THE WINDOW ACROSS THE COURTYARD (SEX ONLY COLLECTION)

BOOK 4 (COMPLETE STORY)

1. The Window

My name is Claudia, I’m thirty-four, and I’ve never slept well in a new house. I moved in in June, with four boxes, one suitcase, and the feeling that I was doing something reckless for the first time in years. The first month I blamed the mattress; the second, the noises from the courtyard; the third, I understood that the problem was simpler and less confessable: I’d bought a fourth-floor walk-up, I’d sunk every last cent of my savings into it, and for the first time in a long time I had nobody to tell whether that decision made me happy. I’d go to bed late, turn off the light, and end up getting up to look at the neighbors’ windows.

My kitchen window faced a narrow courtyard crisscrossed with clotheslines and drainpipes. Twelve meters away there was another kitchen almost identical to mine, with the blind always halfway up and a potted plant clinging to the windowsill for dear life. At first it was just another window. Then it became the only one I waited to see lit. I couldn’t tell you when the habit started; what I do remember is the night it stopped seeming innocent.

It was a Friday, early September. I was drinking water in the kitchen with the light off — just the green clock on the microwave and a strip of brightness leaking under the hallway door — when a woman appeared in the house across the way. She was wearing a loose T-shirt, her hair carelessly up, and she had the ease of someone in her own home. She opened the fridge, drank straight from the bottle, and rested her forehead against the door for a few seconds. I liked that tired, domestic gesture, so unlike anything you manufacture for yourself. Then a broad-shouldered man came in. He wrapped his arms around her and said something I couldn’t hear.

She turned around to kiss him. It wasn’t a goodbye kiss, or one of those distracted kisses people trade while they’re making dinner. She ate his mouth with hers open, both hands on his face, and he grabbed her ass through her T-shirt and pulled her up. I was about to leave when the woman let out a laugh against his mouth. The scene suddenly took on an intimacy I had no right to claim. I should have walked away. Instead I stayed there, glass in hand, my heart uncomfortably awake.

They made out against the counter and her T-shirt hit the floor. She had nothing on underneath. He stepped back half a pace to look at her, with an attention that made everything else vanish — the dishes, the open bottle, the mess of the kitchen — and she let herself be looked at without crossing her arms, hard nipples, goosebumps on her arms. Then he knelt down.

That’s what I wasn’t expecting. At twelve meters you can make out a kiss and a laugh, but not a man going down on his knees in his own kitchen on a Friday night. The counter was pale marble and it sat right under the window; the light, blazing like an operating room, worked as a magnifying glass. He spread her legs and buried his face between her thighs, and she gripped the edge of the marble with both hands and threw her head back. You could see the working of his jaw. You could see her tight belly, her heels lifted off the floor, her open mouth. It took her almost no time at all to put a hand on his head and press.

That’s when I knew what I was watching. It wasn’t an argument just resolved, or a casual reconciliation: it was desire, unmistakable and shared. Modesty made me look away. Curiosity forced me back.

When I looked again, he was already standing and had turned her around, bent over the counter, facing the glass. He pulled his pants down just enough and grabbed her by the hip. From my kitchen you could see little and understand everything: the short thrust with which he entered her, the way she went up on her toes to fit him, the rhythm they found almost immediately, without ceremony, like someone repeating something they’re good at. Her palms flat on the marble. His fingers dug into the flesh of her side.

I don’t know how long I watched. I remember the rustle of the blind stirred by the air, the sound of a motorcycle at the far end of the courtyard, and the contrast between that lit-up kitchen and my dark one. Mostly I remember that at some point the woman raised her head and looked over the windowsill. She didn’t look at the building in general. She looked at my window, with a precision that froze my blood. And she smiled.

I hid against the wall, even though I’d been in the dark for half an hour and could barely be seen from there anyway: the strip of light from the hallway outlined my shoulder, and the microwave clock, green and absurd, drew a line across my face. I felt a shame so intense that for a few seconds it seemed to me she knew me, knew where I lived, could calculate how long I’d been watching them. I also felt something else, lower down: a heat down there, a wetness I’d never connected to anything before. When I dared to peek again, she still had her head up, looking toward my side of the courtyard. He leaned over her back, pushed her hair aside, and held the back of her neck with one hand to lift her head higher, and she turned her face sideways to kiss him without stopping looking at the glass. Her mouth was trembling a little.

Then I understood something that changed the whole meaning of the scene: maybe I hadn’t interrupted any intimacy. Maybe my presence was part of it. That possibility, far from reassuring me, unsettled me even more. One thing was watching from hiding; another was being invited to watch. In the first case I could invent excuses. In the second, I had to admit I’d stayed because I wanted to.

The couple disappeared into the apartment. I stayed in the dark, motionless, glass already empty. I brought my hand to my belly, over my pajamas, and then slipped it inside. I was soaked. I touched myself standing up, leaning on the counter, without even sitting down, and I came in under a minute thinking about things I didn’t dare organize: his knees on the floor, her hand on the back of his neck, that smile thrown twelve meters. Then I went still, fingers inside me, breathing loud, and I started laughing.

When the woman came back, she was wearing a T-shirt that was surely his. She leaned on the window frame and raised two fingers in a small, almost polite wave. I waved back before I’d thought about what I was doing. After three months of insomnia, I fell asleep almost instantly.

For the next three weeks the window became a habit. I discovered, for example, that their blind was the better-mannered of the two: it went up at eight thirty and came down at eleven fifteen, with a regularity that felt like a notice. I learned their routines. He got home last, she cooked with the radio on, they had dinner together in the kitchen and argued without shouting. One Wednesday, at eleven fifteen, just before he lowered the blind, she went still, looked toward my window, raised her hand, and held it in the air until I answered. It wasn’t a wave: it was a confirmation. The next morning I bought binoculars.

I didn’t need them; at twelve meters you can easily make out a smile. I bought them because the object turned a coincidence into a decision, and because, however embarrassing it was to admit, I wanted to be able to choose what to look at. I left them by the windowsill, and when Saturday came I dragged a chair out of the living room, set it facing the glass, and sat down with them in my hands.

Seeing them magnified was something else. You could see the mark of his waistband on his waist, a small scar on one of her knees, the pale hair on her forearm. That night they fucked on the couch, with the TV on and no sound: her on top, sitting on him, moving slowly, hands braced on his chest. With the binoculars I could see her face when she came — eyes squeezed shut, then snapping open, mouth silent — and this time I touched myself sitting in my chair, elbows on my knees, hiding from nobody and not getting up to turn off the light.

Sunday I went down for bread in sweatpants, hair up, three weeks of window at my back. In the produce shop next door they were there, arguing with total seriousness about tomatoes. Dressed, under the shop’s white light, they looked like an ordinary couple, the kind you never look at twice. The woman turned when she heard me ask for my usual loaf. She recognized me instantly. I knew she’d recognized me because she smiled the same way she had at the window.

2. The Invitation

I hadn’t rehearsed what to do if I ever ran into them. In my imagination, windows belonged to a world separate from sidewalks and neighborhood shops. Yet there she was, the woman, bag of tomatoes in hand, looking at me without any ceremony.

Her name was Lidia. She told me before I managed to say hello. She introduced the man as Héctor, her husband, and added, in an almost confidential tone, that both of them knew perfectly well who I was.

“The one from the fourth floor across the way,” she said, without a trace of reproach.

Up close she was something else. Light eyes, wide mouth, and a thin cotton T-shirt through which her nipples showed, because the shop was cold. She smelled of a clean, cheap perfume and of freshly handled tomatoes. Beside her, Héctor had big hands, marked knuckles, short nails from working wood — a furniture workshop out in the industrial park — a thick neck, and a way of glancing sideways that looked nothing like an intimidated man. He spoke little, in a low, slightly hoarse voice, and when he did speak it was in short, pre-thought sentences. Dressed, a meter away, they were so much more than anything I’d ever seen from the other side of the courtyard.

I felt the heat climb to my face. I wondered what explanations they expected, but Lidia didn’t seem interested in any. With a disconcerting naturalness, she talked to me about the blue blind, the dried-out pots, the nights she’d seen me standing by the glass. Héctor smiled without joining in. There was something funny about that conversation happening in front of a scale, while the shopkeeper weighed green beans and a kid behind us asked for candy.

“We saw you the first night,” Lidia said. “You stood still for a very long time, glass in hand, and then you left.”

I asked if they knew I watched them. Lidia held my gaze.

“Of course,” she answered.

And after a pause she added that it didn’t bother her; on the contrary, they both liked feeling desired. She said it without the slightest grandiosity, with no intention of justifying it. I’d spent three weeks imagining a scandalous secret, and they discussed it with after-dinner calm.

“We like being watched,” Héctor clarified. “As long as whoever’s watching wants to be there too.”

“And you like watching,” she added, and looked at my mouth as she said it. “Even if you hide behind the wall.”

Then I noticed I was wet. Right there standing, loaf of bread in hand, with the feeling of having just been read out loud, and the shopkeeper waiting for me to decide how much of all this I wanted.

I thanked Héctor for that sentence more than he could suspect. I didn’t need a confession to feel authorized; I needed to know I wasn’t invading anything. Lidia must have read my mind, because she asked if I’d like to see their place. I didn’t have to answer right then, she assured me, though she immediately proposed Wednesday at eleven thirty, unit B, and recommended I bring a bottle of wine. The invitation was so concrete that any dodge would have sounded absurd.

I said I’d come. Then I wanted to add something clever, but all I asked was whether I should dress up. Lidia let out a laugh that forced Héctor to look away toward the tomatoes.

“Come however you’re comfortable,” she finally answered.

Before she left she ran her eyes over me once, top to bottom, without hiding it. It took her a second and a half. That simplicity disconcerted me more than any of the earlier hints. We said goodbye at the door. They kept shopping; I went home without remembering whether I’d paid for the bread.

Monday I worked as best I could. On the computer screen the numbers and emails kept looking normal, but everything seemed slightly displaced. I caught myself remembering Lidia’s voice, her way of holding a loaded conversation without lowering her tone, Héctor’s amused look. What intrigued me most wasn’t their sex life. It was the ease with which both of them had admitted a desire I had trouble admitting even alone.

At night their blind was up and they were having dinner with the TV on, no sound. Nothing happened; you could see the backs of their necks and an elbow, nothing more. I went to bed at midnight and touched myself thinking about her, not about the scene. It was short and without ceremony, almost perfunctory, and even so it left me unsettled: for the first time in three weeks the desire wasn’t coming from someone else’s window.

Tuesday night I went over out of habit. The blind was down and the apartment dark. I felt an absurd disappointment, as if someone had canceled a date. I saw myself reflected in the glass: old pajamas, loose hair, impatient expression. Then I laughed at myself. I wasn’t the shy girl I was pretending to be in front of Lidia. I was a grown woman, free to accept or refuse an invitation, and I’d spent two days behaving like an applicant.

I got into bed without closing the blind all the way, just in case. At one I was still awake. I put my hand between my legs with no ceremony at all, no window, no witnesses, nobody on the other side of the courtyard, and confirmed I’d been soaked for hours. I touched myself slowly, very differently from Friday: there, standing against the counter, it had been a discharge; here it was something else. I thought about Lidia’s hands, about the mouth that had said “of course,” about the tongue that had passed over her lip before she told me I hid behind the wall. I put two fingers inside, pulled them out almost immediately, and came with my face turned to the pillow and a noise that sounds scandalous in an empty house. The point wasn’t the orgasm. The point was realizing that desire was no longer on the other side of the courtyard but inside my own bed, and that it had a name.

Wednesday I got home from work early, tidied the apartment, then messed it up again. I showered, shaved in a hurry and badly, and picked a gray knit dress. I put on the good panties — not the everyday ones, the others — without being very clear just in case of what. I changed shoes twice and kept the first pair. I bought an eight-euro Rioja; it wasn’t an extraordinary bottle, but it seemed important not to show up empty-handed.

At eleven twenty-five I was in front of door B, holding the wine by the neck. My mouth was dry and the good panties were on, and I didn’t know which of the two embarrassed me more. I wasn’t afraid to go in. I was afraid of discovering I wanted it more than I’d let myself admit.

3. Front Row

Wednesday, at eleven thirty, Héctor opened the door in a bathrobe, hair wet, barefoot.

“Lidia’s getting out of the shower. Come in.”

The apartment was mine, reversed. The same narrow hallway, the same kitchen at the back, the same door on the right. Walking in, I understood the logic of everything at once: the living room was glued to the kitchen, and from the couch, diagonally, you could see my entire kitchen. The pale marble, the coffee maker, the glass I’d left unwashed that afternoon.

“Front row,” Héctor said, following my gaze.

Lidia came out of the bathroom in a long cotton T-shirt, wet hair stuck to her temples. No bra, the fabric marking her chest. She gave me two kisses, took the bottle from my hand, and raised it to the light to read the label.

“Eight euros,” she ruled. “Good.”

We poured three glasses. I sat on the couch, in the middle, and she to my left, one leg folded under her. Héctor dragged a wingback armchair over from the corner, set it two meters away, and sat down with his glass resting on the arm. It wasn’t a casual position: it was the seat from which everything was visible.

We talked about nonsense for twenty minutes. The building entrance, the downstairs neighbor, the rent. Then Lidia set her glass on the floor and explained the rules.

“There’s no program to follow,” she said. “No date, no ceremony. If something bothers you, you say so, and that’s it.”

I asked what happened if one of the three felt like it and another didn’t.

“It happens constantly. And nobody dies.”

Héctor laughed through his nose, without opening his mouth. Lidia turned to him, then back to me, and lowered her voice.

“We like you watching us. He likes that most of all, watching. And I like being watched while I’m with you.” She paused. “And stop making that face, like you’re going to apologize for being here.”

I laughed and felt my back loosen. Until then I’d been sitting with the rigidity of an interview.

Lidia took the glass out of my hand and set it on the floor next to hers. She kissed me without preamble, mouth open, one hand on my jaw, and I knew immediately there was nothing to negotiate: she’d decided before I arrived. She tasted of wine. She ran her tongue over my lower lip and then bit me a little, and I put my hand on her thigh because I needed to touch something.

“Closer,” she said.

We lay down on our sides, her half on top of me, and she pushed my dress up over my belly. She pulled it off over my head and looked at my chest from very close, unhurried, like someone checking a measurement.

“Pretty,” she said, and it didn’t sound like a compliment: it sounded like a diagnosis.

She sucked one nipple and then the other, open hand on my tit, pressing. She went down my sternum with her mouth, put her whole hand inside my panties with no stops. I’d been soaked since the greeting at the door, probably longer, and she noticed and said nothing; she just moved her fingers.

“There,” she said at last. “Good.”

She stroked me on the outside, up and down, with two fingers, then shoved them in. My back arched and a noise escaped me that I didn’t recognize. In the armchair, Héctor shifted and the leather creaked. He hadn’t said a word since the toast.

Lidia slid to the floor, pulled my panties down, and opened my legs with both hands. She knelt on the rug, folded my knees up, and licked me from bottom to top, slowly, tongue flat. She lingered on my lips, sucking, and by the time she reached my clit my thighs were shaking. She put two fingers in and curled them toward my belly, searching for me inside while on the outside she kept a short, very fast rhythm with her tongue. You could hear it. You could hear everything.

I came on a pair of neighbors’ couch at twelve fifteen at night, one hand on the backrest and the other in Lidia’s hair, and it wasn’t a scream: it was a short, dry jolt, a blow to the belly that left my legs trembling and my mouth dry.

When I opened my eyes, Héctor was still in the armchair. His bathrobe was open, his cock was hard, and he wasn’t touching it. When he caught my look he shrugged, as if that explained it.

“Now you,” Lidia said.

She climbed onto the couch, lay back against the cushion with her knees open, and waited. I gave her back what she’d done to me, starting in the same place: mouth on chest, hand on belly, fingers inside. She was wetter than me. At the first contact her breath cut off and she dug her nails into my forearm. I licked her clit with the tip of my tongue and she pulled my hair; I put two fingers in and she clenched around them. She steered me with her hips, chasing it, with no shame at all, until she came with her mouth open, eyes squeezed shut, and a convulsion that ran up her thighs and ended in her throat.

We stayed like that a while, sprawled on the couch, clothes on the floor, three wine glasses half-drunk. Héctor got up to get water. As he passed he put a hand on Lidia’s head, one second, without saying anything.

I left at two thirty. They walked me to the door and Lidia gave me two kisses, with the same ease with which she’d taken the wine out of my hand. I went down four flights, crossed the courtyard with my coat over my dress, and looked up before going in: my kitchen, dark. Behind me, theirs was still lit, two silhouettes still moving in front of the glass. I climbed the steps slowly, smelling of someone else’s house.

Front row. I thought, with a clarity that lasted until my own doorway, that from that night on I was going to have to get used to living in both windows.

4. Habit

Thursday Lidia texted me at six in the evening. Three words: “Dinner here. Bring bread.”

I bought the bread and a bottle, though nobody had asked for one, because showing up two nights in a row with wine was starting to become a character.

I got there at ten thirty. The three of us had dinner in the kitchen, at the small table, radio on, no tablecloth. They talked about a trip to Sardinia and a dog that had died two years earlier; I told them about the apartment, the savings, the walk-up. It was the first time in a long time I’d talked about myself without choosing my words, and I noticed halfway through dinner, fork in the air.

When we finished, Héctor cleared the plates and stacked them in the sink. Then he went to the living room, came back with a kitchen chair in his hand, crossed the hallway, and set it at the foot of the bed. He turned it a little, looked at it, corrected it two centimeters, and only then stepped aside. He said nothing. Lidia looked at him and smiled inward.

“Shall we go to bed?” she said. “So to speak.”

The bedroom was the only room in the apartment that didn’t look like mine. They had a big, unmade bed, two mismatched lamps on the nightstands, and folded clothes on an armchair. It smelled of them: perfume, wood, used sheets. Being in there was more intimate than being naked, and I thought that while pulling my sweater over my head.

Lidia undressed me again, but slowly, and this time without the rush of the first night. She left my bra for last and unhooked it behind my back with one hand, without looking. Then she took off her T-shirt and stood in front of me, small breasts, ribs showing, waiting for me to look at her. I looked at her as much as I wanted.

We lay down. The sheets were cold and warmed up fast. She kissed my neck, my mouth, my sternum, and laid her open hand on my belly, still, just to feel it rise and fall. Two meters away, Héctor sat down in the chair. The seat creaked once and then went quiet.

“Touch,” Lidia said, and took my hand and brought it between her legs.

She was hot and wet and had nothing on underneath. I laid my fingers flat on her, without entering, and she moved her hips very slowly against my palm. I stroked her clit with my fingertip and her breath cut off; I put one finger in and then two, and she fucked herself on them with a short rhythm, looking into my eyes, in no hurry at all, as if she had all the time in the world and the time were mine.

Then she climbed onto my thigh. She straddled it, her cunt spread open on my leg, and started moving back and forth, hands braced on my chest. At first it didn’t work: the angle kept slipping and she slid down toward my knee. We tried twice, the second worse than the first, and we cracked up. On the third she found the spot and didn’t move from it. She soaked my whole thigh down to the knee. She kissed me, pulled back to look at me, and moved again, and I held her hip and helped her, and felt the heat climb up my leg.

I rolled her on top of me, laid her down, and got between her legs. I kissed the inside of her thighs, one and then the other, and bit her a little. When I put my mouth on her she gripped the sheet with both hands. This time there was nothing to learn: I already knew what worked for her. Tongue wide, no dipping, pressure upward, fingers curled inside. Her thighs trembled and she squeezed my head with her knees. She took longer than the first night, and I liked that too: it was the delay of trust, of someone who already knows you’re going to stay there.

She came with a short moan, almost a complaint, both hands in my hair. Then she pulled me up, kissed me with her mouth open, without wiping herself, and turned me over.

“Now like this,” she said.

She put me on my side, pressed against my back, and slipped an arm around me from the front, open hand on a breast. She put two fingers in from behind and bit my shoulder. I had one knee bent and her leg between mine, and from there the rhythm was different, slower and deeper, and every time she pinched my nipple with her fingers a shiver ran up to the back of my neck.

Then what hadn’t happened the first night happened. Héctor got up from the chair, took a step, and laid his open hand on my back, right above my kidney. He said nothing and didn’t move it. It was the first time he’d touched me. Lidia, without stopping her fingers inside me, found his wrist with her free hand and held it there, so he wouldn’t take it away.

I came like that, between the two of them, my face buried in their pillow, one hand from each of them on me. There was no peak: it was a long, low tremor that rose and fell twice and faded without breaking, and left me with my legs open and the feeling of having stopped a centimeter from the edge.

Afterward there was silence and water. Héctor came back with three glasses, sat on the edge of the bed, still dressed, and Lidia put on my T-shirt because hers was on the floor. We talked about nonsense for a quarter of an hour. At some point they started talking to each other and I just listened, sheet up to my chest, watching them in profile, and I had the uncomfortable sense of being inside someone else’s home in the literal sense of the word: inside their bed, their sheets, their conversation.

I left at one. Lidia gave me a kiss at the door and asked if I was free Saturday.

I went down the stairs with yesterday’s bread in my bag and realized on the second flight that the dangerous part hadn’t been the first time. The first could be called coincidence. The second already had a day of the week.

5. The Competition

Saturday she texted at nine: “Come at ten. Bring bread, you’re family now.”

I showed up with the loaf and the ridiculous feeling of passing an exam. We ate pizza from the corner place, standing in the kitchen, leaning on the counter, bottle already open, radio on. We talked with our mouths full and laughed at nonsense. At some point the August heat in the courtyard came up, and the noise from the downstairs neighbor, and a coworker of Héctor’s who’d left his wife for a coworker. At eleven, Lidia wiped her hands on a cloth and announced:

“Tonight we play.”

“Play what?”

“Each person asks for one thing and the other two do it. Nobody can ask anybody to leave.”

“And if someone doesn’t want to?”

“They say so. And they lose.”

Héctor poured wine into the three glasses without saying anything.

“I’ll start,” Lidia said. “I want Héctor to touch you. Wherever he wants. And I want you not to move.”

Héctor set down his glass, came up behind me, lifted my T-shirt, and laid his open hand on my ribs, right under my bra. He didn’t press. He just left it there, flat and warm, fingers spread. My hands were braced on the counter and it was hard not to turn around.

“Like that,” he said, and withdrew his hand. “Your turn.”

“I want to see you sitting on me,” he said. “Dressed.”

I sat on his lap sideways, and he held me by the waist with both hands and waited. I started moving slowly, in no hurry, still in my sweater, and after two minutes I was wet and it showed on my face. Lidia watched us from the stool, glass resting on her thigh and a smile that hid nothing.

“You two are taking forever,” she said.

“Shut up,” I answered, and they both laughed.

My turn.

“I want to watch you.”

They stood up. They kissed standing in the middle of the kitchen, and this time I was in Héctor’s spot: watching from outside and a meter away, which isn’t the same as twelve meters. He unzipped her pants and pulled them off her feet, and she let him do it with her arms a little open, looking at me while she was undressed. When she was down to her panties he put his hand inside and she clung to his neck. You could hear the movement of his fingers.

“Now,” Lidia said. “Me now.”

She took me by the hand and led me to the couch. She straddled my thighs and looked at Héctor.

“I want you to put your hand on her while I kiss her mouth.”

And that’s what happened. Héctor sat beside me, yanked my pants down to my knees in two tugs, put his hand inside my panties, and went still, waiting; Lidia took my face in both hands and kissed me with her mouth open while he started to move. I couldn’t close my legs, or move, or do anything. I came without warning, my mouth occupied and the hand of a man I’d barely touched on me, with Lidia breathing over me.

After that there were no more rules. We went to the bedroom dragging clothes, bottle, and glasses, and the game dissolved into something messier and considerably better.

Lidia liked being in the middle. She liked both of us touching her at once, one in front and one behind, and she liked giving an order and contradicting it a second later. At some point she put her hand on the back of my neck and pushed me down without saying anything, and I went down. I licked her clit while Héctor, from behind, put two fingers in her and held one hip. She came with both hands in my hair and her back arched, then pulled me up, kissed me, and told Héctor to do the same to me.

He laid me on my back and opened my legs with both hands, the way she’d done on the couch. This time I watched. He had thick fingers and a slower rhythm, and he searched with his thumb in no hurry. Lidia lay beside me and sucked one nipple while he put two fingers inside me. Between the two of them they took me to the edge and left me there a while, rising and falling. At one point I went too far and said “wait”; he stopped dead with his fingers inside and Lidia laughed against my chest. We waited. When I was on the edge again, Lidia said “now,” and he pressed his thumb.

I came with my face turned toward her and his hand inside me. And I noticed, with a clarity that embarrassed me a little, that I’d been competing all night. That I’d been watching Lidia to see who she was looking at.

And I’d won, on top of it. Lidia had come with my mouth while Héctor touched her from behind, both hands in my hair. When we finished, Lidia lay on her back, breathless, and said a word that wasn’t for me:

“Fuck.”

And then, to me, with a smile that had something of a graded exam:

“You’re good at it.”

It should have sounded like a compliment. It sounded like a statement of fact. As if she’d been taking notes.

Afterward, when the three of us were sprawled on the sheet, Héctor did his usual thing: he pulled away. He sat at the foot of the bed, back against the iron frame, and watched us. Lidia curled up against me, head on my shoulder.

“See?” she said, without opening her eyes.

“Yeah,” he answered.

And I didn’t know what it was he saw. But I noticed, in the weight of her head on my shoulder, that she didn’t know either, and that she would have liked to.

I left at three. At the door there were no two kisses: there was a long kiss, the kind you give so that someone sees it, and Lidia looked at me while she gave it and then looked at Héctor, who was in the hallway in his bathrobe and said nothing.

I went down the stairs thinking about the face he’d made when he pulled away. And about hers when she said “you’re good at it,” which was the face of someone who’s just been moved to a different place in their own home.

6. The Verdict

Tuesday Lidia texted me at noon: “Dinner at home. No plan.” And two minutes later, in another message: “Héctor wants to talk to you.”

Lidia had had a tone since Saturday that wasn’t hers. She wasn’t angry: she was precise. She set the table with precision, asked questions with precision, and laughed a beat later than she should have.

We ate early and badly, whatever was in the fridge. You could tell something was up. Héctor was quieter than usual and Lidia talked for both of them, until halfway through dinner she pointed at him with her fork:

“Tell her what you have to tell her before your rice goes cold.”

Héctor put down his fork.

“He’s jealous,” she said.

“Not exactly,” he said.

And at that Lidia got up for ice, with an excuse that didn’t hold up, and took her time coming back. She left us alone with our plates half-eaten.

Héctor stayed with his glass in his hands, looking at the table.

“The first night I saw you was before her,” he said. “I saw you first, from the window. You were facing away, in the kitchen, and you took a long time to move.”

“And what did you see?”

“A woman in a dark kitchen looking over here and believing she couldn’t be seen.”

He drank. I said nothing, because anything I said would have sounded like an apology and this wasn’t the moment.

“What’s going on with me is that I like to watch,” he went on. “And I don’t say it as a polite way of saying I don’t feel like taking part. It’s that when I’m in it, I miss half of it. Saturday I realized: what I liked most was the part at the end when I pulled away. And that, with you here, has started to embarrass me a little.”

“Embarrass you?”

“Of taking advantage of something.” He set down his glass. “And if I ever have to choose between having a good time and hurting you, I’ll leave.”

“Hurt me?”

“Her. You. The plan.” He shrugged. “I’m saying it so you know it before and not after.”

“And what do you propose?”

“Friday. You two. I sit in a chair and say nothing. If it goes well, we repeat; if it goes badly, we’ll see.”

Lidia came back with the ice when everything had already been said, which confirmed she’d left on purpose. She sat down, poured herself water, and looked at me with a calm that was a little scary.

“And what do you want?”

“For it to go well,” I said.

“That’s not wanting anything. That’s wishing there were no problems.”

I sat with the answer half-formed and she waited, without helping me. Héctor didn’t help either. The two of them had agreed on something they hadn’t told me, and suddenly the whole dinner felt like a well-meaning trap.

“I want him to watch,” I said finally. “And I want to be with you.”

Lidia took a second to answer, and that second felt endless.

“That’s it,” she said. “That’s wanting something.”

And then, without changing her tone, as if it were the same question:

“Saturday, when you came the second time, who were you looking at?”

She caught me, just like before. I took my time and she didn’t help.

“At him.”

“And who was I looking at?”

“At him too.”

“And who were you doing the favor for?”

“For me,” I said. “I was winning.”

Lidia sat a moment with her glass in the air. Then she set it on the table and said:

“Okay.”

“Okay,” Héctor said, and got up to clear the plates.

I left at one thirty. Lidia walked me to the landing and, instead of two kisses, pushed me against the landing wall and put her hand inside my coat. She kissed me as if we hadn’t seen each other in weeks. She pulled up my skirt, put her hand inside my panties, and left me with two fingers inside me, still, when my breathing was already loud.

“Friday,” she said against my mouth. “Not now, because if we start you won’t leave.”

And she pulled her hand out and went into her apartment.

I went down four flights with my legs trembling and my hair a mess. My mother had spent three months asking why I’d bought such a high floor with no elevator, and I’d spent three months telling her it was for the light. Crossing the courtyard I looked up at my kitchen, four floors up, and saw it dark, blind half up, the pot on the sill. Behind me, theirs was still lit, two silhouettes moving in front of the glass.

I stood a while watching them from the courtyard, the way I’d done so many nights from my kitchen over the past three months. And I thought that the next day was Wednesday and that Friday was far away.

7. The Other Window

Wednesday at eight Lidia texted me. Four words and a question mark, which in her was a whole novelty: “Can you come?”

I got there at nine. The apartment was different without him. Not messy: still. The bathroom door open, the razor out of the cabinet, and on the kitchen table a note with two and a half lines. I read it standing while Lidia opened a bottle.

“Gone for two days. It’s nothing. H.”

“It’s not the first time,” she said, without my asking. “The other was in March.”

She’d pulled her hair up any which way and was drinking faster than usual. We talked about nonsense for twenty minutes and about neither of the two subjects in the room.

“Saturday,” she said at last, looking at her glass, “when I came, you were looking at Héctor.”

“Yes.”

“And he was looking at me.”

“Too.”

“And who was looking at you?”

“Nobody. I was the one looking.”

Lidia laughed without much conviction.

“That’s what pisses me off. That you play better than me and on top of it you don’t care about winning.”

“And why did he leave?”

“For the usual. He likes to watch and then it seems too little to him. Or too much.” She shrugged. “He said it Tuesday, didn’t he? About leaving. He leaves so he doesn’t have to choose. And he comes back.”

“And what do you do?”

“Wait. And I don’t like waiting.” She drank. “And I don’t like that I like you choosing me. It’s a mess, and I don’t do messes.”

At eleven thirty she said, suddenly:

“I want to see your place. I’ve never been.”

We went down four flights, crossed the courtyard, and went up the other four. I showed her the hallway, the living room, the bedroom. She stood a while in the bedroom doorway, looking at my bed the way you look at a hotel bed. Then she went into the kitchen and stopped dead.

The chair was facing the glass. The binoculars on the windowsill.

Lidia looked at them. Looked at me. Looked at the chair again.

“And this?”

There was no way to slip out of it.

“I bought them in September.”

“And since then?”

“Since then.”

She picked up the binoculars, sat in the chair, and looked through them at her own kitchen, lit and empty on the other side of the courtyard, bottle open, two glasses.

“Fuck,” she said. “You can see the note.”

She stayed like that a long while. Then she lowered the binoculars and looked at me over her shoulder.

“So you’ve been watching us fuck since September and you haven’t said a word.”

“You didn’t ask either.”

She laughed. It was the first time in five days and it sounded like something loosening inside.

“Now it’s your turn,” she said, and handed me the binoculars. “Sit there and watch me.”

I sat. She stood, leaning on the counter, three meters away, watching me watch her. Then she came closer, took the binoculars out of my hands and set them on the marble, and kissed me standing in my own kitchen, which was the only place where we still hadn’t kissed.

We went to my bed. And there, for the first time since September, there was nobody else.

“May I?” she asked, hand on the hem of my T-shirt.

In her, “may I?” was an event. I said yes and she undressed me slowly, without the efficiency of other times, lingering on unnecessary things: the seam of my shoulder, the elastic of my panties, the back of my knee. She laid me on my back and stayed on top, hair falling on both sides, and kissed my neck until I stopped thinking about anything useful.

She touched me with her whole hand, no fingers, until I was soaked, then put two in and moved them slowly, very close, watching my face from twenty centimeters. There was no audience and you could tell: on the couch and in her bed I’d been, without noticing, a little in profile. Not here. Here I was the only thing in the world and there was no way to position yourself nicely for anyone.

I came with my mouth open and my eyes open too, which had never happened to me, and she watched me while it happened, missing nothing.

Then I laid her on her back. Before going down I asked her the same thing, and she said yes with her voice a little broken. It took her longer than at her place. She took a while, slipped once and started again, and halfway through she laughed at herself with her hand in my hair. When she came she did it with noise, out of control, both hands gripping the sheet as if she were going to fall.

We stayed on our sides, legs tangled, and she talked to me with her mouth pressed to my shoulder.

“I didn’t know you could be like this with nobody watching.”

“Me neither.”

And we both knew the same thing and neither said it: that it was good and that he was missing.

Thursday night I saw him come back. I was in the kitchen, light off, binoculars in hand, when he appeared through the arch of the entrance with a gym bag and crossed the courtyard unhurried. As he passed he looked up at my window. I didn’t hide; he didn’t pretend he hadn’t seen me either.

Five minutes later a message came from a number I didn’t have saved.

“Tomorrow I’m still in the chair, if you two are up for it. H.”

I read it twice and answered yes. Then I stayed in the chair, binoculars in my lap, watching the kitchen across the way. Lidia was standing by the counter and he came in, set the bag on the floor, and stood beside her. They talked for a minute. Then she raised her head, looked toward my window, and raised two fingers, the same as the first night in September.

I didn’t wave back. I stayed still, watching her, so she’d know I was there.

8. The Chair

Héctor and I hadn’t touched since Saturday, and he’d been gone two days. With Lidia, once, on Wednesday, in my bed, with nobody watching. Friday morning the math didn’t add up and I stopped doing it.

Friday Lidia texted at eight: “Come at ten. Don’t bring anything today.”

I got there at ten. We had dinner with a calm that wasn’t last Saturday’s calm: it was a calm with memory, the kind you have after someone has left and come back. Nobody mentioned anybody’s absence and nobody mentioned the chair, which had been at the foot of the bed for two weeks with a folded blanket on it.

When he finished dinner, Héctor got up, left his plate in the sink, and crossed the hallway. I heard the chair scrape as it turned on its legs. Then nothing.

Lidia looked at me from the table, glass in hand.

“Coming?”

We stood facing each other, hallway light on, bedroom in half-dark. Héctor was sitting at the foot of the bed, hands on his thighs, back very straight. He’d promised to say nothing, and he’d already kept it once: two days of silence with a note of two and a half lines.

Lidia didn’t kiss me right away. She looked at my mouth, then my eyes.

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

She kissed me with her mouth open and no delicacy at all, whole tongue, hand on the back of my neck gripping my hair. She tasted of wine and salt. I put my hands under her T-shirt and pushed it up to her breasts; I pulled it off in one go and she did the same with mine. Nothing underneath. Her nipples were hard and small, and there was a mole next to her armpit that you couldn’t see from the window. I sucked them one at a time, without gentleness, and she held my head with both hands so I wouldn’t leave.

Behind us, the chair creaked once. Then silence again.

She undressed me bottom to top: the button, the zipper, hands inside to pull my pants and panties down at once. When I was barefoot with my panties around my ankles, she made me step on them to get them off. She looked at my cunt without hiding it, with a quiet attention that turned me red and that I liked.

She sat me on the edge of the bed. Facing the chair. Then she knelt on the floor, opened my legs with both hands, and said it in my ear, two meters from him:

“Like that. Let him see you.”

And I felt at once a difference I’d been learning for three months without knowing it: that being naked isn’t the same as being put on display. She stroked me on the outside, up and down, with two fingers, then shoved them in. My back arched. This time I recognized the sound. I raised my head and looked for him, and he was there, elbows on knees, mouth a little open, holding my gaze without smiling. For the first time since the first night, I wasn’t ashamed of anything.

She put one finger in to the hilt and then two, and fucked me with them slowly, pulling them almost all the way out and pushing back in, while her thumb crushed my clit. You could hear it. Just like the first night, you could hear everything, and I didn’t care.

Then she went down with her mouth. She licked me bottom to top, the whole slit, slowly, and lingered on my lips, sucking, pushing her tongue in. When she reached my clit she sucked it unhurried, with the tip, and at the same time put two fingers in and curled them against my belly. With her other hand she spread me open a little to reach better.

It wasn’t a scream. It was a tension that climbed up my legs, stayed still in my belly for a second, and broke in short waves. I gripped the sheet with both hands, my legs closed around her head, and I said her name once, voice broken. She didn’t stop until I asked her to, and even then she took a while to come out.

When I opened my eyes, Héctor was still in the chair. His bathrobe was open, his cock showing through his pants, hands still on his thighs, not touching himself. When he caught my look he ran his tongue over his lip and barely smiled.

I asked Lidia to sit down. I wanted to give it back to her and I wanted to do it with him watching, now with no alibi at all. Lidia climbed onto the bed, leaned against the headboard, and opened her knees with no shame at all, and waited. She was wet down to her thighs. I opened her with my thumbs and looked at her up close for a second: lips swollen, clit out, everything shining. I ran my tongue bottom to top very slowly and she arched her back at once and dug a hand into my hair.

I learned fast what worked for her: slow, no dipping, pressing upward, whole tongue against her clit and fingers inside, curled up, hunting for her spot. Her thighs trembled. She grabbed my head with both hands and started moving herself, fucking herself on my mouth, and that was what turned me on most of everything.

“Don’t stop,” she said. “Don’t stop, don’t stop.”

She came with her mouth open and no sound at all, trembling, heels dug into the mattress, her cunt clenching around my fingers in pulses. A little more escaped her and I licked all of it without getting up.

She pulled my hair until I came up and kissed me with her mouth dirty, tasting of herself, and laughed against my lips.

Then we lay on our sides, facing each other, one leg each over the other’s, and put our hands between each other’s legs at the same time. Unhurried, watching each other from very close, until the two rhythms merged and we stopped telling whose moan was whose. That part I’d never done: not being touched, but being that close to a face while it happened, her breath in my mouth and her eyes open.

At some point Héctor got up from the chair. Not to get into bed: he stood at the edge, watching us, one hand on the backrest. Lidia raised an arm without stopping and he took it. We stayed like that a while, the three of us connected by one arm, until she squeezed my fingers with hers and her breath broke a second time.

And it hit me, three weeks late, that Héctor hadn’t been inside me even once. Neither had he sought it nor had I asked for it, and nobody had needed it.

In the end the three of us stayed in bed, badly arranged, sheets tangled, feet wherever they fell. Héctor was the last to lie down. When I turned off the lamp he said, in the dark, the only sentence of the whole night:

“I didn’t say anything.”

And Lidia laughed against my shoulder.

I woke at nine, in her bed, with Lidia’s hand on my belly and the smell of coffee. Héctor was in the kitchen, dressed, radio on. The chair had gone back to its place, at the foot of the bed, with the folded blanket on it, as if it had never been good for anything.

I had breakfast with them. I left at eleven. Lidia gave me a kiss at the landing and Héctor, from the doorway, raised two fingers in a small, almost polite wave, the same as the first night on the other side of the courtyard.

I got home at eleven thirty. The chair was still facing the kitchen glass and the binoculars on top, where I’d left them Wednesday. I sat down out of habit and looked across: the blue blind half up, the empty apartment, nobody. After a while they turned on the light and the two of them appeared, moving around the kitchen, and I stayed there with the binoculars in my lap, not using them, because at twelve meters you don’t need them anymore.

I sat a while thinking about putting them away in the drawer, which was what I’d decided from the start. And in the end I didn’t: I set them back on the windowsill, in their place. And before going to bed I did something I hadn’t done in four months.

I left the kitchen light on.

That night, from the window across the way, you could see me.