Across The Hall
One Wife. Three Neighbours. One Secret.
Five months married. Nine floors up. And her body still waiting for something that has no name.
Shruti followed her husband from Chennai to Bogotá with a suitcase of spices, a brass coffee filter, and a marriage built on a good man’s careful love. Jerome is kind. Jerome is devoted. Jerome is away — again — closing the deal that was supposed to buy their future.
Then three men move in across the hall.
Diego, who asks about her spices like the answers matter. Alexei, who doesn’t pretend he isn’t looking. Leon, who says almost nothing and sees absolutely everything.
It begins with filter coffee on a steel tray. It becomes salsa lessons, a city she finally learns to love, a knife on a dark street and the man who appears out of nowhere — and, one door at a time, an education no one ever thought to give her: what her body can do, what it can ask for, and who is allowed to finish first.
Set between Chennai and Bogotá, steeped in two cultures, this is the story of a wife who went looking for nothing and found everything — carrying a secret and an answer to the question her husband asked her in the dark.
A standalone literary erotic novella. Explicit content: multiple partners, MFMM ménage. Not a romance.
18+ Adults only.
A glimpse beneath the sheets…
The building had fourteen floors and Shruti lived on the ninth with her husband Jerome. It was March when they had moved in. It was now May. She had adjusted. Jerome went to work every day, came back and went again the next day. She learned the building’s rhythms the way you learn any new place — by paying attention when there was nothing else to do.
She was paying attention on a Tuesday afternoon in the second week of May when the lift doors opened on the ninth floor and three men walked out carrying boxes.
She looked through her peephole.
Three of them. Early-to-mid twenties she guessed. The one nearest to her door was tall and fair-skinned, dark-blond hair that probably needed cutting but suited him.
She poured herself some South Indian filter coffee. She looked at the box of steel tumblers she hadn’t unpacked yet.
She unpacked three.
She put the tumblers on a tray with the small ceramic creamer and the sugar bowl. She picked it up, crossed the hall and knocked on the open door.
***
Alexeisaw her first and smiled. He spoke in English with an accent that had Russian in it somewhere, warmer, Colombian: “Namas-tay.”
“Namaste,” Shruti said, smiling at his pronunciation. She held up the tray. “I’m from across the hall. I made coffee. No compulsion. Just trying to be neighbourly.”
Diego pulled an upturned box to the doorway. “Sit. Please. We have nowhere that isn’t a box.”
Alexei took the first tumbler. “Smells incredible,” he said, his eyes scanning her face. She wasn’t sure the compliment was about the coffee.
Leon took his tumbler and didn’t say much, just looked at her with eyes that were very direct, very calm and entirely unsettling — in a good way, she decided.
“You live alone?” Alexei asked, sounding more like wishful thinking than a question.
“No. My husband. Travels for work. Away this week.”
Alexei was looking at her hair parting. “Can I ask what that is? The red.”
“Sindhoor,” she said. “When an Indian woman marries, her husband puts vermilion in her hair parting at the wedding. It means she’s married.”
“Lucky guy,” Alexei said. “Your husband.”
***
She stood in her kitchen, pressed her thighs together and made herself a cup of tea. Jerome loved her. She loved him. And yet —
She didn’t hear him knock so much as hear the door already moving. Alexei had a way of arriving that skipped the part where most people waited to be let in.
“You’re not doing anything,” he said. Not a question.
“Whatever it was, it’s worse than what I have planned.” He was already in the kitchen. “There’s a place. Salsa. Come with me before I have to dance with strangers.”
She grabbed her purse and went with him.
***
Alexei took her hand and put his other hand at the small of her back like it had always lived there.
By the third song her hips had stopped arguing with his hand. By the fifth, neither of them was pretending the dancing was the point.
An hour later, the cab dropped them at the building’s entrance. He kept her hand in his the entire walk up — through the lobby, into the lift, down the corridor — like letting go wasn’t something that occurred to him. She should have said goodnight outside his door. The thought arrived and left without taking hold.
“Where are the others?” she asked, as she stepped into the apartment and he closed and locked the door behind them.
“Diego has class till six. Leon’s at the gym, or wherever Leon goes when he wants to be left alone.”
He was walking towards his room, her hand in his.
Continue the story Across The Hall.
A little more spice — on me — for my lovers
This part is for my lovers only.
Sign up, sweetheart — it’s free, and I don’t bite. Unless asked 😉
All images are AI generated and do not depict any real person.