3. Ezra
EZRA
She wakes up before six.
I know her wake time. Six-oh-eight on school days, later on weekends. Today is a school day—except she’s not going to school. Her phone has been on the nightstand within arm’s reach all night and she hasn’t touched it.
I’ve been watching her sleep for hours from two feet away instead of two hundred.
I’ve watched men sleep before they died.
Sat in hotel rooms in Cartagena and Prague and a basement apartment in Seoul, waiting for the hour.
Their faces do something in sleep—they go slack, unguarded, the face underneath the face.
Hers does the same thing and it’s nothing like the same thing.
The scope gives me shape and motion and light and shadow.
Two feet gives me the sound of her breathing.
The small shifts she makes toward the left side of the mattress.
The way her face goes through something complicated in the early hours—not a nightmare exactly, but not peace either.
A working-through. Her body sorting what happened.
Her body processed it in my direction. She woke twice in the night and pressed closer, not away.
She doesn’t know she did it. Both times she was still mostly asleep and I stayed still and let her settle.
She’s awake now. The breathing has changed—it’s not the slow rhythm of sleep but the deliberate, controlled breathing of a woman who’s awake and deciding what to do.
She reaches for the phone.
Unlocks it. Lies still, screen up.
I watch her thumb hover over the contacts. I watch her think about who to call. Watch her put the phone down without dialing.
Six weeks through a rifle scope and I read her exactly right. The same instinct that tells me when a target is about to break cover—something in the body language, the micro-hesitation. She was never going to call.
“You could have called,” I say.
She goes rigid. She’d been hoping I was asleep.
“I know,” she says, after a moment.
“Why didn’t you?”
Long pause. “I don’t know.”
She does know. We both know she knows. I don’t push it.
She’ll find her way to the words when she’s ready and I have all the time in the world now—the contract window closed last night when I crossed the alley, the terms voided the moment I deadbolted her door.
I walked away from a kill for the first time in eighteen years.
I made that choice and I have no regrets about it.
She sits up. Pulls the sheet to her chest. The movement tugs it off me and she looks at me—at the size of me in her bed—and her expression cycles through something it doesn’t land on. Not fear. Not fury.
“You stayed,” she says.
“Yes.”
“You were supposed to leave.”
“Who told you that?”
She stops. She is not going to say what she was going to say.
I sit up. She moves back slightly—reflex, body memory—but not far. Not as far as she could.
“Your plant needs water,” I say.
She stares at me.
“Thursday,” I say. “You water it on Thursdays. You forgot last night.”
“I was slightly occupied.”
Something almost happens at the corner of my mouth. She sees it. Her expression shifts—some of the wariness becoming something she doesn’t have a name for yet.
“What are you going to do?” she says. “Today.”
“Watch you,” I say. “From across the alley. The way I have been.”
“And come back.”
“Yes.”
She pulls her knee to her chest. Sits with her chin on it, looking at the far wall—the window, the alley, the building she now knows is where I’ve been for six weeks. Looking at it differently. The recalibration is in her face: every evening she’s spent at that window, visible, unknowing.
“How much did you see?” she says.
“Everything.”
“Be specific.”
So I tell her. I tell her the cereal at eleven PM, the dress with the misbutton, the plant, the couch sleeping, the grading, the kitchen dancing.
I tell her about the scope at 3 AM when she gets up for water and comes back to bed and pulls the covers up alone.
I tell her about the nightstand drawer. About the three nights at the wall.
About my cock hard and my hand wrapped around it while I listened to her on the other side of the plaster.
I tell her all of it. She deserves the full scope of what she’s dealing with.
By the end she’s red from her collarbone to her hairline.
“And you’re not sorry,” she says.
“No.”
“You don’t think there’s something wrong with you.”
“I think there are a lot of things wrong with me.” I look at her. “I watched you for six weeks and I came across the alley and everything I did was something I chose with full information. That’s not wrong. That’s honest.”
“That’s insane.”
“Also possible.”
The sound she makes is almost a laugh—the short exhale of someone trying not to find something funny and losing. She presses her mouth together. She doesn’t look afraid anymore. The fear was real and always will have been. It just wasn’t the only thing in the room.
I reach for her.
“Wait.” Her hand up, stopping me. I hold still. I give her the wait.
“I don’t want this,” she says.
“Tell me that and mean it.”
Silence.
“Mean it,” I say. “Mean it and I’ll cross back to the other building and I’ll take the scope down. You’ll never see me again. I’m very good at disappearing—it’s a professional requirement.”
Her hand is on the sheet. Knuckles white.
“I hate what you did,” she says. “I hate all of it. The break-ins and the watching and—“ She breathes. “I hate that I’m not calling the police.”
“But you’re not.”
“But I’m not.”
I move slowly. My hand on her hip over the sheet. Her warmth through the fabric. I keep my eyes on her face the whole time.
She doesn’t pull away.
She watches my hand on her hip like she’s deciding what it means that she’s letting me put it there.
“I can still feel you,” she says. Quiet. The quality of her voice has changed. “From last night. Inside me. I’m going to go to school today and I’m going to be able to feel where you were.”
“Good,” I say.
“That’s not?—“
“Good.” I move. She makes a sound and her hands go to my chest—pushing, except they stay there after the push, flat against me, her fingers curling. I press my hand over both of hers and keep them there.
“I know what you want,” I say. Against her ear.
“I watched you through that scope for six weeks. I know exactly what makes your pussy wet. I know the sounds you make before you’re close.
” I feel her shiver. “I’ve been at that wall with my cock in my hand listening to you through the plaster. Night after night.”
“Stop—“
“Your body’s not saying stop.”
Her hips are moving. Small, helpless, seeking. Her pussy pressing against me through the sheet and the thin layer of nothing she’s wearing.
“You’re already wet,” I say. I move my hand between her thighs and she’s soaking through the fabric. “Every time I go slow you get wetter. Same as last night.” I push the sheet aside. “Same as the wall.”
“Ezra—“
I take her hand and put it on my cock. She wraps her fingers around it—reflex, curiosity, the same body that chose last night choosing again. Her hand tightens and I’m so hard it hurts. I’ve been hard since I walked through her door. I’ve been hard since the scope.
“Open your mouth.”
Her eyes go wide. Her lips part.
I push my cock past her lips.
The heat of her mouth. Fuck. The sound she makes—muffled, shocked, something under the shock that isn’t shock at all—vibrates through me.
I hold the back of her head, my hand in her hair the way it was last night, and I push deeper.
Her jaw stretches around me. She’s small.
Her mouth is small and I’m making it take me anyway.
“Good girl.” Her tongue moves against the underside and I feel it in my spine. “These hands kill people, Dove.” She makes a sound around my cock. “And right now they’re shaking because your mouth is on me.”
She grips my thigh. Not pulling away. Holding on.
I push deeper. Her eyes are watering and her throat works around the head and I hold there—one second, two—and the squeeze of her throat is so tight my vision goes white at the edges. I pull back. Push in. She takes it. Her tongue does something and I grip her hair harder than I mean to.
“Fuck.” My voice is wrecked. “Your throat. Jesus Christ.” I pull back and push in again and she moans around me and the vibration runs through my cock into my chest. I’m leaking down her throat and she’s swallowing it.
“I’ve put bullets through men and felt less than this.
You understand? Your mouth right now—fuck—I can barely stand up. ”
She moans again. Her nails dig into my thigh and her other hand comes up to grip my hip and she doesn’t push me away. She pulls me closer.
I pull out. She gasps. Spit on her chin, lips swollen, looking up at me with wet eyes and the flush running down her neck.
I flip her. She makes a sound—surprise and want—and she’s on her hands and knees and I’m behind her. My hand wraps in her hair and pulls her head back and her spine arches.
My cock finds her from behind. The head presses where she’s soaking and I can feel the heat coming off her before I’m even inside.
I push in. One slow stroke.
Her cunt resists me. Tight, swollen from last night, and I feel every inch of the resistance as I push through it.
She takes me—takes all of it—and then the sound she makes when I bottom out.
The sound from the wall. The one I jerked off to in her dark hallway.
Hearing it this close, with my cock buried in her, nearly ends me.
I hold still. I have to. If I move right now I’ll come and I’m not done with her.
She’s not saying stop. She’s saying my name—Ezra, wait, I don’t—and not finishing any of it because her cunt is clenching around me in rhythmic pulls, gripping me, and her hips are already pushing back. Her body wants this. Her body wanted this before she knew my name.