20. Kai
Kai
The lamp stays on.
Warm amber light spills from Julia’s living room and stretches across the lawn before thinning into darkness near the tree line, leaving her perfectly visible against the glass while everything around me remains buried beneath branches and shadow.
From where I’m standing, deep enough inside the woods that the uneven trunks break apart my silhouette, I can even see the black envelope and the letter lying open on the coffee table behind her.
She stands several feet from the window at first, wearing the loose gray T-shirt and black shorts she changed into after coming home, her damp hair darker toward the ends where it hangs over her shoulders.
There is nothing deliberately seductive about any of it, which somehow makes the sight of her more distracting.
She looks comfortable and completely herself, like she showered, opened the closet and grabbed whatever felt soft rather than wondering what might look good to the man waiting outside.
Apparently bras become optional the second Julia closes her front door too.
I’ve noticed that before. Tonight I notice it considerably more.
She doesn’t move for several seconds, and even from here I can see enough hesitation in her posture to know she is giving herself one last chance to decide that reading the letter was as far as she wants this to go.
She could walk away now. I made sure she knew that.
If she leaves the window, I leave too, because I’m not following her view through another room or standing here until she comes back and then deciding that maybe she changed her mind.
I asked her for one thing, and if the answer is no, that needs to be the end of it.
Especially after everything she told me in my office about what happens inside her when that particular word is ignored.
I shouldn’t have needed her history to understand that, but now that I know it, there is no pretending it doesn’t sit between us.
Julia stays. The tension between my shoulders loosened enough that I realized I had been holding it there. Then her lips move. The closed window and the distance make hearing her impossible, but I’ve watched her speak often enough to recognize the shape of the question.
Are you there?
A quiet smile pulls at the corner of my mouth.
Yeah, little ember. I’m here.
I remain hidden between the trees and watch her search for something she has no real chance of finding.
From this distance, I am little more than another shadow among dozens, exactly where I need to be if tonight is going to happen on the terms I gave her.
Julia waits another moment before letting one hand settle against her thigh.
At first she does nothing with it, simply resting her fingers beneath the loose edge of her shirt while she looks into the trees, almost as though she is checking how it feels to know someone may be looking back before she decides whether she wants to continue.
The hesitation gets to me more than I expected.
She is choosing. Last Sunday, I took that choice from her completely.
She believed she was alone inside her own home, and I knew she believed it while I stood out here watching anyway.
There isn’t a clever argument that turns that into anything else, no matter how many times I tell myself I only stayed because I wanted to understand the version of Julia nobody else seemed to notice.
Tonight isn’t the same, it doesn’t fix what came before, but it isn’t the same.
She knows I’m here. She knows what I asked her for.
She left the lamp burning and came to the window anyway.
Her hand finally begins moving, slowly enough that the anticipation becomes its own kind of torture.
She doesn’t immediately slide beneath her shorts but lets her palm travel higher along her thigh, pausing again as her eyes move between her reflection in the glass and the darkness outside.
For me and knowing that hits low and hard.
When her hand moves between her legs, the fabric stays between her fingers and skin for a little longer, and I see the first obvious change in her before she gives me anything else.
Her lips part slightly and her shoulders tighten, then a quick flash of embarrassment crosses her face as though the reality of what she is doing has suddenly caught up with her.
For half a second I expect her to step away.
Instead, she looks back toward the trees.
Something dark and deeply satisfied settles beneath my ribs.
She is checking whether I’m still here. I don’t move.
Her fingers eventually slip beneath the waistband of her shorts, and there is almost nothing explicit I can actually see from this distance.
I know where her hand is because of the angle of her wrist and the way her body reacts when she touches herself somewhere more sensitive, her breath catching while the tension in her shoulders shifts and color begins creeping slowly up her throat.
I breathe in through my nose.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Most of my working life is built around watching people without letting their reactions take control of mine.
Patients cry, panic, get angry, shut down or tell me things they have carried alone for years, and I know how to stay steady enough that they never have to worry about managing me on top of whatever they are trying to survive themselves.
None of that skill is useful here. Everything Julia does seems to land somewhere inside my own body.
When her breathing deepens, mine follows.
When her hips shift forward slightly, searching for more pressure from her hand, the response beneath my jeans becomes impossible to ignore, and when one of her palms braces against the window frame as she leans closer to the glass, every instinct in me wants to close the distance between us.
Ghost has no problem with that idea.
Go closer.
No. She agreed to my eyes, and I don’t get to turn one yes into five more just because I want them. Ghost is far less interested in the distinction, but I remain exactly where she allowed me to be.
Her eyes close briefly before opening again. She remembers what I asked.
Keep your eyes on the trees.
A smile threatens the corner of my mouth. “Good girl.”
She can’t hear me, which is probably for the best. The words belong to the man she thinks is hidden out here, not the psychiatrist she sat across from earlier, although the line separating those two versions of me is becoming harder to believe in every time I come back to this place.
Julia keeps looking. Whatever uncertainty she carried when she first approached the window gradually disappears as the pace of her hand changes beneath the fabric.
Her posture loosens even while the tension elsewhere in her body builds, and I can see the exact moment curiosity stops being the thing keeping her there.
She wants it now. That affects me more than the view.
I never wanted her performing because she thought an anonymous man had ordered her to entertain him.
I wanted to know whether the knowledge of being watched would change something for her, whether having another person attached to the wanting would make the release feel different from whatever she had been trying to accomplish alone last Sunday.
Apparently it does. Last time, she looked afterward as though she had scratched an itch and found the result barely worth the effort.
Tonight there is nothing casual about the way her forehead drifts closer to the glass while her breath creates a faint patch of fog in front of her mouth.
Her fingers tighten around the window frame. Her eyes find the trees again.
Mine.
The thought comes so easily now that I barely bother pretending to be surprised by it.
I know Julia isn’t mine. Ghost sees her standing in front of a window because of a letter I wrote, touching herself while searching the darkness for one specific man, and seems to consider the technicalities settled. For tonight, I’m not arguing very hard.
I shift my weight against the tree, and the pistol tucked into the back of my waistband presses harder against me beneath the jacket.
I’d almost forgotten it was there. A county social worker I’ve worked with before called late this afternoon about a woman in temporary housing on the north side who was spiraling badly enough that she wanted another opinion before pushing for an emergency evaluation.
The building itself didn’t worry me, but the surrounding blocks after dark were a different story, especially when I was showing up alone on the bike, so I took the gun from the safe before I left.
The visit ran longer than either of us expected, and by the time I walked back outside, going home first would have meant missing Julia.
So I came straight here, and the pistol came with me.
I have a permit, I’ve carried it on late solo rides often enough that the weight doesn’t usually register once I’m moving, and tonight taking it had seemed no more dramatic than taking my gloves.
My attention returns to Julia. She is beautiful when she walks into my office dressed for work, and I noticed that from the first day even before noticing it became something I had to actively stop myself from doing.
Still, I prefer this version of her far more than I should — bare legs, damp hair, oversized shirt, not a single obvious effort made for another person’s attention.
She looks fucking sexy without trying and maybe exactly because she isn’t trying.