7. Good Neighbors
Good Neighbors
One week later.
Nadja walked down the hallway, her gym bag hanging loosely from one shoulder. Karl Seifert was leaning against the wall beside the shared mailboxes, lighting a cigarette.
He raised his head. His dull gray eyes immediately fixed on her.
Nadja walked past him without a word. Her face remained ice-cold. She neither nodded nor greeted him.
Karl stayed silent too. He didn’t say a word, but his gaze slowly traveled over her body from top to bottom, lingering on the tight athletic clothes and shamelessly dwelling on every curve that moved with her steps.
Nadja slipped the key into the lock, opened the door, and shut it firmly behind her. His greasy stare stayed outside.
The days that followed passed in a calm that almost seemed unbelievable. The financial pressure hadn’t disappeared, but it no longer felt as suffocating or urgent as before. The Kellers’ marriage gradually seemed to be settling back into a normal, peaceful rhythm.
Every morning, his wife pressed a neatly prepared lunch box into Markus’s hand. Around noon, Nadja’s phone would vibrate with short, cheerful messages.
“Ate everything today. The sandwich was really good.”
Nadja would read the message, and sometimes a genuine, warm smile stole across her lips.
Late in the afternoon, Markus came home looking noticeably more relaxed.
The deep crease between his brows began to smooth out.
Over dinner, he spoke animatedly about the contracts in Frankfurt, the commission that was supposed to be paid soon, and his firm plan to finally pay down some of their larger debts.
His face was full of hope for the future.
Nadja sat across from him, calmly set his plate down, and listened attentively.
She watched the light slowly return to her husband’s eyes.
He ate with more appetite. Talked more. When he passed through the kitchen, he would sometimes rest a gentle hand on her waist or give her ass a playful squeeze.
She took it in good humor, sometimes straightening his collar or laughing at one of his clumsy jokes.
The run-down rental apartment was no longer just a gloomy shelter where they hid from their debts. It was slowly beginning to feel like a real home again.
But the calm was deceptive. And incomplete.
Every night, after they had slept together, Markus would drift off with a tired, deeply satisfied smile on his lips.
Nadja, however, stayed awake in the dark.
She lay still and listened to her husband’s steady breathing.
Only when she was absolutely certain Markus was sound asleep did her hand slowly slip beneath the blanket.
Her breath trembled faintly. Hidden by the darkness, her fingers moved lower and touched her wet pussy, trying to calm the body that remained greedy and unsatisfied.
Her movements were quiet, careful, concealed, without a single sound that might wake the man beside her.
She desperately tried to extinguish that throbbing need.
Tried to fill the tormenting emptiness with silent orgasms so she wouldn’t grow so hot and hungry again that she blindly fell back into the same filthy mistake.
When the trembling of the orgasm had faded, she withdrew her sticky hand.
Nadja turned her head, looked at Markus’s peaceful face, pulled the blanket up to her chest, and suppressed a heavy sigh.
Throughout that entire seemingly “peaceful” week, Karl Seifert remained near her like a shadow.
He was there.
He still let his lustful gaze roam over her without restraint.
One afternoon, Nadja returned from the small supermarket around the corner carrying a shopping bag. Karl stood at the bottom of the stairs, slowly blowing cigarette smoke into the air.
Another day, Nadja came back from the gym completely exhausted. Her brown hair was tied into a severe ponytail, her thin T-shirt clinging sweat-soaked to her body. Karl was bent over the mailboxes. When he heard her footsteps, he turned around.
His gaze lingered a crucial moment too long. It swept over her rapidly rising breasts before reluctantly moving on.
Nadja could feel exactly how her body reacted to him against her will.
Her hand clenched tightly around the strap of her gym bag.
Her steps immediately quickened. When she was finally safely inside her apartment, she stood for several seconds in front of the hallway mirror and studied the betraying flush in her cheeks, for which there was no reasonable, respectable explanation.
Another time, Karl happened to be passing just as Nadja opened the door. He stopped at once and politely stepped aside with his head lowered to let her go first.
That feigned submissiveness only strengthened Nadja’s belief that the hard slap from before had done its job.
The old man had become afraid. Apparently, he had accepted that he had been put in his place.
But there was another truth, and it was far more unpleasant:
Karl was still there.
His mere, filthy existence lay right behind her bedroom wall. And Nadja’s treacherous body vibrated every damn time she felt his eyes on her.
Nadja clung to the thought that time would eventually erase all of it.
Then another week passed.
Nadja dragged herself home from the local supermarket carrying heavy shopping bags.
The large paper bag held the essentials: a carton of fresh milk, vegetables, a long baguette, eggs, packaged cold cuts, and two heavy bottles of mineral water.
The crumpled receipt was wedged between her reddened fingers, which already ached from the weight.
As she pushed open the building’s heavy front door with her hip, a red apple slipped from the top of the bag and rolled across the stone floor.
The weight pulled one of her shoulders down so hard that she couldn’t immediately bend to pick it up.
Karl appeared like a ghost that was always there exactly when someone was vulnerable. He approached silently. He didn’t crowd her.
He simply bent down slowly, picked up the apple, then reached with his bony hand and firmly took one of the handles of the heaviest paper bag.
Nadja stopped. She said nothing. Her gray eyes narrowed, sharply on guard.
“Too heavy,” Karl said in a low voice.
“I can carry it myself,” Nadja replied dryly and dismissively.
Karl didn’t argue.
He simply took the bag and walked a few steps ahead, exactly like a kind, harmless neighbor helping a woman carry her groceries.
They went up the old, silent staircase one behind the other.
At the Kellers’ apartment door, Karl bent down and set the heavy bag close to the threshold. Nadja came up behind him with the lighter bags.
“Thank you,” she said curtly. Polite enough, but without giving him the slightest opening for further conversation.
She reached out to pull the door shut.
Suddenly, Karl slipped his skinny arm forward and lightly blocked the gap.
The movement wasn’t forceful. He didn’t shove the door open. He didn’t push his way into the apartment.
He merely rested his forearm loosely against the wooden edge, as though silently asking for a few more seconds.
Nadja looked down at the wrinkled arm covered in age spots, then raised her head and looked directly into his eyes.
The air between them tightened instantly.
“I’m sorry,” Karl murmured.
Nadja didn’t answer. Her gaze remained absolutely cold.
“I… I understand my place now.”
The way he said it sounded almost pathetic. The old, crumpled face. The dull eyes lowered submissively. The voice that had turned fragile.
He truly looked like a lonely, broken old man who had awakened from a fever dream after a painful slap.
Nadja watched him in silence for several agonizing seconds.
“Spare me that pathetic bullshit,” she said coldly.
Karl paused. Then the pathetic mask slipped from his face in a flash.
The corner of his mouth twitched and curled into that familiar greasy smile. This time, though, he restrained it.
Not too openly. Not too brazenly. A quiet, scratchy laugh came from his throat.
“All right. I mean it, Mrs. Keller. I really do understand my place.”
Nadja frowned. Karl lowered his voice to a rough whisper.
“I just want us to be good neighbors again. Like before.”
He deliberately emphasized the last two words. A disgusting double meaning. Nadja understood immediately. She looked him straight in the eye.
She didn’t open the door any wider, but she didn’t push his arm away either.
“Neighbors. Nothing more,” she said sharply, stressing every word.
Karl nodded quickly.
“Nothing more.”
Nadja continued without mercy:
“You never mention what happened before. You don’t knock unless you have a damn good reason. And you do absolutely nothing that could make Markus suspicious.”
“Of course.” He answered a shade too quickly. A shade too eagerly.
Nadja noticed but deliberately ignored it. Because if she faced the ugly reality, this was the safest solution.
If she and Karl openly treated each other like enemies from now on, Markus would inevitably notice. If she became too cold or rejected him too aggressively, her husband would eventually ask why.
And if Karl felt cornered, if he were humiliated any further, a horny old man with nothing left to lose might do something unpredictably stupid. For the moment, this icy truce seemed like the best way forward.
Nadja gave a curt nod. She firmly pushed his arm away and closed the door.
Click.
The bolt slid into place with a solid, final sound.
Nadja stood inside the apartment, which smelled faintly of lavender. Through the thick wood, she heard Karl’s slow footsteps moving away.
One step. Two steps.
Then he began to whistle. A soft, cheerful, old, and repulsive melody drifted through the empty hallway.
Nadja closed her eyes in irritation.
Fucking old pig.
But after that silent curse, the anger no longer felt as suffocating in her chest as it had during the days before.
She was still irritated. Still deeply disgusted. But at the same time, she was strangely relieved. At least everything could look normal and clean from the outside again.
Nadja carried the heavy bags into the kitchen.
She placed the groceries one by one on the polished wooden table. Bread, eggs, fresh vegetables, cold cuts, mineral water.
Then she took out the ingredients for the stew Markus loved so much. The familiar domestic scene quickly pulled her back into the safe role of the caring wife.
She stood at the sink and carefully washed each piece of produce.
She took the sharp knife and cutting board from the cabinet and set the heavy cast-iron pot on the stove.
Those small, repetitive tasks gradually slowed her heartbeat.
Soon the comforting smell of melted butter and sautéed onions rose into the air, driving away the old, musty smell of the hallway outside.
The phone on the table vibrated briefly. A message from Markus.
He wrote that he would be home on time today and asked curiously what his beloved wife was cooking for dinner.
Nadja quickly dried her hands, smiled, and typed a perfectly ordinary, sweet reply.
She didn’t mention Karl at all. She didn’t mention the heavy grocery bag he had just carried for her. Or the smug, filthy whistling outside in the hallway.
After sending the message, Nadja placed the phone facedown beside the cutting board. She lowered her head and continued dicing the onion with concentration.
The knife struck the wood in an even rhythm.
Tock… tock… tock.
Clean. Neat. Perfectly ordered.
Out in the hallway, Karl Seifert had long since stopped whistling. But his greasy smile was still lodged somewhere deep inside her mind. Small, filthy, unbearably unpleasant. And she simply couldn’t stop thinking about it.