When No One Is Watching

by Alyssa Cole

  I won’t even get to go to the block party.

  “Sydney?”

  I fling the door open to find a strange white man standing there in jeans and a T-shirt. No. It’s Theo, his hair darker because it’s wet and his beard shaved to reveal the harsh angles of his jaw, which do a lot toward containing and putting into perspective all those other prominent features on his face. I thought the beard was great, but I like this smooth-faced stranger at my door, bearing gifts.

  He holds up a plastic bag, slowly. “I, uh, went for a walk. Got some guava tarts from the Caribbean bakery because it was the only place open this early. Do you like those?”

  I’m about to answer when I notice his nails. There’s a solid crescent of dirt under each of them. That dirt wasn’t there yesterday evening.

  “Theo.”

  I pull him inside by the front of his shirt and slam the door behind him.

  “So you do like guava tarts? Good.”

  I grab one of his big hands with both of mine. There are blisters that will soon form into calluses on the palm pads below each finger. There is the dirt. When I sniff him closely, there is the smell of sunflowers.

  “Theo. Did you—?”

  He shrugs, runs his other hand through his hair. “You know who’s the last person to get stopped for doing some weird shit like digging in an empty Brooklyn lot in the middle of the night? I mean, a cop car did stop and—”

  “What?” My heart thumps so hard in my chest that it hurts.

  “—I told them I was burying my . . . dog. I’m sorry, it was the first thing that came to mind that would work. Then the cop got all misty-eyed about his German shepherd.”

  “Where is she?” I ask, my heart in my throat.

  He looks at me for a beat longer than it should take to reply. “There was nothing there. No one there. Under the sunflowers.”

  No.

  “They took her?” I ask, gripping his hand harder, but he shakes his head.

  “They messed things up, but there was no digging before I got there. I didn’t find her.”

  My entire body flinches from this as multiple thoughts hit me at once: someone moved Mommy, Drea is gone, Theo will think I’m crazy, people hurt you when they think you’re crazy.

  Maybe he wouldn’t be wrong, thinking that.

  “I buried her there,” I say quietly. His hand squeezes mine and I look up at him.

  “I believe you.”

  “Don’t just say that to—”

  “If you say you buried her, you buried her. We’ll find out where she is.” He squeezes my hand again, the pressure steady and comforting. “Everything is going to be okay.”

  On some level I know it’s wrong, macabre—fucked up—when I bring his hand to my mouth and kiss the back of it.

  Mommy is gone.

  Drea has seemingly abandoned me—maybe she’s the one in Belize with her $50K. She’d looked up countries we couldn’t be extradited from, after all.

  Theo is here, in front of me, looking at me with kind eyes that have no trace of doubt in them, his hands rubbed raw from an attempted exhumation.

  No one has ever tried to save me.

  My fear and pain and fatigue burn away in the generous light of his attempt, leaving a roar of the emptiness inside of me, and the feeling that only one thing can fill it right now.

  I pull him by the hand to the bedroom, glancing back over my shoulder to look at him.

  “Sydney?” He pauses at the threshold of my bedroom door, despite my attempt to tug him after me. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve been through a lot and—”

  “You just said you believed me.” My voice is trembling because my body is. “I’m telling you that I want you, need you, right now. Do you believe that?”

  He nods and steps into the room with me, and everything else falls away.

  There’s no fear of all the awful things that’ve happened before this moment, or all the bad things that might happen after. Just the relief of his gaze, so fucking intense as he looks down at me. The expectation of his touch, his heat, his scent, his presence . . .

  I expect him to be gentle, but he drops the bag on the floor and his hands move toward my shoulders like he’s been holding himself back from it for days. His fingertips press into my shoulder blades as he pulls me toward him.

  Theo’s gaze roams all over my face before he meets my eyes, reads my confirmation there, and kisses me.

  I’m not the only one who needs this right now. Our kiss is like two drowning people searching for a life preserver, finding each other instead, and deciding that roaring waves aren’t so bad if you can fuck in the lulls between them.

  His mouth moves as desperately as mine, his tongue searches as frantically; a groan slips between my lips but I can’t pinpoint its origin—him or me.

  He backs me up to the wall of the bedroom, one hand sliding from my shoulder to my neck and resting there—not squeezing, but simply restraining. Holding me, keeping me from falling apart. Heat sears through my body at his touch, at the fact that he understands it isn’t roughness that would hurt me right now, but coddling. His eyes are too kind for his touch to be gentle—I wouldn’t be able to stand that. So he holds me as his mouth crushes into mine and his hips grind against me, his arm wedged between us.

  He glances into my eyes a few minutes later, face flushed and eyes stormy. His fingertips stroke under my jawbone as he asks, “Do you need more?”

  When I nod, he lowers his hands to my hips and his mouth to my neck, sucking at my skin, rubbing his lips across my collarbone. My nipples are hard points through the fabric of my camisole and he teases them through the fabric with his teeth as I drive my hands into his hair. He uses his chin to drag the top of my shirt down, and his light stubble teases my sensitive skin before he sucks a nipple between his lips.

  For the first time in months, my mind is gloriously clear, all of my troubles and pain hacked away by the pleasure of Theo’s tongue swirling over my nipples, first right, then left, of his hands pressing my hips against the wall so that when they lift involuntarily my ass is forced to remain against the wall.

  “Theo.” I shove at his shoulders and his hands are off me instantly, his tongue a second later. He looks up at me, brows raised, and when I push him again, he tumbles back onto my bed with a grin, hands already reaching up to catch me to him as I scramble on top of him.

  I fumble in the bedside table drawer for a condom and lube, and Theo takes advantage of my raised hips and shoves down his pants and boxers.

  He follows my lead as I roll us over, but stops moving as I reach between our thighs to pump his veiny shaft, to slide the condom on and warm the lube using my fingertips.

  He’s looking at me all gentle again, so I lift my head and kiss him hard as I hold his gaze, tease his bottom lip with the threat of a hard bite. I feel his grin between my lips, and then he thrusts into me.

  He doesn’t push into me roughly, but I still gasp at the slow, teasing stretch of him. He’s thick, hot, and hard inside of me, his weight crushing me to the bed. He doesn’t move for a second, as if adjusting to being encompassed by my tight heat.

  “Sydney.” He lowers his head and kisses me, and when I slide my hands into his hair and tug, when I nip his bottom lip again, he pulls out and drives into me hard.

  After that it all moves too quickly, this almost violent desire caused by the care in a crescent of dirt. I’m half off the bed at one point, my head banging against the floor, then on my hands and knees. I flip him onto his back, riding his dick desperately because I need this release, need . . .

  He brushes away tears I didn’t realize were rolling down my cheeks with one thumb and strums my clit with the other, and I buckle against him as the orgasm hits me like a cleansing wave.

  Chapter 17

  Theo

  NOT THINKING TOO DEEPLY BEFORE I ACT HAS LED ME DOWN some pretty bizarre paths in life.

  Committing crimes with my dad. Lyin
g to get hired at some hot-shit company. Buying a house with someone I’m not married to while having no real knowledge of how owning property works. Trying to siphon money from rich people, and getting caught.

  Searching for my neighbor’s mom’s body so I can move it to a safe location.

  I’d thought about the first time I handled a dead body as I shoveled up humid mounds of dirt looking for Yolanda Green. My own mom had been watching back then, blood-spattered and angry at me, like I hadn’t just saved her from being the one on the receiving end of a shotgun blast.

  Mom and I don’t talk about that.

  Ever.

  We don’t talk about how I was seventeen and had to leave town abruptly at the beginning of senior year. That’s when I moved in with my dad and learned some things from him that would have come in handy with burying that first body, or maybe would’ve put a stop to the situation before it got that far.

  I don’t know where Sydney’s mother is, but I believe that Sydney put her in the ground. I could be wrong, but I’ve been wrong about worse things.

  What I’m not sure about is what happened after I got to her apartment. She wanted me, I wanted her, but maybe it was just one of those weird emotional pressure-valve-release things and she was happy for it to end there.

  We both passed out after that first round of sex, waking up hours later to the sound of afternoon noise on the block. She got up and had a cigarette, brushed her teeth, and then we did it again, more slowly this time but just as intense. Then we slept some more, until she pulled me into the shower with her after we lay sweating on her bed for a while. In her clawfoot bathtub, she stood naked and soapy beneath my hands, dodging the shower spray because she didn’t want to get her braids wet as she kissed me.

  It seemed like some surreal dream outside of everything that’s happened over the last few days, but now we’re back in reality. My body aches from grave-robbing and weird sexual positions and she’s sitting across the table from me, mouth full of guava tart and wide eyes darting back and forth, everywhere but my direction, as she chews.

  The air conditioner whines in the background and I fumble around for something to say. I don’t know the banging-after-attempting-to-hide-a-body-for-you etiquette.

  “This is awkward as hell,” she finally says, then takes another bite of her tart and pulls her feet up onto her chair so her knees press against the table and block her chest from view. She’s wearing a thin-strapped white tank top and black capri sweats that are both loose and formfitting.

  I nod in agreement. “Definitely at the top of the weird-first-dates list for me.”

  She chuckles, crumbs dusting her smile as her gaze finally lands on my face.

  “Mine too. I guess.” She sighs. “I think . . . I need to talk about the weird week I’ve been having. If not finding my—anything in the garden hasn’t led you to believe I’m crazy, then maybe you’re the only person I can talk about this with. I’ve actually managed to sleep for more than a couple of hours, and my brain is somewhat functional, though I wish it wasn’t.”

  “Try me.”

  “You saw the Con Ed dude who tried to get into my house,” she says quietly. Her eyes widen. “Didn’t you? That happened, right?”

  “Yes. I saw him, I saw the van, and the entire situation was shady. Look, just tell me what you think is going on. I’ll believe you, okay?”

  A sliver of this is bullshitting; I don’t know her that well and any number of mental illnesses could be at play. I don’t think that’s the case, but even if it is, she believes whatever she’s about to tell me, and we can take it from there.

  She twists her mouth. “And if . . . if what I say is crazy, will you tell me that? And not just call the cops on me?”

  I nod. “I won’t call the police.”

  She takes a deep breath. “There’s been other stuff, besides that. Two days before the Con Ed guy, I got into an Uber, and the driver locked the doors and drove me to a semi-deserted street. He started saying wild shit about being an ex-cop and civilizing the neighborhood and—I don’t remember everything. It was terrifying.”

  My stomach tightens with the sudden fear of what can happen to a woman trapped in the back of a stranger’s car. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t know you,” she says. “This week has been like three years long, but this was before you even came here to have coffee.”

  She could have disappeared before I’d even had the chance to get to know her.

  “Plus, there’s no record of the driver in my account.” Her hands shake a little now and she puts the half-eaten tart down. “Everything started to happen so fast that I couldn’t keep up. That same day, Preston got arrested on some bullshit. And then Mr. Perkins was gone. Drea hasn’t responded to my texts and calls. I heard noise upstairs in her apartment a couple of nights ago, and when I went up there, there were bedbugs on her bed. A lot of them.”

  Her increasingly speedy words crash to a halt as she shudders.

  “They took the bodega. And then the garden. Everything is . . .” She presses her palms to the outside corners of her eyes and pulls back, stretching the skin while blinking rapidly. She’s trying to prevent another deluge of tears.

  “What do you think this all means?” I ask, sounding calmer than I feel. I’m getting that feeling of something bad heading our way.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “It feels like someone is messing with me. Not just me. With all of us. But that doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  I’m trying to piece together the random things that don’t seem random to her and figure out how to respond when a familiar howling bark comes from outside the house.

  “Count,” Sydney says, the tart dropping onto her plate as her body sags with relief. “Thank god.”

  She hops up and jogs out of the apartment toward the front door, and I follow at a slower pace; if I’d jogged after her, I would have rammed right into her when she stops short at the top of the outer stairs.

  The moving truck comes into view as I step out behind her. There’s a dark-haired middle-aged woman and her blond-fading-to-gray husband standing out front as movers cart their belongings inside. He’s wearing khaki shorts and a button-up shirt and she has on a breezy, expensive dress. Neither of them would look out of place at a gathering at Kim’s parents’ house.

  They have a dog on a leash, an old hound who looks up at Sydney and tries to run to her, only to get tugged back.

  Sydney slips into flip-flops and starts walking slowly down the stairs. “Count?”

  The dog strains toward her again and the woman tugs the leash hard enough that he whines sharply.

  “Down, boy,” the man says. “Be a good boy.”

  “Are you our new neighbor?” the woman asks with that slightly condescending smile Kim’s mom always used to give me.

  “I’m Mr. Perkins’s neighbor,” Sydney replies. “He’s coming home today.”

  The couple look at each other, seemingly baffled, before looking back at Sydney. “We own this house,” the woman says. “Our daughter Melissa moved here first, since she was starting school, and then we decided we wanted an adventure in the city, too.”

  “Brooklyn is the number one most happening place to live now, even more exclusive than Manhattan,” the husband adds, his voice a parody of a country club Chad that isn’t a parody. “All of our friends are just flocking here, and we didn’t want to be the last ones!”

  They laugh, and I just watch them, my whole body feeling heavy as my brain tries to fight what my gut is screaming at me: This isn’t right. This definitely isn’t right. They’re just moving into someone’s house. Mr. Perkins’s house. The man I possibly saw something happen to, and who I was told was visiting his family.

  “No,” Sydney says. “Mr. Perkins is coming back for the block party. And that’s his dog.”

  The man looks taken aback. “We got this dog at the shelter. Someone had abandoned it—you know some people don’t like dogs. Reminds them of w
hen they could be chased down and returned to slavery. That’s what I heard.”

  “It really is a shame,” his wife says, frowning. “The dogs didn’t do anything to deserve that kind of hatred.”

  “Whoa,” I cut in, but Country Club Chad talks right over me.

  “As for Mr. Perkins, trust me, he was paid more than enough to be able to move somewhere else. Wherever he wanted. I don’t see what the problem is.”

  “He wouldn’t move without telling me or anyone else,” Sydney says angrily. “And where would he go? This is his neighborhood. We’re his neighbors! He wouldn’t just leave us.”

  The woman steps closer to her husband, as if she’s scared of being attacked.

  “This isn’t a very hospitable welcome,” the husband says in the same tone he used to chastise Count. “And if you want to continue, you should know I’m close friends with the chief of police.”

  “Sydney, come on,” I say, doing my own Country Club Chad parody. “Let’s go to my place.”

  She resists my tug at her arm, then whirls up the steps to her house and down the hall.

  “Oh wait. You’re Kim’s latest? Weren’t you at the house last summer?” the husband asks while Sydney’s gone. “She always picks up the most interesting playthings. I guess you do, too.”

  “You know Kim?”

  His brow wrinkles. “Of course—”

  “Charlie! Go make sure the movers don’t break that. It’s been in my family for years and he just dropped it without a second thought!”

  Charlie gives me a strange look, the look you give someone when you greet them like a friend and then realize they’re just a similar-looking stranger.

  He and his wife head over to the moving truck, tugging Count along with them, and Sydney storms back down the stairs with my duffel bag over her shoulder, various papers shoved haphazardly inside. She glances at Charlie and his wife as they stand next to a giant carved-wood African statue that the movers are about to take up the stairs.

  I guide Sydney into my house—Kim’s house—and into the first-floor apartment. Which isn’t a cauldron that hasn’t been cleaned for a month, like mine. Sydney and I push aside the expensive curtains and glare at the people who claim they bought a house that wasn’t for sale.