about that fraction of a second made me realize that sooner or later we'd end up on the same side of the glass.

She grabbed her purse, turned off the lights, and left. I stayed standing in the laundry room for quite a while, finished my cigarette, finished my beer, and opened another. Then I lay on my back in bed, pulled my underwear down to my knees, and grabbed my cock with my right hand, spitting into my palm to make it slide better. I stroked it slowly at first, thinking about the way she'd adjusted her tits in front of the glass, the way her nipples showed through the white top. Then faster, imagining ripping her skirt off in one pull and burying her face in my cunt while she writhed. I came a few minutes later, my hand full of warm semen and a short grunt echoing off the empty walls. I fell asleep almost without finishing cleaning myself, the smell of milk clinging to my fingers.

***

The miniature poodle woke me up. It was barking as if someone were killing it. I looked at the clock: quarter past three in the morning. The street outside was dead, but someone had arrived at C. I got up in my underwear and walked to the laundry room. I didn't turn on any lights. What I saw on the other side of the air knocked the sleep out of me.

She was standing in the middle of the living room with three men. Three. I watched them, trying to understand where they had come from. One was extremely tall, wearing a white T-shirt; another had shoulder-length hair; the third, the shortest, wore a leather jacket and was taking off his glasses as if he owned the place. All three had that half-careless smile of someone who already knows what's going to happen.

The first one hugged her from behind. He slipped his hand beneath her skirt and she threw her head back with her eyes closed, laughed, and spread her legs to give him more room. I watched the man's arm moving back and forth beneath the fabric, working her cunt with his fingers until she began panting with her mouth open. The second came up beside her, grabbed her face, and shoved his tongue into her mouth without asking. The third, the one in the jacket, sat on the back of the sofa and began unbuckling his belt unhurriedly, pulling his cock out over his jeans, thick and half-hard, stroking it himself while he watched the show. She bit her lip. It was the same expression I'd seen on her face in front of the mirror a few hours earlier.

I lit a cigarette and remained motionless. I also started stroking myself through my underwear, feeling my cock wake up again. I didn't want to miss a single movement, gesture, or the instant she decided where to begin. Then the one in the jacket pulled his entire cock out and pressed it against the picture window, looking toward the courtyard, displaying it like a flag. She approached on her knees without losing that slow smile she'd practiced in the reflection, and wrapped her fingers around it. She ran her tongue all along the base, licked upward to the head, took the whole thing into her mouth in one thrust until the bulge showed in her throat, then pulled it out covered in saliva, strings hanging from her chin. She began sucking him enthusiastically, bobbing her head back and forth, squeezing her cheeks to create suction, pulling him out every so often to spit on it and jerk him off with her hand while licking his balls.

The man in the white shirt positioned himself behind her. He yanked up her top. Her tits sprang free: round, white, with large dark nipples, hard as grapes. He kneaded them as if testing merchandise he was about to take home, squeezing them until his fingers left marks, tugging her nipples until she moaned around the cock in her mouth. He ripped off her panties in one pull, smelled them slowly, and threw them onto the floor. He spread her ass cheeks with both hands and crouched to lick her cunt from behind, plunging his tongue between her open lips, noisily sucking her clitoris, biting the soft flesh of her ass. He pushed her by the nape until he bent her at a right angle. I saw her arched back, her skirt lifted above her waist, her legs barely parted, her cunt swollen and shining with saliva. He spat into his hand, coated his cock, and drove it into her from behind in a single thrust, all the way to the balls. She opened her mouth in a soundless scream that vanished into the courtyard air, the other man's cock still buried between her lips.

The second one, the long-haired man, waited his turn patiently. When he saw the angle, he approached from the side and presented his cock at face level. She accepted it without opening her eyes, reverently, as if surrendering to something she had already decided on. Now she had two cocks: she moved from one to the other, took them both into her mouth together, stuck out her tongue so the heads rubbed against each other over her lips, and rubbed them across her face. Meanwhile, the man behind her kept fucking her with long thrusts, pulling almost all the way out and sinking back in hard, making her ass bounce against his pelvis with a slap audible from my window. Three mouths, three hands, three bodies synchronized to a rhythm that seemed rehearsed in advance.

I opened the window slowly to let the smoke out. I pulled my underwear down to my thighs and grabbed my cock with my free hand, starting to pump it in rhythm with the man fucking her from behind. The courtyard air carried her moans to me: high-pitched, muffled, broken when they filled her mouth, longer and more guttural when they pulled out. Then they stopped her. The man in the shirt wrapped both hands around her waist and lifted her effortlessly. She wound her legs around his waist and let herself be impaled. I watched the man's cock disappear entirely inside her, watched her cling to his shoulders and lower her hips to take the whole shaft each time he lifted her. The short one came up behind her, spat on his fingers, spread her ass, and began pushing in too, entering her asshole at the same time the other man had her cunt. She let out a long shriek when she felt both cocks inside her, head thrown back, mouth open, a thread of saliva running from her chin to her tits. She bounced between them as if riding a mechanical bull, double penetration, both men thrusting out of sync so they wouldn't collide, pulling out and filling her again. The long-haired man grabbed one of her tits and sucked it as best he could, biting her nipple until she screamed, then rose to kiss her open mouth, stealing her tongue between moans.

I stroked myself without hurrying, eyes fixed on the scene, feeling the semen gathering but not wanting to finish yet. After a while, the short one pulled his cock from her ass and came across her buttocks in two or three thick spurts that ran down the crack until they dripped onto her thighs. The man in the shirt came inside her, thrusting hard the last few times, holding her pinned against his pelvis while he emptied his cum into her cunt. All three of them stood still, like a photograph. She breathed with her mouth open, hair stuck to her forehead, hands on the shoulders of the man holding her, milk running between her legs. She said nothing. She smiled. And the night went on.

The long-haired man lowered her to the floor and led her by the hair against the picture window. He spat into his palm, coated his cock, and drove it into her while she stood, her face flattened against the glass. He grabbed her hips and began fucking her standing up, pushing into her cunt from behind with short, dry thrusts that made her tits strike the glass with every jab. He ran one hand through her hair, grabbed her by the neck, and shoved her face even harder against the window. She looked straight toward my window. She smiled. She blew me a kiss with lips stained with saliva and stuck out her tongue to lick the glass while he kept fucking her. I wasn't hiding myself anymore: I'd pulled my underwear all the way down, had my cock in my hand, and was working it with my eyes fixed on hers. I knew she could see me. And she liked it. She began moving her ass backward on her own, pushing herself against the man's cock, setting the rhythm, moaning louder each time, knowing I could hear her across the courtyard. When the long-haired man came, he pulled out and sprayed warm milk over her lower back and buttocks, and she slowly twisted so it would spread properly.

When he was finished, the short one came again, his cock hard once more. He pushed her against the picture window and her tits burst against the glass, growing enormous, two white moons stuck to a pane in the darkness of the twelfth floor, nipples flattened and red. He opened her legs with his knee and entered her cunt from behind, gripping her hips, fucking her against the glass with violent thrusts that made her cheek squeak against the window. She planted both hands on the glass, lifted one, and began making a masturbating gesture in the air while kissing the window. She stuck out her tongue and ran it over the glass as if she were licking a cock, her eyes fixed on mine. She kissed the glass and looked at me. She gestured with her open mouth, imitating how she sucked the man, sliding a finger in and out between lips painted with saliva and someone else's semen.

At the end they put her on her knees, the three of them around her. She closed her eyes. She opened her mouth. She stuck her tongue all the way out, forming a bowl, and grabbed her tits with both hands, squeezing them together to offer a channel between them. All three stroked themselves over her at the same time, one in front of her, the other two at her sides. The first jet landed on her cheek and ran down to her chin. The second hit her forehead and trickled over her nose into her open mouth. The third painted her hair and shoulder. They bathed her face between them, thick, hot spurts, and she received them without closing her eyes, swallowing what fell onto her tongue and letting the rest paint her. She laughed softly as she ran her tongue over the corners of her mouth, collecting the milk stuck there, sucking the fingers she'd wiped across her face. I came at that moment, with two short jerks, splattering my hand and the pajama pants lying at my feet, biting my lip so I wouldn't moan aloud. Then she stood without cleaning herself, raised one hand as if waving to an invisible audience, and walked toward the bathroom hallway, milk dangling from her chin and nipples still hard. The men celebrated among themselves, slapping each other on the back and laughing as if they had won a championship.

She came back dressed in a sweatshirt and shorts, her hair tied back, her face clean, as if nothing had happened. She sat on the back of the sofa. The men took bills from their pockets and stacked them on the coffee table without counting them very carefully. She accepted them with a professional smile, put them in a box she took from a drawer, and escorted them to the door. Before closing it, she leaned toward the picture window, waved to me, and pulled down the blind in one sharp motion. I remained standing in the laundry room, cigarette dead between my fingers, cock still in my hand, feeling my heart in my teeth and the semen cooling on my thighs.

***

Two weeks passed. December melted into January. The mother had returned from her trip; I saw her one afternoon drinking mate on the balcony, the miniature poodle in her lap. The daughter had gone back to her daytime disguise: glasses, sweatpants, hair tied back, that good-girl face of someone who stays home Saturday nights watching movies with her mom.

One afternoon I ran into both of them in the elevator. I was going down to buy something at the greengrocer's; they were too. We greeted one another politely, as always. The mother commented on the heat. The poodle barked at me half-heartedly from the floor.

“Mom, can I go to Camila's tonight?” the daughter asked softly, looking at the elevator floor. “We're having a sleepover.”

“Okay, but call me when you get there. You girls are so boring, honestly…” her mother replied, pretending to be resigned.

“That's how we have fun, Mom. You know that.”

The elevator reached the ground floor with a soft click. The mother got out first, pulling the dog. The daughter stayed behind for one more second, waiting for me to pass. When I crossed in front of her, she looked straight at me without smiling. She raised her index finger and pressed it to her lips. Slowly. Then she winked and followed her mother out, swinging her bag, walking like the girl in sweatpants with her hair tied back.

I stood still in the lobby for a couple of seconds, listening to the building's automatic door opening and closing behind them. That night, when I got home, I went straight to the laundry room. I turned off the light. I lit a cigarette. And I waited.