The Voyeur Next Door (9 page)

“Yes, that’s fine.”

“What’s your name?”

I should have been prepared for the question. I should have known she would ask. But I had no answer. There was a time I had a name, one that I was proud of, that spoke of me and who I was. I wasn’t that person anymore. I had left that name behind. I had left that world behind.

“Q,” I murmured, hating the tightness it brought to my chest. “Just Q.”

It had been too long since I’d worn those shoes. Why on earth was I digging them out of hiding now? For this girl? And the answer was simple: because I missed it. I missed women. I missed holding a hot, aroused body as I made them beg for release. I missed it all, just like Regina had said I would. I hated myself for that. But it was who I was. I needed this.

I needed her.

“Q,”
she whispered at last.
“Does that stand for something?”

“Yes,” was all I was willing to give her, and it did.

Gabriel Quintus Madoc was my full, legal name. Only my mom, dad, and grandfather knew. I was fairly sure not even Tammy was privy to my middle name, only because I knew she would never let me live it down.

“How old are you?”
she asked, seemingly out of the blue.

“Thirty-five.”

She took her sweet time processing that and responding.

“I’m twenty-three.”

Her age didn’t bother me. She was legal, had the voice of a sex kitten and wanted to play, I was fine with the rest.

“Does it bother you?”

“Your age?”
She didn’t wait for me to answer.
“No. So, will this just be about sex?”

“Yes. If you’re not comfortable,” I continued when her hesitance worked through the plastic and wires of the phone. “Things don’t need to go any further than this. We will resume our everyday lives and no hard feelings all around.”

Her silence was longer this time, thicker and I waited patiently for her.

“I need to think about it,”
she said at last.
“I want to make sure this will be something I can commit to without reservations.”

I admired her for that. I liked that she considered everything before heedlessly lunging into a decision. It only solidified my resolve that she was the one I wanted.

“Call me Monday,” I told her. “Seven o’clock with your answer.”

I expected her to hang up, instead, she asked,
“What about coming?”

Despite everything, I burst out laughing. The sound reverberated from my gut like a storm and exploded from my throat in a long, and rumbling roar. I would have been stunned by the unfamiliar sound if I could bring myself to stop. On the other end, I heard her timid giggles and it only made me laugh harder.

“Monday,” I promised her, forcing myself to sober down.

“Really?”
she huffed.
“Is this a ploy to get me to pick what you want?”

“No, this is my way of making sure we don’t do anything you’ll regret later,” I replied. “There is no hurry and if this is what you want, then it won’t matter. But when I allow you to come for the first time, it will be because you have chosen to be mine.”

“Well,”
she breathed.
“You certainly know how to get a girl all excited.”

I chuckled. “I try.”

She hung up after a soft goodbye. I set the phone done on the sofa next to me and peered down at the tent pole holding up the front of my sweats.

“Sorry, pal. Not tonight.”

I started to heave my horny, exhausted body off the sofa when the phone shrilled against my hip. For a startled second, I hoped it was
her
calling back to say she accepted. But from what I had gathered about my neighbor, she was consistent and thorough. She would wait until Monday. Which meant it could only be five other people.

Tamara’s excited chirp filled my ear even before I could speak.

“Guess what?”

I dropped back against the leather and settled in. I knew just from the volume of my sister’s excited voice that this would be an at least two hour conversation.

“What?”

“I got the lead role in the school musical,”
she declared proudly and with more than a touch of arrogance.
“I will be Odette in a modern and riveting retelling of Swan Lake.”
She ended her dramatic roll with a deep and profound sigh.
“I wowed the judges and stole the spotlight right out from under that little bitch’s fake nose.”

“Tammy!” I scolded without any heat.

“Her nose is totally fake,”
she replied without missing a beat.
“She can pretend it’s not, but it so is. I have pictures from kindergarten and trust me, so fake.”

I rolled my eyes. “I meant the bitch comment.”

“Why? Everyone says it.”

“Are you everyone?”

“What does that even mean?”

I was so glad she couldn’t see my grin. “Congratulations on getting the part.”

“I know! Awesome, right? Mr. Bowide says I have the grace and beauty of the silver screen, the old kind. You know? The black and white stuff from back in the dinosaur era.”

“I know,” I assured her.

“Anyway, so, you’re happy for me, right?”

Years of being her brother and recognizing
that
tone automatically prickled my apprehension.

“Possibly…” I said cautiously. “What do you want?”

“Well, see, here’s the thing,”
she began, her words coming out quick.
“The cast and crew have to elect a family member to help with building the stage and making the props and stuff and soooo…”
She dragged her o on forever before continuing.
“I volunteered you.”
she said it in such a manner that she almost had me convinced she had done me a favor.
“Isn’t that awesome? You don’t have to thank me. Just be at the school by eight on Saturday.”

“Whoa, hold on there!” I cut in before she could disconnect and trap me with this bomb she’d dropped into my lap. “What the hell did you sign me up for?”

“It’s only for the one day!”
She exhaled sharply.
“If you don’t help, I can’t be in the play.”

I glowered at the curtains across the room. “You couldn’t just ask like a normal person?”

“Would you have said yes like a normal person?”
she countered smartly.

The odds of that were slim to none so I could see her point. But I didn’t like it.

“What about Jonas?”

“Are you kidding? Can you imagine Dad with a hammer? He probably couldn’t even lift the thing.”

This was also true. My stepfather was as thin as a pole with arms that reminded me of tree branches in the winter. His face went purple trying to open a jar of pickles. Asking him to do any sort of manual labor was just a joke.

I relented. “What am I supposed to do?”

Her smug little grin was all over her voice when she answered.
“Just help set up the stage. It’s really easy.”
She paused, then added,
“You wouldn’t happen to know how to sew, would you?”

My eyebrows lifted up into my hairline. “Sew?”

“Yeah, like costumes and stuff.”

“No!” I blurted in indignation. “I’m a mechanic, not a … a…” What the hell were they called?

“A seamstress?”

“Don’t they teach you how to sew over there?”

“If you can’t sew, just say so,”
she retorted curtly.
“I’ll ask Mom.”

“Mom can’t sew either and you know it.”

Tammy paused as she thought about this.
“I don’t know then. Maybe I’ll buy something. How will the school know? Unless they find out and I get kicked out of the play and expelled from school…”

I shook my head. “I’ll see what I can do.”

That must have been exactly what she was waiting for. Her elated screech nearly deafened me.

“I love you! You’re the best brother in the whole world!”

My grin was unstoppable even when I fought to suppress it. “And you are the most spoiled and conniving little sister in the world.”

“I know!”
she sing-songed.
“It’s what makes me so awesome. Okay, I gotta go. Mom thinks I’m doing homework and reflecting on my bad choices.”

“Oh yeah? What did you do this time?”

She huffed.
“Why would you think I did something?”

“Because you’re you.”

“True.”
She sighed.
“She caught me smoking.”

My grin was gone. “Jesus, Tam…”

“I know, I know. Smoking is bad for me, blah, blah, blah. It was only the one. I was stressed.”

“About?”

“Just school crap.”
She exhaled deeply.
“Math’s kicking my ass and I fucking hate science, and English, and algebra and—”

“I get it,” I interjected. “You hate all your classes.”

“Not all. I love drama and music, oh, and lunch. The rest can just go to hell.”

“Look, if you need help—”

“No, I’m okay. Thanks though. You really are an awesome brother, Gabe. Anyway, I gotta go. See you Saturday.”

She hung up before I could say anything else.

I dumped the phone down on the sofa and climbed to my feet. My lower back gave a twang and I rubbed absently at the spot as I shuffled my way into the sparsely stocked kitchen. I kicked aside a box and yanked open the fridge. A sickly, white light spilled over empty racks and I grunted.

“Pizza it is.”

Ali

His hands were painfully hot gliding down the curve of my waist to leave a trail of fire down to my hip. Moist lips, danced over the curve of my neck and moved inward in the direction of my collarbone. Blunt, playful teeth nipped at my pulse, took a detour to nibble at my jaw line before resuming its downward trail to the hollow of my throat.

I burned. I could feel my skin reaching temperatures too high to be safe. My heart was a wild¸ desperate mess in my chest and I knew he could feel it the moment that mouth closed around my breast.

“Don’t stop…” I pleaded, threading my fingers into thick, silky hair the color of ebony and holding that mouth to me.

My back arched and a hard, toned arm slid beneath me, lifting me higher to the scraping teeth and circling tongue. A corded thigh pushed between mine, spreading me to lean hips and a searching cock.

A hiss whispered from my lips and I bowed beneath him. My head dipped back against the pillow and I waited to feel him fill me. The head of his cock slipped between my lips, mixing our juices as he nudged against my opening.

“Please…”

I was coming before he even broke through the ring. The sudden explosion skittered up the length of my frame in a fluid, flawless slice that incapacitated everything else.

I came awake with my fingers pumping inside my pulsating sex. Hot, thick cream spilled down the crack of my ass to stain the sheets. My low tortured whine sang through the room as I milked the last shudder from my pussy by assaulting my clit with wet, sticky fingers.

Spent and exhausted, and feeling exquisitely sated, I slumped against the damp pillows and stared at the patches of shadow stretching across the ceiling. My breathless pants echoed around me and I squeezed my eyes shut.

Well, that had been unexpected, or maybe not as unexpected as it should have been. I hadn’t had a man in four years and Q had opened things for me in the short few minutes we’d spoken that I never thought myself capable of. But I could honestly say that I had never orgasmed in my sleep. That was new, even for me. I didn’t know whether to give myself a high five, or take up smoking. However, I did know one thing; I had to tell Q.

I exhaled.

It wasn’t that I believed in the whole
don’t orgasm because I said so
thing, but there had been an understanding between us that we would both wait and he was, or at least, he said he was and I believed him. It just wasn’t fair that I had, inadvertently, had a cheap thrill in my sleep while he was sitting on a hard dick … metaphorically speaking … I hoped. Except the problem I couldn’t get my head around was whether or not to wait until Monday to tell him. The annoying little shoulder angel kept insisting I should purge my freaky little soul sooner rather than later, while the shoulder devil pointed out I had three days. What was the rush?

Shoulder angel won.

I glanced at the alarm clock next to the bed and inwardly cringed. It was still only six in the morning. While it was time to get up, shower, and get ready for work, it was thirteen hours before I could call him, assuming he would be home. But what if he didn’t want me to call unless he said so? What if he thought me experiencing happy hour mid REM cycle was news that could have waited until Monday? But no, my shoulder angel was insistent. Of all my sins, this was one that required a confession, which made me question my shoulder angel’s priorities; I was pretty sure I had much more confession worthy sins.

Yet, it wasn’t about cleansing my soul and doing what was right. It was about equality and, believe it or not, trust. Q and I had an unspoken agreement and I was nothing if not honest. Okay, and there was guilt.

Realistically, I shouldn’t have been as enthralled by the man and his smoky,
Brad Pitt
voice, but I was and I wanted to keep hearing that voice whispering dirty things into my subconscious. It was insane, but having a guy never see my face was apparently the only way I could get a man. No one else would understand me, or want me if they could see me in person. While I wasn’t grotesque, I knew what I was and what I wasn’t and I had worked hard to get to a place where I could finally accept myself and I accepted that I was not any guy’s cup of tea. My own mother had been appalled by the daughter that wasn’t like other children and she claimed it was why she drank as much as she did.

Growing up, my mom hadn’t understood my fascination with keeping to myself, to being that shy little girl who watched people from a distance. She thought it was dirty and abnormal. More importantly, she thought there was something mentally wrong with me. Normal children didn’t behave like that. So, she did what any parent would do; she took me to see a shrink.

Dr. Wilber Woynim was the leading psychologist in child behavior. He believed there wasn’t a thing that couldn’t be solved with fear. If you could scare a gay kid enough, he’d eventually go straight, or a bed wetter, or a kid afraid of the dark. In my case, my perverted obsession deserved humiliation. He wrote me a sign that read:
I’m Ali Eckrich and I’m a pervert. I like watching you while you sleep.
Which wasn’t true. But I was made to walk up and down the busy sidewalk in front of his office building for two hours wearing it. I never told my mom I watched people again. So in a sense, Dr. Woynim’s methods actually worked; my mom no longer believed I was a sicko and I was saved from further humiliation.

I’d been eleven at the time.

For years after, that was how I saw myself, too. I thought there was something wrong with me. I saw other kids and how they were and I wasn’t like them. I figured my mom was right; there was something wrong with me.

I was eighteen and living at the university dorms when I found a book at the library explaining the mind of an introvert. It went on to describe how most preferred to watch others around them and kept to small groups. Because they weren’t comfortable in a social setting, most saw them as voyeurs. So that was always what I considered myself, a sort of voyeur. I watched people, because I was socially awkward and preferred my own company.

Everyone was a voyeur to some degree. Most of the time, it had nothing to do with sex or being a pervert. Not everyone was pressing their foreheads to bedroom windows, hoping to catch someone naked. Anyone who had ever seen a porno is a voyeur. Anyone who has watched a jogger at the park, or hot, sweaty men play basketball is a voyeur. Even photographers and authors. It was such a wide spectrum and probably one of the only fetishes that everyone shared. For me, it had always been a mental high. It had a calming effect, like knitting or reading a book.

Also, until recently, wanting to be watched hadn’t crossed my radar either. But I knew about those urges. After learning about what I was, I had broadened my view of the fetish world. I had read everything and anything that displayed people in such a way that no one else thought was normal. I read about the
sick and twisted
and secretly loved everything they were doing.

Then I met Tony, tall, beautiful Tony with his curly brown hair and shy blue eyes. It had taken him a month to ask me out. We dated a year before I finally let him into my bed. A wishful part of me had hoped he would take me the way it had been written in all those books, rough and angry, but gentle and firm. He hadn’t. It had been sloppy and messy. It had hurt and I hadn’t come. My first time had been a joke. But I tried again and again, striving for different results and being left disappointed each time. Finally, I just told him what I wanted. I wanted him to get kinky, not necessarily flogging and ball gags, but just … more. Maybe a spank, here and there, or handcuffs. Little things.

Tony left the next day and I never saw him again. Although, he did leave me a very nice note telling me he just wasn’t into that kind of thing, but good luck. I never thought about it again. Part of me had wondered if maybe everyone else was seeing this whole thing differently than me. Maybe I really was a sick pervert for wanting something so taboo. I had given up on the idea entirely.

Until Q.

He didn’t seem disturbed by the idea of different. I couldn’t honestly say how this webcam idea would go, but I liked it. I was excited for it. I would have jumped into it the first night we talked, but despite my drive, a girl had to be careful.

Rolling out of bed, I padded into the bathroom. The sun was climbing over the building when I finished my shower and dressed. I combed out my hair and twisted the strands into a tight bun at the back of my head. It was contained by a series of pins and a light mist of hairspray. While I loved my hair, it possessed the supernatural ability to piss me off. It was heavy and thick and clung to everything. Done up was the only way to keep my sanity.

As an afterthought, I slicked on a coat of clear gloss. There was no reason behind it. I normally didn’t bother, but something made me reach for the tube and sweep on a layer.

I stole a peek at the alarm clock. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t late for work a second time.

The garage was already open when I got there with ten minutes to spare, making up for the ten minutes I was late the day before. I knew nothing about cars, but there were two parked in the bays. The first one was getting something removed from the bottom. The second one was just sitting there. I didn’t recognize the man gutting the car. I didn’t recognize any of them. The only one I knew was Gabriel and he was just impossible to like. Earl hadn’t returned since his Houdini act at the restaurant so I was on my own to socialize, which would never happen.

Moving quickly and quietly, I jogged up the steps and stepped into the office. The massive tower of papers I had left behind the day before sat exactly as I had placed them. If anything, the pile seemed to be even higher. I couldn’t help wondering what type of business could continue functioning for so long and have such shitty organizational skills. It was incredible. It was mind boggling. I didn’t know whether to be impressed or disgusted.

Tearing the strap up and over my head, I tossed my purse unceremoniously onto the swiveling chair and delved in.

I was still organizing sale slips from waybills when Gabriel tromped in. From my kneeling place on the floor, he seemed extra enormous darkening the doorway. I felt my spine tingle when he took a step in deeper and stopped when the curved toes of his boots were mere inches from the circle of papers around me. In that position, my neck was forced back and my spine straightened in result. I stared up at him, wide-eyed and curious, and maybe it was my imagination, but I could have sworn something darkened in his eyes.

“You can take all of this upstairs,” he said. “There’s a bed up there.”

A bed.

Lord knew what the hell possessed me, but my gaze drifted down the width of that broad chest to stop at the silver buckle on his belt. My dream came back to me in hot flashes of brilliant color, me, on a bed with a dark haired mystery guy working over my body. Two sensations rocketed through me simultaneously. The first was lust at the memory, a deep, sticky rush of arousal that made my core pang for attention. The second was horror that my mystery guy had hair the same shade as Gabriel’s.

Panicked, I darted quickly to my feet, putting some distance between me and the faint outline of his cock leaning a little to the left through the hard grains of his jeans.

I swallowed with great difficulty and forced myself to meet his gaze.

“I’m okay here.”

He studied me for a long, sizzling moment, studied my mouth the way I obsessed over steak, which was to say the way a wolf studied a fresh kill. The gray swirled like an approaching thunderstorm and I was trapped in its path. My skin prickled with an awareness that tightened my nipples and dampened my panties. I felt the stretch of fabric rub uncomfortably against my skin and fought not to shift. My lips parted, not because I had something to say, but because they wanted something I knew was crazy. In reaction, his nostrils flared. The thin material of his top strained over his chest with his sharp inhale. His hand lifted and the place between my legs spiked in anticipation. My lungs constricted and I could barely move as every bit of me waited for contact.

The fingers balled mid reach and lifted to splay across the back of his neck. He rubbed hard before dragging his palm forward over his hair, ruffling the already unruly strands to a rumpled state that did not lessen the sexiness.

“I’ll let you get back to work,” he grumbled, already moving away.

My throat muscles worked to generate spit so I could formulate words, but he had turned away and was jogging up the stairs.