Bad Neighbor

by Molly O'Keefe

  I kept looking out my peephole for signs of Nick, but the basement doorway stayed empty. And from next door there was no sound. I went so far as putting my ear against the wall before I realized I was being an idiot.

  Finally after dinner, I heard his door open and the murmur of voices. Another man and a woman, and soon he turned on his music—not the rap or the country, but something with a sexy bassline and a woman’s voice—and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  There wasn’t going to be a fight. Or it didn’t feel like there would be.

  So, I shook off my worry and opened a bottle of wine.

  And got out the Brie and crackers.

  When it wasn’t the last Saturday of the month, this was My Saturday Night Tradition. I called it date night, and thought it was hilarious. And since it was date night and the rules of date night were no work, I put on the BBC North and South miniseries and called watching Richard Armitage research.

  Armitage was just scowling at Daniela Denby-Ashe when the porn started next door.

  At first Jesse just turned up his music. Way too loud. I checked my watch—ten o’clock—and scowled at the wall I shared with Jesse. Rude much?

  And then the thumping started. The rhythmic thumping.

  That’s not…I turned down the speaker on my computer.

  And I heard the moaning.

  Thrust. Moan. Thrust. Moan.

  Oh my God.

  I pulled my legs off my desk with a thunk.

  He was having sex with someone next door. I turned up North and South, and even that wasn’t enough. I plugged in my ear buds and finished off my bottle of wine and tried with all of my might not to think about Jesse having sex with someone.

  I wasn’t hurt. Or wounded.

  I mean I was a little, but mostly, if the bottle of wine I’d just put away could be honest for me: I was turned on.

  What was he doing in there? What was he doing that was making the woman—screaming now—feel so good?

  Here’s the truth—there wasn’t a whole lot of screaming in my sex life. Not that lights-out missionary position didn’t have its finer moments, but they usually didn’t involve screaming.

  I would bend you over this counter.

  Before I realized what I was going to do I’d turned down my monitor so I could hear it better. It wasn’t just the woman screaming now, I could hear the rough bass of Jesse’s voice. It was sharp, like he was yelling at her. Ordering her around.

  I would spank this ass.

  Between my legs I hurt—and I’d spent the last week wearing out the batteries on my vibrator, masturbating to images of Jesse doing all the things to my body that I didn’t even realize I wanted, and my hand was halfway down my pants before I realized I was about to masturbate to the sound of him having sex with another woman.

  Too much. Too far. Too weird-neighbor. Too get your own fucking sex life.

  Too goddamn sad.

  The whole scene was sad. The Brie and the crackers. The empty wine bottle.

  Enough.

  I cleaned up, ignoring both the soundtrack next door and the aching throb between my legs.

  Finally, there was a big shout and a woman screamed and I did a slow clap and crawled into bed.

  Only to be woken up an hour later by round two.

  Jesus, I thought, staring up at my ceiling and the lights from the parking garage outside my window. What kind of stamina does Jesse have?

  By three a.m., I was livid. And when it started up again after a brief respite, I put my glasses back on and stormed over to Jesse’s door. I was sleep-deprived, half-drunk, half-hungover and I’d had enough.

  I didn’t consider what I was going to say or do. I didn’t consider what Jesse’s face would look like. I didn’t consider any of it. I was just mad. I had work to do. And he was rubbing this shit in my face. It felt weirdly personal. A show he was putting on to show me what a coward I was.

  Of course that could be the wine talking.

  I pounded on the door, aware that behind me half the apartment complex was asleep, and when no one came to the door I pounded again.

  Harder. So I could be heard over the endless sex happening, and finally it was wrenched open, revealing a beautiful black woman who looked vaguely familiar, wearing a thin jersey tank top and nothing else. She was flushed, her long hair sweaty and stuck to her neck.

  Her dark eyes raked my body and then she smiled. “Fun,” she said. “Come on in.”

  “Do you have any idea what time it is?” I yelled over the sounds of the music.

  “Nope,” she shouted back and turned and walked back into the living room, turning left toward the bedroom.

  And I stood there like an idiot. Was I supposed to follow? Did I want to follow? I heard the low rumble of what had to be Jesse’s voice, and I knew if I went back there I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. I could be outraged—and I was, but If I went back there it was because I wanted what was happening back there. Because, if nothing else, I wanted to see it.

  I was mad, yes.

  But underneath it, like my anger was a suit of armor keeping me safe, I just wanted to see it.

  I wanted to be the girl, the type of girl who went back there.

  And so I put my apartment keys on the edge of his kitchen counter and I did.

  Chapter Eight

  Charlotte

  There was a man sitting on the edge of the king-size bed, and between his legs was the woman from the door. She’d taken off her shirt and was kneeling on the floor. The man’s cock in her hand.

  All the air got sucked out of my body, the room, perhaps the world, and as I watched, the woman slowly slipped the head of his dick in her mouth. And the man—I assumed it was Jesse—wrapped his hand around the back of the girl’s head and fucked up and into her.

  His head was down as he watched her take him, but I realized belatedly that the guy was blond. And thin.

  Jesse was neither of those things.

  Panicked, I looked around and found Jesse sitting on the couch on the far side of the room, watching me watch them.

  His eyes glittered in the dark.

  The dim light from the kitchen made its way across his body. His chest was bare, the bruises from last week in brilliant Technicolor. Sweat was rolling across the muscles. His collarbones. I tried not to look, I did, but in the end I couldn’t help myself, I glanced down at his crotch but it was shadowed and I couldn’t tell if he was naked.

  I couldn’t tell if he was hard.

  I felt like a teenager, blind and dumb with hormones.

  “What are you doing here, 1B?”

  “Your music is too loud.”

  Like my answer was the wrong one, he turned and watched the couple. The guy was lifting the woman’s hair out of the way, while she licked him from his balls to the tip of his cock. Long slow licks, leaving him wet. The gleam of her saliva was golden in the half-light from the hall.

  “Look at me,” the man breathed, and the woman on her knees did as he asked. Holding his cock with one hand as she put his cock back into her mouth.

  They were so beautiful, the two of them. Each of them long and thin, muscular but not like Jesse. They looked like porn stars. The room smelled like sweat and sex and it was the hottest thing I’d ever been a part of, and all I was doing was standing in the doorway.

  “What are you doing here, 1B?” Jesse asked again.

  “It’s…it’s three a.m.,” I said, my voice breathy and wretched.

  Jesse turned away again, watching the couple on his bed.

  “Suck him,” Jesse said. “1B wants to watch.”

  I gasped, my eyes back on Jesse like he’d betrayed me.

  “You do, don’t you?” he asked. “Or maybe you want to pretend you don’t. Pretending is easier for you, isn’t it?”

  It stung, it stung deep and hard where a lot of my secret stuff lived. The things I didn’t like to acknowledge about myself. The things that kept my life so small. So small it felt like a jail. The fucking book t
our. Simon. Jesse. Wanting more, taking less.

  I didn’t say anything to Jesse, but I stood in the doorway and I watched the people on the bed.

  And I didn’t leave. It was hard. It was a fucking force of will. But I didn’t leave. Because I did want to watch.

  The girl smiled at me and then bent her head to the guy’s cock. His hand in her hair tightened and she took him deep.

  “All the way,” Jesse said, like he was orchestrating this whole thing. And maybe he was. Maybe we were all just puppets.

  And the girl took the man as deep as she could, until her face was pressed into the hair at the base of his cock. So deep and so hard that I thought for sure she would pass out. Or stop breathing. The man held her there. Fucking into her. Forcing her to take more.

  I was about to say stop—that there was no way that she could want that—when she sat back with a sudden gasp, her face split into a smile, spit hanging from her mouth.

  The man wiped it off with his hand.

  “1B is worried you don’t like that,” Jesse said.

  “Like what?” the girl asked, her eyes dilated, her face blissed out.

  “Tell her,” Jesse said to me, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. Participating somehow would mean that I was really here.

  I shook my head, barely. But Jesse knew.

  “She’s scared you don’t like sucking cock like that,” Jesse said. “She thinks we’re forcing you to do something you don’t want.”

  The girl’s eyes found me. “I like it,” she said. “Do you want to try?”

  My legs buckled and I fell back against the door, making it bang against the wall.

  At the sound the guy turned to look at me, too.

  “You all right?” the blond guy asked.

  “Fine,” I said with a smile, like we were at the grocery store and I wasn’t watching him get his dick sucked. “Go back…to…that.”

  “You like to watch?” the girl asked. “Or do you want to join us?”

  “I…uh…” Oh, this wasn’t hot anymore. This was just awkward, and I was so totally out of place with my flannel shirt and my socks and my hair back in a bun.

  I was wearing fucking glasses. Who wears glasses to your neighbor’s orgy?

  “Don’t talk to 1B,” Jesse said. Like he knew I wanted to run. Like he understood I could watch but I could not stand to be the focus of anything. I would crumble under that.

  The girl rolled her eyes at me, as if somehow we were sharing a private joke about Jesse being bossy, but then she put the blond’s cock in her mouth again, taking him all the way into her mouth. Down her throat. The man got in on it, holding her still, holding her tight against him.

  “Deeper,” he whispered to the woman. “You can do it. You can. You’re so fucking hot. So good, baby. Sucking my dick like that. All the way.”

  She made some sound of despair or desire, something that blended the two and she braced her hands against the bed and finally leaned back, the spit this time between her lips and his cock like they were connected.

  She went back. Again and again.

  It was the most brutal and amazing thing I’d ever seen. The consent. And the…desire. On both their parts. His restraint and her enthusiasm.

  The grace of their surrender to each other.

  I leaned back against the door, panting. I could barely shut my mouth and my nipples underneath my flannel shirt were so hard. Painfully hard. Between my legs…I hurt. I hurt so bad.

  The wine was making a mess of me.

  My loneliness was making it worse.

  It was like watching something I never knew I wanted. Like finding out there were other flavors of ice cream. Secrets rooms in all my favorite places.

  This, I thought, is what the bold get to have.

  “Charlotte,” Jesse said and like I was dazed, I looked at him. Unable to hide anything I was feeling. I didn’t even know how I would.

  And his flushed face. His bright eyes. In the shadows between his legs his hand was slowly moving. The other two people on the bed. The blowjob. Everything, all of it—disappeared.

  It was me and Jesse. And nothing else.

  “Come sit down.” His voice was quiet. Beseeching almost, like he wanted to convince me to stay. Like it mattered to him. “I won’t touch you. Not if you don’t want me to. But we can…we can watch together.”

  On the bed, the guy was groaning. The woman’s hand around his cock, stroking now. Faster and then faster still.

  “Or,” Jesse said, “you can leave. And go back to your half-here, half-somewhere else life. And you can pretend this was a dream. We’ll avoid each other in the courtyard and this can just disappear.”

  That is exactly what I would do if I left.

  And it seemed, all at once, so empty. So cowardly. He wasn’t forcing me to do anything I didn’t want to do. He was forcing me to do what I wanted.

  He was putting this gift in my hands.

  I crossed the room and sat down on the couch beside him. Careful not to touch him because that would make all of this feel too real. But the couch was small and I had the sensation of him all along my leg. My side. My body vibrated with the nearness of him.

  The air tasted salty and tangy, like we were all just breathing in sex. I was so turned on I thought I might combust. Shifting on the couch, my thighs squeezed my clit and it was all I could do not to do it again and again. Right here, in front of people.

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see Jesse’s hand on his cock, but he wasn’t hard.

  I actually started at the sight of his semi-hard dick. How in the world could he be sitting there, watching these beautiful people, telling them what to do, breathing this air—and not be turned on?

  “I’m tired,” he said, like I’d asked the question out loud, or maybe my staring at his cock just made my thoughts so freaking obvious. He was smirking at me, his ruined mouth pulled tight at one corner. And I couldn’t stop myself from imagining him having sex with that woman, her sleek body and his sleek body. I imagined his hands in her hair.

  Her mouth on his body. His cock… I made some strangled noise before staring back at the bed.

  “Ask me,” he said, his voice low, thick. Humid even.

  “What?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “Did you fuck her?”

  “I did.”

  “Did you fuck him?”

  “Would that bother you?”

  I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t even breathe. I pressed my legs together, squeezing my clit. The idea so exciting. So outrageous I couldn’t think past the idea.

  “I didn’t,” he said. “Not tonight.”

  From this position I couldn’t see much, the girl’s back, the man’s hand in her hair. The bob of her head. The gurgle in her throat.

  But it was no longer the hottest thing in the room. Sitting in the dark next to Jesse, it was breathlessly intimate. My entire body was tuned to him.

  “You want them to do something else?” he asked.

  “Is that…how it works? You tell them what to do?”

  He shrugged.

  “Like live porn?”

  “Like a bunch of deviants who get their rocks off fucking each other,” Jesse said. He turned to the couple on the bed. “Matt, go down on Amber.”

  “No,” the blond guy said. Gasped really. He looked like he was about to come.

  “Charlotte wants to see it.”

  Matt gave Jesse the finger and kept sliding in and out of Amber’s mouth.

  “Sometimes it works,” Jesse said. “Sometimes it doesn’t.”

  “Please.” The word croaked out of me before I even knew I’d been thinking it.

  Everyone turned to stare at me. Amber over her shoulder, her lips red from being stretched around Matt’s cock.

  I didn’t look at Jesse, but I could feel him watching me.

  And I loved it. Not a little. A lot.

  I loved all of this.

  “I would…like to see that.”
/>   “I guess I wouldn’t mind either,” Amber said with a wink and got up off her knees. She lay down on the bed and Matt took her spot on the floor, kneeling between her legs. Again, I couldn’t see much. Amber’s legs stretched to accommodate Matt’s broad back. But I could tell when Matt licked her, Amber jumped. Sighed and then put her fingers in his hair to push him closer.

  “Look at you,” Jesse said, still watching me. I got the impression those two on the bed could burst into flames and he wouldn’t so much as glance away from me. “So brave.”

  Not looking at him I opened my mouth to say something. To tell him to fuck off, or stop staring or something, but nothing came out. My breath shuddered in my body and I wanted to touch myself so bad I could taste it in my throat.

  “Touch yourself,” Jesse said and I flinched, his words turning up the desire in my body even higher. Even hotter.

  I would die here like this.

  But still I didn’t do it.

  “Let me touch you,” he said.

  And “yes” gasped out of me.

  He made some low humming noise in his throat and I closed my eyes braced for his touch.

  Stupid me. Like I could prepare for something like Jesse’s touch. It was like being shocked by electricity. Like stepping naked into the wind. It was only his hand on my upper thigh, pushing the hem of my sleep shirt up, but I jumped. I nearly screamed.

  I closed my eyes and bit my lip.

  “No,” he said. “Look at me.”

  “Jesse,” I breathed. “No.”

  “You can do it, baby, open your eyes.” I felt the fingers of his other hand against the side of my face, barely there and yet all I could feel. His fingertips were rough and callused and I flinched, but succumbed to his pressure, turning my face until I felt the back of the couch against my cheek.

  I waited, holding my breath for his fingers to slip under the lace edge of my underwear, but they didn’t. His breath was so loud in my ears, the gust of it warm against my lips.

  I licked my lips and he groaned and the sound pulled my eyes open, like I had no control.

  And there he was. His beaten-up face, his tender mouth, curled in a half smile. Whatever I was expecting to see on his face, the smirk or distance, a teasing whatever… it wasn’t there.