Boy Next Door

Chapter One Claire I’ve discovered I have a peeping tom. His name is Brian and not Tom, but he’s a sneaking little peeper all right. Well, not such a little peeper I guess: at eighteen he’s bigger than me. But I’ve known him since he was only thirteen. It’s hard for me not to consider him a little boy still, though I’m only seven years his senior. When we moved here after getting married my husband, Jim, hired him to mow our lawn and do other kinds of yard work. This was convenient enough, since he lives next door. And it soon became apparent, at least to me, that he was curiously infatuated with me – curious because I’m nothing special, believe me. Still he was just a boy, so I thought nothing of it. Eventually he seemed to grow out of it, even though he still performs these chores only a year away from college, when he clearly has no need of the small amount of money it pays. All this makes me wonder now just how infatuated he still is – and how long he’s been peeping at me. Naturally I was angry at first – angry and hideously embarrassed. I’ve always been terribly shy, you see. My self-esteem is so low that at the time I couldn’t bring myself to confront Brian or even let on that I was aware of him. Now I’m glad that I didn’t. The more I think about him – hunky young stud, captain of the football team, exactly the kind of guy who wouldn’t give me the time of day during my own high school torment – the more I’m tempted to take a wicked advantage of the situation. After all, my marriage is a sham. I’m actually still a virgin, if you can believe that. And despite my shyness and generally timid demeanor, the s****l repression and deprivation I’ve grown up with and suffered all my life has led me to indulge in ever wilder fantasies, some of them incredibly kinky. Why shouldn’t I take advantage of this opportunity? Why not try to live out some of those fantasies, or at least finally get to have s*x? Brian is a legal adult now. If he’s so interested in my body when he could have any girl in school, he ought to be easy to seduce. Or failing that, why shouldn’t I coerce him? It would certainly be fair play after the way he’s sinned against me. I first became aware of his peeping last week. Coming from families that are both considerably well-off, Jim and I have a pretty sizeable house: two stories with bathrooms both upstairs and down. Jim and I have separate bedrooms at the back, with the bathroom between them. I have the master bedroom, which has its own door on the bathroom and is sited at the corner of the house nearest to the Garvey’s – that’s young Brian’s parents. There are big windows on adjacent sides of the bedroom and a skylight over the tub in the bathroom. This continues down the wall to the foot of the tub, allowing sunlight and a view of the sky and distant treetops while blocking any sight-lines from the ground. Taking a leisurely soak one morning this June, just lounging and enjoying the warm sun and churning water (the tub is equipped with whirlpool jets) a flash of light caught my eye, and not for the first time. Only on this occasion I saw more. About fifty yards away, over in the Garvey’s back yard, there is a massive old willow tree. About twenty feet up in this is a tree house – not some scrappy thing hammered together, but a professional redwood job that I’m sure homeless people the world over would find more than just commodious. Such is the way kids are spoiled out here in the suburbs. Anyway, I couldn’t see more than the roof of this from where I lounged low in the tub, but I didn’t need to. Another twenty or thirty feet up in the branches that flash of light came again. Squinting against the tiny glare, I waited until it receded. And then what should I see but our yard boy propped mostly hidden among the leaves, sunlight reflecting occasionally from the binoculars he was using to peer across our properties and through the skylight! I froze in mortification. The little bastard was spying on me naked! Despite the sauna-like heat my skin crawled into gooseflesh. Shock warred with rage and humiliation for a moment, making it impossible to think. Then other realizations occurred, kicking my mind into overdrive. Besides rarely opaquing that skylight, I almost never close the curtains in my bedroom. I like watching the moon rise at night and enjoy the sun and birds in the morning. I even like the view of that willow and its tree-house visible from my bed. It never occurred to me it might be occupied. If I’d thought of it all I suppose I assumed that Brian had long since outgrown it, and anyway it was almost fifty yards away. With a pair of binoculars however… How many times had he watched me dressing, undressing, or even m**********g in there? Feeling a burning shame flush me that was as much the result of my upbringing as at this unconscionable violation, I remained frozen in place, at a loss how to respond. I couldn’t imagine calling the police or even his parents. For one thing, I’ve never been able to stomach much confrontation. And furthermore I’ve been uncomfortable around Mr. and Mrs. Garvey ever since we moved here. Like everyone else in this conservative, moderately wealthy community they are fundamentalist evangelicals. Their fervor makes me uneasy; I feel more than ever like an imposter in the court of the enemy. And of course, they dote on their only child, their glitteringly perfect son. They refuse to hear a word against him. Plus if the story got around that he was a spying little pervert, their own status in the community and church would take a dreadful hit. It’s not that I cared about that. But even if they believed me, there’s the evangelical habit of blaming the victim, the female victim, to consider. People (my own parents included) would claim I enticed him by leaving the skylight transparent and the curtains open. Even if I was somehow spared such a backlash, drawing community attention to myself could prove disastrous for me. By this time I’d endured five long years of a loveless and sexless marriage to keep my secret. The last thing I needed was gossip and public scrutiny. In the end, my reticence and fear of confrontation, even of social awkwardness, caused me to shy away from even letting Brian know that I was on to him. How could we ever look each other in the face after this with such a momentous shame out in the open between us? Angry all over again I cursed the little bastard for putting me in this predicament. Why the hell did he want to look at me anyways? It’s not that I’m ugly or overweight, more like insufferably plain. My hair is a lusterless wheat-blonde, hanging thin and straight to my shoulders. My eyes are an utterly ordinary brown, my nose too small, my chin too weak and my lips not generous by any means. My skin is too pale and my body mostly normal to the point of being unnoticeable. Five-five and a hundred and ten pounds, I’m skinny and without any muscle tone. And then there are my breasts. As always the thought of these suffused me with excruciating embarrassment, magnified a hundredfold by the idea that someone was seeing them even at that moment, an attractive man, in fact, just like those who had always spurned me. All through high school the other girls made fun of me in the locker room. My endowment is as ordinary as the rest of me, neither too big nor too small. It’s my n*****s that are hideously different. These are absolutely gigantic, comprising at least half of my C-cup size. The enormous aureoles jut out like tennis balls, distorting the shape of the whole, while the tips are just little bumps on the end. Glancing down at these filled me with despair and self-despite all over again, and suddenly I couldn’t bear them being seen anymore. Keeping my face as neutral as possible and trying not to show any alarm or haste, I climbed out of the tub and toweled dry. Wrapping that towel about myself with considerable relief, I finished my morning hygiene in a torturous struggle to appear normal. Only when I passed into my bedroom and then the enclosed wardrobe to pick out some clothes did I allow my upset to overwhelm me at last. I sat huddled in the corner and cried furiously for twenty minutes at least, in shame and anger at my violation, and grief and sorrow over my undesirability and hopeless situation. Claire It’s hard to say when I began to think more speculatively about my naughty young neighbor, to consider this an opportunity rather than a problem. Eventually I pulled myself together. Resolving to be more careful, I got dressed in the closet. Suppressing all evidence of my upset, I went about my housework and interacted with my husband as though nothing had happened. By the time I saw Jim off to work at about one-thirty I’d regained my equanimity. I’m familiar with feeling unattractive, misused, and helpless to right offenses after all. Being unpopular growing up, intellectually estranged from everyone I know and generally unloved has long forced me to find solace in my own company. I passed the day in my usual way, but all the while wheels were beginning to turn. Deciding that I needed to know the extent of Brian’s peeping, I began to plot a little spying of my own. I generally go to bed around midnight. Jim has a ninety-minute commute and works overtime regularly, never returning before three in the morning – not that this matters a whole lot, since he moved out of our bedroom a week into our marriage. In any case, well before the usual time I crept upstairs into the guest bedroom adjacent to my own. Leaving the lights off, I pulled a chair next to the open window but well back from it. There I could keep a watch on the Garvey house, yard, and all approaches to the tree. For half an hour not much happened. All the lights were off over there. Good God-fearing folk go to bed early I guess. But finally at eleven-thirty I saw movement out back. There had been no betraying lights or sounds coming from the house, but my dark-adapted eyes easily picked out Brian as he moved cautiously through the patio furniture. He wore sneakers and pajamas of pale blue, and paused a moment to study our house. Seeing the lights I’d left burning in both bathroom and bedroom but no movement, he hurried across the lawn and up to the tree house, disappearing within. That sneaky little s**t! This must be a nightly delight for him, no doubt stretching back over years. Again I flamed with humiliation, thinking of all the times I’d spent writhing on the bed, sating my solitary needs privately – or so I’d always assumed. Anger and frustration made me grind my teeth. There had to be a way to make that bastard pay! Perhaps I could begin by serving up some frustration right back to him. Not by closing the curtain or moving to a different bedroom – I could always trade with Jim – because that might signal to young Brian that I was on to him. Instead I could let him go on watching me, but be careful to never let him really see anything. Decided, I slipped out of the guest bedroom and back downstairs, where I shut everything down and locked up for the night. Then following my usual routine I went back up and into the bathroom. I brushed my teeth, washed my face and combed my hair: move along folks, nothing to see here. There are no sight-lines from the toilet to the skylight, so I was able to relieve myself without worrying. Finally, I headed into the bedroom, dousing the bathroom light on the way. I felt like an actress entering stage left. The awareness that I was being spied upon, and had likewise been spied upon probably every night of the last five years filled me with anger and embarrassment all over again. Still I remained determined to torment my young voyeur until I figured out a way to either revenge myself upon him or put a stop to these violations without betraying my knowledge of them. Moving more slowly than usual, as if lost in thought, I wandered around the room a bit. I spent a good ten minutes unnecessarily sorting my scanty jewelry box – I don’t even wear earrings. I dawdled interminably over selecting five CDs for the stereo to play softly all night. At last I removed my shoes, pants and shirt.