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Erotica | Voyeur | Cuckold | Cheating Wife | Neighbor | Teasing Texts | Hidden Watching | Risky Invitation

I Watched My Neighbors' Intense Private Session — 6

She smiled right at my hiding spot, sent teasing texts, and now wanted me over — knowing exactly what I had seen.

PART 5

I sat on the toilet lid in my locked bathroom and replayed everything I had just seen, heard and felt, and wondered where, exactly, the trap had been set.

Was the open window a deliberate choice?

The show was directed towards my backyard?

If Jessa degraded herself for the benefit of one, why?

The only logical solution that my body had already taken to heart, and my brain kept battling was the one she wanted me to see:

Being watched was a part of the scene and I was the closest set of eyes.

There was a thrill in me, which was not unlike terror.

I stood up.

Opened the bathroom door.

Went to my kitchen and drank a glass of water I didn't drink.

I noticed the small ceramic hedgehog on the windowsill, Jessa's thank you gift for a cup of sugar from a neighbor.

At the time I thought it was cute.

Quirky.

Now I picked it up and turned it over in my hands, looking for something I couldn’t name.

It contained only soil and succulent roots.

No hidden camera.

No secret message.

It was only a planter.

But I placed it in the cabinet under the sink anyway, so I wouldn't have to view it every time I did the dishes.

My cell phone rang again.

Unknown number.

PS—Your pitcher is not in the mound.

This evening, it will be raining.

I went to the sliding glass door and peered out.

The pitcher was still there, small and white, and conspicuous on the patio concrete.

The sky was already beginning to overcast, and for the first time, the grey harbingers of the evening storm had appeared in the weather app all week.

Now Jessa's house was dark.

The windows closed.

There was no one there but the light in the kitchen was on, a golden rectangle in the growing darkness.

I got my pitcher back.

Locked the door.

Checked that the blinds were closed—really closed, fully closed—before I went upstairs to take the coldest shower my water heater would allow.

The telephone remained silent throughout the night.

I didn’t sleep.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Jessa's face tilted up toward a man she couldn't see, her lips forming words of surrender.

I heard the belt snap across her skin.

I heard the ring, ring, no answer sound of my phone against my thigh and received messages from a number I didn't block and wouldn't block.

I decided to forgo sleep altogether at three in the morning, and went to the kitchen to make tea.

I could see a single light on in my neighbors house, through the kitchen window, the curtains drawn but it was still faintly lit, on the second floor.

Did they also have eyes?

Fucking again or talking or lying in each other's arms after I had run away inside after what happened?

Had Jessa been aware I was watching the light as I had watched all the other things?

My cell phone was face up on the kitchen counter, and it was still dark.

No more texts.

No more knowing, devastating little observations from a number I couldn't bring myself to block.

Only the rain, when it finally arrived, pounded against the roof and patio and hostas.

Cleaning up all traces of my presence.

I sat in the dark kitchen until the dawn, drinking cold tea and waited for the next message that didn't come.

The text was received on a Tuesday.

No, not the coy, teasing messages from an unknown number that had been playing with me like a teenager for three days since the incident, those had been cut off, abruptly, as if Jessa had grown bored with her game the moment I'd hidden the hedgehog planter.

No, it was something else altogether.

Drinks tonight.

7pm.

My place.

Bring nothing.

I read it three times in the dairy aisle of Whole Foods with my cart full of yogurt and too-expensive granola, and the kind of sad single-woman groceries I've been purchasing since the divorce was finalized.

The ceiling was illuminated with fluorescent lights.

A little further away, a young child was crying about string cheese.

There were three words that kept coming to me, uninvited and unwelcome:

Bring nothing.

Not “come over” or “want to hang out” or any of the neighborly phrases I would have guessed.

Bring nothing.

It was a command wrapped in friendly words, and my body knew it before my mind did, the warmth that spread across my chest, the way my fingers clenched around the phone case.

I replied, "Who's that?

Before I even had the phone down I got a response.

The chair on the left is the one you are interested in.

A lady in yoga pants walked past me for almond milk.

I didn't see her.

I was in my patio, the pitcher slipping from my fingers, the belt cracking across Jessa's skin like punctuation.

In my throat my pulse had become a live thing.

I don't understand what you're saying, I typed.

Lied.

I was about to press send, but my thumb lingered there for a while.

Sure you don't.

7pm.

Wear something comfortable.

Not a request.

Not a suggestion.

I paused to consider the word comfortable and got hotter up the back of my neck.

What was "comfortable" to a woman who had been bent over an ottoman for forty-three minutes, with a blindfold over her eyes?

To the man who had held the belt what did it mean?

The toddler continued to cry.

The fluorescent lights continued to buzz.

The world had been spinning its wheels and mine was on an axis that I'd never known until four days ago.

I left my cart in the dairy aisle and walked out of Whole Foods with only my own steady, insistent heartbeat in my ears.

The next six hours was a study in self-deception.

PART 7