Chapter 1: The Wall Shakes
The first thing Jules noticed, after the boxes and the faint smell of the previous tenant’s lavender air freshener, was how thin the walls were. She could hear Lissy humming Taylor Swift in the shower down the hall, the pipes groaning in response. It was fine. It was charming, even. They were friends, sort of. They’d run in the same circles for years, enough for Jules to know Lissy was fun, a bubbly, sun-kissed sparkplug of a person who could make anyone laugh. When she needed a roommate for this two-bedroom walk-up, Lissy had been the obvious, easy choice.
“The walls are kind of thin,” Jules mentioned later, handing Lissy a roll of paper towels.
Lissy just grinned, her brown eyes sparkling. “We’ll just have to be respectful, roomie. No blasting my breakup anthems after ten.” She said it with a wink, her voice light and melodic. It sounded genuine.
That first night, Lissy announced she was going out to “christen the neighborhood.” Jules, curled on the couch with her laptop, just waved her off. “Don’t wait up.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Lissy laughed, the door clicking shut behind her.
Jules fell asleep to the soft blue glow of her monitor, the silence of the new apartment a comfortable weight.
The pounding woke her up at 3:07 AM.
Not an angry pounding. A rhythmic, insistent, mattress-spring-creaking thump-thump-thump that vibrated through the plasterboard separating her room from Lissy’s. Jules lay still in the dark, disoriented. Then the sounds crystallized.
A high, girlish squeal. “Yesss, right there! Just like that!”
Jules squeezed her eyes shut. Okay. Lissy had brought someone home. Fine. Normal. She pulled a pillow over her head. The pillow was useless.
The sounds were a narrative. The wet, slick slap of skin on skin, faster and harder than Jules would have thought possible. The bedframe now hitting the wall in a steady, jarring tattoo. And Lissy’s voice, not the conversational tone Jules knew, but a performance of breathy, peaky ecstasy.
“Oh my gaaawd, you’re so big! It’s so deep!”
Jules felt her face burn. She stared at the faint outline of her own blank wall, a prisoner to the audio. She heard a male voice, a low, strained grunt. “Fuck…”
“You like this ass, baby?” Lissy’s voice sliced through, clear and sharp as glass. “You like this phat ass?”
A choked, affirmative sound from the man.
The tempo increased. The slapping sounds became louder, more violent. Jules imagined the picture: her petite friend with the dancer’s body and the remarkably round, pronounced behind she’d always discreetly noticed, putting it to work. The grunts from the man became more ragged, punctuating the rhythm.
“I’m… gonna…” he panted, the words barely audible.
Everything stopped.
The slapping ceased. The bed frame went quiet. The only sound was heavy, labored breathing.
Lissy’s voice cut through the sudden void, but it was different now. All the high-pitched theatre was gone. It was flat, cold, and utterly in command. “Don’t you dare cum yet.”
The silence that followed was deafening. Jules held her breath.
The man let out a shuddering, almost pained breath. “I can’t… you’re too…”
“You can,” Lissy stated, her voice a low murmur Jules had to strain to hear. It was neither a request nor encouragement. It was an instruction. “You will. Now get back to work.”
A beat. Then the pounding started again, slower this time, more deliberate. The man’s grunts were tinged with something like desperation. Lissy, meanwhile, had gone completely silent. No more theatrical moans. Just the relentless, physical sound of the act itself, a machine in perfect, punishing operation.
Jules lay frozen. This wasn’t the fun, tipsy hookup she’d imagined. This was something else. Something mechanical and voracious. The bubbly girl from the shower was gone, replaced by this engine of demand in the next room. The friendly, casual Lissy she thought she knew was a façade, and the real one was on the other side of this horrifyingly thin wall, milking a stranger dry.
The rhythm changed again, growing frantic, unsustainable. The man was making a raw, guttural sound.
Lissy’s voice returned, suddenly sweet and encouraging, a switch flipped. “That’s it… give it to me. Give me every drop.”
A final, crashing thud against the wall. A hoarse shout, abruptly cut off. Then a deep, exhausted silence, broken only by the sound of two people gasping for air.
Jules didn’t move. She listened to the heavy footsteps, the creak of the floorboards, the low murmur of a man’s voice—strained, bewildered. She couldn’t make out the words. Then Lissy’s laugh, light and girlish again, the one Jules recognized. “You were amazing, baby. The bathroom’s down the hall on the left.”
Jules stared at the ceiling, the aftermath humming in her ears. The image was seared into her mind: her playful new roommate, and the cold, precise command in her voice. Don’t you dare cum yet.
Down the hall, a door opened and closed. The toilet flushed. Minutes later, the front door of the apartment opened and quietly clicked shut. He was gone.
Silence settled back over the apartment, thicker and more profound than before. Jules finally exhaled, her body tense. She heard a single, soft footstep in Lissy’s room, then the sigh of mattress springs as a body settled into bed.
In the complete dark, Jules’s understanding of her friend, of her living situation, of the very walls around her, had fundamentally and irrevocably changed. And downstairs, on the dimly lit sidewalk, Marcus walked unsteadily to his car, his body spent, his ego curiously punctured, wondering what in the hell had just happened to him.