The Beach House Next Door

We rented the little blue beach house for four days, just me and my boyfriend, and for the first two days it was perfect in the most boring way. Long walks, sunburned shoulders, falling asleep early with salt still in my hair. Then on the third night, the house next door filled up, and everything changed.

I heard them before I saw anything. We were in bed with our window cracked open to let the ocean air in, half asleep, when it started drifting across the narrow strip of sand between our houses. A woman's voice, low and breathy, rising and falling. Then a man's, murmuring something I couldn't make out, and her laugh, soft and wicked. My boyfriend was snoring lightly beside me. I was suddenly, completely awake.

I slipped out of bed and went to the window. The house next door had every light on and not a single curtain drawn, and there they were on their couch, backlit like a movie. She was in his lap, facing him, her sundress straps fallen down her arms, moving on him slow and deep while the ocean crashed behind their open sliding door. I stood there in my sleep shirt with my forehead nearly touching the screen, and I didn't move for I don't know how long.

The next night I didn't even pretend to sleep. I told my boyfriend I wanted to read on the balcony, and I curled up in the deck chair with a book I never opened, angled where I could see straight into their living room. They didn't disappoint. This time she was bent over the back of their couch, her dress flipped up, and he was behind her, one hand tangled in her hair. I had to press my hand over my mouth. My book slid off my lap and I didn't pick it up. My other hand found its way under my sleep shorts all on its own.

It became my ritual. Night four, our last night, I went out to the balcony the second the sun went down, and I didn't bother with the book at all. I just sat there in the dark in my thin little nightgown, waiting. When their lights came on, my whole body lit up with them. They were on their balcony this time, closer than ever, maybe fifteen feet from me. She was leaning back against their railing, and he was on his knees in front of her with her legs over his shoulders, and the sounds she was making carried perfectly across the water and the sand.

I was touching myself openly by then, my nightgown pushed up around my hips, my fingers slick and fast. I couldn't take my eyes off them. She was coming apart, her hands gripping the railing, her back arching, and I was so close, so embarrassingly close, when I felt hands on my shoulders.

My boyfriend. He'd come looking for me, and instead he'd found me like this, spread out in the deck chair, moaning along with the neighbors. For one frozen second I was mortified beyond words. Then he bent down, and I felt his breath hot against my ear, and he pulled my fingers away and replaced them with his own, pushing two deep inside me while I gasped.

He lifted me out of the chair like I weighed nothing and bent me right over our balcony railing, facing their house, facing them. My nightgown rode up over my hips. The night air was cool on everything he'd bared, and he pushed into me from behind in one long stroke that made me cry out loud enough that I was sure the neighbors heard. Maybe they did. She was watching us now, I could see her face turned toward our balcony over his shoulder, and the knowledge that she was watching me the way I'd been watching her all week made me clench around him so hard he groaned.

We finished together with the ocean roaring below us and the neighbors' balcony gone suddenly, suspiciously quiet. When we finally stumbled back inside, tangled and laughing and wrecked, I looked back once. Their lights were off. But I like to think they stayed out there in the dark, listening to us the way I'd been listening to them.

We checked out the next morning. I never learned their names. But every time I close my eyes I can still hear her, and I can still feel that railing under my hands, and I wonder if they're telling the story of the noisy couple next door the same way I'm telling this one.

I hope they are. I hope we gave them as good a show as they gave me. Part of me wishes we'd booked another week, just to see if they'd come back, just to find out whether the woman who watched me would ever wave again.