I keep it close, for all the times I’ve wanted something like that and been denied.
He saw me.
And I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I have seen him.
* * *
The next time I dare to look, I’m disappointed. Of course I am. He’s closed his curtains, like a sign: I know what you did. And I don’t like it.
Even though I know that’s completely irrational. If I accept that he knows what I did, I have to also accept that he did it on purpose. He could have stopped once he realised I was watching – and yet here we are. Trapped in our places. Him with his curtains drawn, me wishing they weren’t.
Though I understand it’s not just because of the dirty things now. It’s not just because of his gorgeous body and his filthy actions, I swear it’s not. It’s those eyes, burning out at me. It’s that look that lingered long after the event, so furtive and … and complicit, somehow. I lie in bed thinking of the weight of that gaze, and when I actually entertain the idea of putting my hand between my legs it’s with his face in mind.
Would he stare at me like that as he fucked me? With that kind of intensity? I don’t know and obviously will never be privy to it, but that’s beside the point, isn’t it? I can fantasise. For the first time in my life, I can actually fantasise about a real, living, breathing person and not panic.
I’m safe, behind the glass. I can lie on my stomach and press a pillow between my thighs, then imagine him taking me like that, haunches up like an animal. With Sid, it was never like that. It was always face to face so that he could slap me as we did it, but I’m not sure my blue-eyed Serial Killer would be that way.
He’d probably just chop up my body and put it in the freezer.
Or maybe he’ll simply leave his curtains open, when I least expect it.
It’s the seventh day since it happened, and I’ve almost started thinking it was a dream. And then I wake up twisted on my side, foggy with images I don’t want to have in my head, and there’s a glow seeping into my apartment. I can see it just edging its fingers across the carpet, like the light of a convenience store after you’ve just trekked ten miles through a barren desert.
I think of the Rocky Horror Picture Show – that song they sing when they see the castle and think everything’s going to be OK – and then I heave myself out of bed like a zombie and stumble across to that light.
It can’t be helped. I’m dying of thirst. I’m drowning in desperation. I have to hang on to my own curtains just to keep myself standing, and then I see him. He’s in the window, just like before. On the same day, too, I realise, which practically makes this some sort of ritual. I was silly to doubt him, or imagine he thought badly of me.
He just likes to do it on the same day every week, the way he likes to do everything. The orange, I remember, always gets peeled at the same time. And he picks his mail up at certain intervals – maybe when it’s safe to come out of his lair.
And so it follows that he stands in front of his window half-naked, at the previously allotted time. He’s even wearing the same garb he did before – those queer longjohns, so tight over his every bulge and curve.
Though there’s a subtle difference.
He’s not stood up. He’s sat at that little table in front of his window, and he isn’t staring straight forward, like an automaton playing out a role.
He’s staring up at my window. I know he is. I know he is even though I kind of lean forwards and look up, expecting to somehow see a prettier woman in the apartment above … Or maybe she’s below me? Yeah, maybe she’s doing an exotic dance for him in the apartment below me, and, once she’s done, that’s when he masturbates.
For her. Not for me.
And the message he’s scrawled on his window in lipstick?
That’s for her, too.
Your turn now, it says, and I can’t help admiring his gall. I admire his lettering, too – as neat as he seems, as ordered, in spite of the ink he’s used. I’m fairly certain it’s lipstick – so red and garish, glaring in the backwash of that strange light from his apartment – but of course I can’t fathom why.
He seems more the sort to have made a neatly printed sign in Microsoft Word, with an elegant and stark border and a font that can be registered clearly. It’s your turn now, it would say, but maybe with a sincerely, The Serial Killer after it, instead of what I get.
Which is nothing.
I’m allowed that much – no names, no promises, no pleases or thank yous – and even that much seems like a stretch. I didn’t realise he knew how to talk. That wasn’t a part of the programme when he first introduced me to it.
I’m just supposed to watch, I think. That’s my role: to watch him peel out of his clothes and abuse himself. He has to know that I can’t do the same for him in return, no matter how tightly he folds those massive arms or how closely he watches me be this shadow in the window.
Because that’s what I’ll look like, isn’t it? My light isn’t on. He can maybe make out the wispy white corner of my nightgown, and possibly the edge of one of my arms. I’m a ghost made up of higgledy-piggledy random parts, which he’s probably pieced together in completely the wrong order.
In his head, he’s given me a slimmer build, smaller breasts, daintier feet and hands. That glimpse he caught of me in the hall … it hasn’t helped him. He probably just saw my eyes, black as night and twice as lovely as the rest of me, and made his suppositions from there.
Now I’m some exotic gypsy, ready to play for him. I’m not a girl who let some man degrade her for a year, before breaking free into absolute nothingness. Into this place, chill as an arctic night. Into this life, monotonous and samey but ultimately safe.
I don’t have to worry in this life.
Or, at least, I didn’t have to worry. Until now.
Which is probably why I slowly draw my curtain back across the window, and return to my bed. And then, once I’m there, I sleep the numbing sleep of the dead.
* * *
The words are gone by the next night, and I know what that means all too well. I missed my chance. I didn’t do what I was told, so now I have to pay. Of course, the price in this situation is far less than the ones I’ve paid in the past. It’s just a withdrawal of a promise, an erasure of possible delights and pleasures that I’m sure I didn’t want anyway.
Yet it stings all the same. I’m back to being just a checkout girl, who doesn’t dance with a Serial Killer in the pale moonlight. I’m nothing, I think, as I stare down at his sullenly dark window.
And then the light in his apartment abruptly goes on, and suddenly my heart is beating like a trapped bird in my chest. There doesn’t even seem to be any build up to it, either. One second I’m silent and still inside, the next second my pulse is trying to leap out of my body. I can lie and lie and lie to myself, it seems, and pretend that I don’t care whether I’m nothing or not, but my body tells the truth.
It means something to me that he comes to the window half-dressed, sweatpants slung so low on his hips a breath could knock them down. It means that he didn’t care whether I did anything for him or not.
He’s still going to do anything for me.
And he does. Anything, I mean. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a guy do the things he offers me, right there in his window where anyone could see. In all honesty, I’ve never even seen a guy masturbate, or be vulnerable, or give a single thing without taking. So this … this is right out.
He puts his fingers in his mouth, slow, slow. Like he’s putting on a show for me, and knows it. He even knows the things I want to see – like the glimpse of his tongue I get between