Charlotte Stein - Deep Desires

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.