Peeping

I was the serious guy in the suit and SUV. All it took was for a woman to challenge me with her eyes for the animal inside me to wake up, and that village fair set him loose for good.

She had spent years deciding who obeyed and who begged. None of her clients knew that behind the mirror, someone was studying how to dethrone her.

I met her in adolescence and never stopped wanting her. She told me about every kiss, every lover, never knowing I kept all her words for lonely nights.

I served that house since I was a boy and watched as that woman’s fire-red mane brought the valley’s most powerful men to their knees, one by one, by day of the week.

At eighty-seven, he thought he’d heard everything. Then she knelt on the other side of the grille and started telling him what she did when her husband traveled.

I thought she was asleep the night I brought those two men home. I was wrong: she saw everything. And weeks later she walked into the bathroom, sat in front of me, and demanded to know it all.

The first time I heard her through the partition, I froze, holding my breath, pretending to be asleep while she believed she was completely alone.

She’d go up to her room, open the closet, and change knowing we were watching from the street. I was the youngest in the group, but I was the first to go through her door.

I hid on the locker-room mezzanine with Bruno pressed against my back. Below, my mother and her friend were undressing among the workers, and I couldn’t look away.

That Thursday I didn’t have classes and the morning was mine. I turned on the water, closed my eyes, and let myself go... not imagining boots would appear in the window.

I had never smelled another woman’s desire until that afternoon, standing in the hallway with my flatmate’s soaked garment in my hands and my pulse racing.

For fifteen years I’d greeted him on the beach without imagining what that man saw each night through the bathroom glass while I thought I was alone.

At four in the morning, locked under the sheets with my mother’s phone, I started opening folder after folder, unaware that nothing would ever be the same.

Our bedroom window faced his rooftop exactly. That night I realized the idea of being watched aroused me more than I’d ever admit.

We’d met to review for finals, but by six o’clock the books were closed and no one wanted to leave. What came after still makes my pulse race.

I opened the curtain just enough to confirm my suspicion: he was outside, with his hand inside his pants, waiting to see something he shouldn’t have seen.

He’d been ignoring me for weeks. That night I dressed for another man, and just as I was kissing him at the next table, he walked in arm in arm with a stranger.

I left the curtains open on purpose and pretended not to see him. He, standing on his rooftop, didn’t miss a single detail of my naked body.

When she told me what really turned her on, I knew we were opening a door we’d never be able to close again. And I didn’t want to close it.

A yellow Post-it on the little box said just one word: “Play me.” It was two in the morning, and curiosity beat out the night’s accumulated exhaustion.