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 those two filthy fingers. It’s a promise, I think, some sort of seductive version of a guy suggesting a very specific sex act, but different to that, too.
I don’t think of guys in bars, waggling their tongues. I think of that slippery thing just easing over my swollen clit, and then suddenly my hand is on the window, holding me up. The glass is ice cold beneath my palm and barely any comfort at all, but that’s OK. I don’t need comfort here.
I need him to keep doing whatever he’s going to do.
Though of course it isn’t what I expect. At first it goes that way. He slides that hand down under the waistband of his sweatpants, and I can see him stroking over the thick shape beneath the material. I can even recall exactly what that heavy thing looked like, all slippery at the tip and swollen, most of it the same honey colour as his gorgeous body.
But he only lingers there a little while. He strokes once, maybe twice, enough to get his eyes to stutter closed. I see that lewd little tongue come out to wet his lips – those lips like a bow, notching an arrow straight at my heart – and then his hand slides around inside that secretive material. I mean, you can just about see what he’s doing. The cloth is thin enough to make out his knuckles, shifting like a formless face beneath a veil.
But it’s all just hidden enough that you can imagine you’re seeing things. It’s a magic trick, an illusion, and I’m holding my breath for some kind of big reveal. I’ve clenched my fist into the centre of my chest again, as that hand makes its way around his body and oh God, oh God.
He’s not going to do that, is he? Does he know I’m not even sure what that is? I’ve heard whispers. I’ve seen movies. I know that people don’t just put peg A into slot B. Yet even so I’m trembling and mesmerised, watching him touch himself in this unbearably intimate way.
It’s worse than if he were naked. I have to imagine it all instead – though all my imagination can come up with is him stroking slow and wet between the cheeks of his arse, teasing himself the way that I sometimes tease myself. I don’t go in, you know. I don’t do that. I just rub over that tightly clenched hole while I play with my clit, and usually when I do my mind goes elsewhere.
But he keeps my mind right here.
His mouth is open now, and his eyes are closed. I can still tell what expression he’s wearing behind them, however. I’d know mindless pleasure anywhere, having seen it faked a million times – which makes me think this is just a show, for a little while. He’s squirming around in a way men never do, and I can almost hear his moans as he pretends to work a finger into his tight little asshole … but none of it’s actually real.
Until he jerks and sinks his teeth into his lower lip, and I see the spreading darkness on the front of his sweatpants.
I may be dumb and mute and foolish, but I know what that means. He’s just worked himself to a shuddering climax on those probing, searching fingers, and I missed half of it, imagining it was all a masquerade. I missed the strangest, most exciting event of my life, because I couldn’t believe it was real.
It’s not a surprise.
* * *
I’ve always thought the fluorescent lights in the store where I work were very bright. Unbearably bright. I go home still squinting from their glare, and remain so even in the closed-off darkness of The Courtyard.
And yet somehow they seem dimmer today than they did before. They’ve lost power in the time between me looking into the Serial Killer’s eyes and right now. They’ve turned to a low and crackling blue, somewhere in the distance of my life.
Though it isn’t just them. The candy-bright wrappers that line the shelves seem to have faded; my apron is more worn and withered than it once was. I take the thing off the moment I get home, and marvel at the thinness of the material, the patheticness of the pattern. Is this what I’ve been wearing all this time? This chequered thing, as limp and lifeless as a body found floating in the pool?
I don’t know, but it feels good to get the apron off. And it feels even better to stand beneath the groaning pipes of my crookedly tiled shower and wash all of that away. When I’m done, I put on the long nightgown – the one I cleaned and dried this morning, in the rumbling machines that shudder around the washroom – and go to the window.
By the time I do, my heart is already hammering in my chest. These little meetings – they could still be a dream of some sort. Maybe I think I’m awake when I’m asleep, and asleep when I’m awake. Maybe he’s changed his mind, and finds me a dull sort of creature, now.
It’s not as though he’s wrong after all. I’m so dull I’m almost crying, torn with tension over something as simple as opening the curtain. What if he’s there, oh God, what if he’s there? And even worse: what if he’s not? I don’t think I could take it if he wasn’t, though, when I wrench the curtain back and his window is dark and silent, I’m surprisingly calm.
This is how things are supposed to be, I think. I can’t be disappointed about something that shouldn’t really happen to me. It’s not even all that big a deal, really – just a little game played through two windows in the middle of the night. No one would ascribe it some profound meaning, or pin so many of their hopes on it continuing.
Yet my heart still jerks in my chest when I catch a glimpse of something stirring through the darkness. A flash of white, I think it is – the way my nightgown probably looks – and then I see the now familiar shape of him more clearly.
He’s sat in a chair in front of the table that sits below his window. And everyone now and then he’ll reach forward for a glass he’s placed on the wood, in this deliberate sort of way – like a rich man in a velvet club, waiting for the girl to come out.
I’m the girl, I think. He’s waiting and watching for me, even though I can’t see his eyes to confirm. There’s a black band of darkness over them like a blindfold made of nothing, and, I have to say, it makes me feel easier about turning on the light. His eyes are as sightless as the dozens of curtain-covered windows that stare down at me, so what does it matter if I just do this thing?
I barely feel exposed at all once I have. I’m electric instead, trembling with a kind of excitement I’ve never felt before. Different points of my body call to me, call to me, like a siren song. And I go to them. I do.
I stroke my breasts through material that had seemed thick before but now feels gossamer light. In fact, it’s so light I can make out the exact shape of my stiff nipples beneath, so taut and spiky I can hardly bear to touch them. And the response I get when I do … oh God. The sensation that radiates outwards as I circle first one, then the other …
It’s enough to make me gasp without thinking, and then of course my face heats directly afterwards. Of course it does – I’m not supposed to make a sound. I’m not supposed to be noisy and uncouth, and I think of that restriction all the way up until the moment of realisation:
It doesn’t actually matter if I am.
After all, I’m alone right now. There’s no one else in here with me. I could scream and no one would hear me, though I’m nowhere close to that. I’m closer to moaning, like some shameless whore, and the more I do, the worse it gets.
I’m already wet, I know. I can feel my own slick cream every time I move, easing over my swollen clit and making all of those flushed folds so slippery, so ready to be parted and stroked, though I’m not ready for that just yet. I have to wait, until the pleasure reaches fever pitch. Until I’m gasping and tilting forwards towards the glass, pulling and plucking at my nipples while my face heats and my mouth makes this lewd sort of O.
Though even that isn’t enough to push me over the edge. I’m close to doing it – hell, I’ve already traversed several of my own personal boundaries, like the noise-making and the voyeurism and the need to just take something, even if it makes me feel ashamed. But I’m not quite there, until he reaches a hand up, suddenly, in the light from the middle of The Courtyard and clear enough for me to see.
And then he does something I recognise immediately:
He strokes over the shape of my body, through the glass.
Of course I try to pretend otherwise at first. All the old issues take over, and I’m left imagining that he means something else. It can’t be my body he’s outlining, like that, so reverently, so slowly and softly. No one would want to touch me like that, and even if they did … that isn’t my shape. That subtle curve at my hip, the fullness of my breasts … how can he even tell that I look like that beneath this shapeless gown?
And then I realise I’m practically clutching the thing to me, following the path he’s making with that twisting, curving hand, and I know for sure. He’s touching me, across a million miles of space and through two panes of glass. He’s uncovering my body, those fingers finding their way over my jaw and my throat, clutching briefly in a way that thrills me, before sliding on down to other places I can’t bear to touch.
Only I can, when he’s touching them for me. He rubs his knuckles over my swollen mound and I find myself doing the same. I even turn my hand to get the exact same effect, pressing in when he does, forcing those knots of bone deep into my slick slit.
Everything parts easily for me, even through material. And my clit is so stiff and swollen that I barely have to push against myself to get some pressure on it. Just a little movement, a little rub back and forth, and I’m masturbating for a stranger.
A stranger who then makes a very specific sort of gesture, which I can’t easily ignore or dismiss. Lift your nightgown, that gesture says. No more than a wave of his other hand, really, but enough to make me try. Quickly I do it, quickly, like some furtive flasher in a supermarket, aware of how easily I could be caught.
Someone could just slide open their curtain in the middle of the night, for example. Or maybe the girl from 9G will walk by, just as I had imagined. Just in time to see me expose my slippery pussy to this stranger’s hungry gaze.
And it will look slippery, I know. I can feel the wetness on my perfectly waxed and oh-so-sensitive skin, and if I dared to glance down I know I’d see it glistening there. In fact, I don’t even need to see it glistening there. It’s obvious that I look as lewd and aroused as a woman could possibly be, because, after a moment of watching me, his hand goes to that place between his legs.
I can tell it does, even through all of this frustrating darkness. I can make out the motion of his thick bicep, as he works himself to the sight of me. And after a second of that desperate motion, he brings the fingers of his free hand to his lips and licks, then reaches forwards to stroke over my messy slit, through the glass.
He wants me to get off at the same time he does, I’m certain. He’s going to jerk and come inside that clingy material, and when he does he wants me to do it, too. He wants me to slide two fingers through my swollen folds, find my clit, and stroke myself in time to the slow, easy rub he’s giving himself.
And when he puts it like that, I find him impossible to resist. My face is flaming and my body is strung as taut as a wire, but I work my way through all of my mortifying slickness, until I’ve found that agonising point. That stiff little bud, so ready to be touched.
And then I just rub over it with the pad of my fingertip, just once, but once is enough. I can’t even hold off long enough to see if I was right and that he’s ready to come too. I just stumble over the edge into a thick, uncontrollable orgasm, more slipperiness spilling over my hand as I do, body spasming and twisting beneath the pressure of it.
I’ve never longed to know his name as hard as I do now, while calling out words that are not him. I moan uuuh and God and yes, but none of them fits my sultry stranger, my Serial Killer. They just have to make do as the most intense orgasm of my life barrels through my body, the sight of him stroking himself driving it on.
By the time he arches in his chair and shows me what he’s been doing – hand sliding back and forth over his slick and very bare prick – I’m sure this thing has gone on forever. I’m still coming when he finally spurts, thick and copious and all over that neat little table of his.
Though that’s not the best thing about it. No, the best thing about it comes after he’s almost done. He sags back in his chair, and a split second before he does I see the side of his face – caught in pleasure and desire, as beautiful as it had seemed in the hallway.
And then I see his tongue, curling up to catch his upper lip – so greedily, I think, so different to the restrained person he usually appears to be – and that’s all I need. That’s what I take away from this lewd act, to store away for
leaner, crueller times. Tomorrow I’ll believe it was all just imagined desire and lust and loveliness.
And then I’ll remember that tongue just kissing his upper lip, and make it real again.
I’m aware that this is a ridiculous thing to do – like a stalker, rooting through things that belong to a person they’re having a fake relationship with. But, after last night, I can’t help it. I think of the name I couldn’t call out and then I just wait, and watch which mailbox he goes to.
I do it surreptitiously, out of the corner of one eye.
And then once he’s made his way past me – me with my back to him, him staring straight ahead, the air between us bristling like that moment just before lightning strikes – I go to the place he was. I run my fingers over the Sellotaped name on the front of that dingy grey metal.
Ivan. Ivan Orlinsky, it says, which of course only makes things worse. Now I’m thinking of far-off places in the past, where men with beards stride around through the snow and everyone has mysterious accents. He’s the Russian of my imagination, the Polish of my dreams, or maybe some other nationality that I can’t even think of.
Ivan Orlinsky, I think, from the land of TirAsleen. And then I have to stop, because the end of that tale is: who came across oceans of time to be with a tired, pathetic checkout girl called Abbie Gough.
It doesn’t quite go, does it? Abbie and Ivan. Abbie is the girl you shove into the road on your way to a business meeting. She’s not the mysterious sex partner of a dense-eyed man called Ivan.
And yet that’s the name on the parcel he’s left in my mailbox, in that same neat cursive script he used for the window. Abbie, it says, just above the impeccable seam he’s made with the expensive wrapping – a perfectly straight and perpendicular join, held down by tape so crisply cut it could have been done with a machine.
Hell, maybe it was. It’s called him. He’s made of metal cogs and synchronised gears, and, when he’s required to send an unexpected gift to a stunned girl, they perform the task with technical precision.
Deep Desires Page 2
