4. Dove
DOVE
Four days.
Four days and I haven’t called the police. Four days and he’s been here every night—not all night, not always, but he comes after dark and he leaves before six and in between those two points I have stopped being a person who makes sensible decisions.
I should talk to someone. My sister. Calla from the fourth-grade classroom.
Call someone and say: a man watched me through a rifle scope from the building across the alley for six weeks, he let himself into my apartment more times than I can count, he was waiting on my bed when I came out of my shower on Friday, and I don’t know what to do.
He kills people for a living and I let him pull my hair and I came so hard I saw white.
I haven’t said any of it to anyone.
Every time I reach for a reason why, I find instead the sensation of his fist in my hair and his voice low in the dark saying things he has no business knowing. And then I lose track of what I was looking for.
He is still inside me. Not metaphor. Four days and I can still feel where he was—the stretch of him, the weight, the ache from how deep he went from behind that first night.
I showered twice and both times felt like I’d lost something—his cum washing out of me, the last physical proof of what happened draining away.
So I stopped being thorough about it and started just rinsing and getting out.
The second morning I caught the news about the man across the alley. Police tape. A body. And I stood at my kitchen window and thought about Ezra’s hands—steady on his thighs, steady in my hair, the hands of a man who does this—and I didn’t call anyone then either.
I know why. I don’t want to examine why.
I stand at my kitchen window in the morning with my coffee and look at his building. Third floor. Second from the left. The glass is always dark, always closed. He’s in there sometimes. I know it the way you know weather—a pressure, a quality of the air, the sense of being in a frame.
On Sunday morning I stand at the window for twenty minutes.
Then I put the coffee down.
I am going over there.
The building across the alley has a door that buzzes open if you press it wrong—the latch doesn’t fully catch, the kind of thing a person who’d done twelve unauthorized entries would have noticed.
I figure it out on the second try. Narrow hallway, old building smell, someone cooking on the second floor. The stairs creak.
Third floor. Dark windows facing south. I stand in front of the door for thirty seconds being a normal person having a normal reaction to what I’m about to do.
The door swings open under my knuckle. Not latched. He left without latching it, or he left it open for me, and both of those options tell me something.
I go in.
Dark. Curtains drawn on all windows except the one facing my building—sill cleared bare, nothing else on it. A tripod. And on the tripod, aimed directly across the alley at my window, a rifle scope the size of my forearm.
I walk to it. Stand in front of it for a moment. Then I lower my eye to the lens.
My apartment jumps into focus, close and clear and angled slightly up—he has the high ground by maybe six inches, a difference I’d never noticed.
The living room lamp is on. I left it on.
My couch. The book open on the cushion. The coffee mug I didn’t bring to the sink.
Through his scope at eleven in the morning my apartment is completely visible: every corner, every private ordinary inch of it in perfect resolution.
Six weeks.
Something is wrong with me. Standing in his surveillance apartment, looking at my own life through the lens of the man who’s been watching it, the strongest thing I’m feeling is not violated.
Seen. The word arrives before anything else.
Seen.
I step back from the scope. Look around the room.
Sparse. He doesn’t live here the way people live in places—temporary overlay on rented space. A folding table against the east wall. A chair. On the table: a lamp, a water bottle, a lined notebook. Open.
I pick up the notebook.
His handwriting is precise and even. The handwriting of someone who learned to be legible because imprecision in his line of work gets people killed. The first page is dated six weeks ago.
Subject: Dove Sinclair, 28. School teacher. Third floor, apartment 3B. Lights come on early depending on work schedule. South window has the best coverage. Pattern: regular, predictable, minimal variation.
I turn the page.
She eats standing at the counter. Doesn’t like sitting alone at the table—the chair is always pushed in, the placemat unused. I’m going to take this personally.
I stare at that last line. I’m going to take this personally. Buried in the field report like a splinter.
Next page.
She dances in the kitchen. I’ve seen it four times. She doesn’t know she’s doing it—just a small movement, a hip shift when a song changes. She shouldn’t be allowed to do that. It’s unreasonable.
Next page.
She can’t sleep. The 2 AM light in the living room isn’t insomnia. It’s the not-sleep of a person who lies down and finds the darkness too large. She’s lonely. She’s been managing it for a long time.
I have to put the notebook down.
I stand in the middle of his sparse dark apartment with his scope aimed at my window and his notebook in my hands and I’m shaking.
Not from fear. From something I don’t have a word for—the sensation of being read with this accuracy by someone who had no right to read me at all.
He watched me dance in my kitchen. He noted my insomnia.
He noticed the chair and made it mean something and he was right, the placemat is unused because eating at a table for one makes the one-ness undeniable, and I’ve spent years learning to manage it.
How does a man who watched me through a scope for six weeks know things my sister doesn’t?
I pick the notebook back up. Turn to the most recent entries.
I know this apartment better than any place I’ve lived in the last ten years.
Better than the safe house in Lisbon, better than the flat in Munich I kept for three months while I worked two contracts.
I know the order she stacks the dishes. I know where she keeps the extra lightbulbs.
I know what she looks like in sleep. I know the sound she makes at the end and I’ve been in that apartment so many times and never once been close enough to cause it.
The contract window is closing. I should take the shot and leave. There’s a version of this where I do that. Where I’m the professional I’ve been for eighteen years—pack the rifle, wipe the scope, fly out of the country by morning.
I’m not taking that version. She dances in the kitchen and I’m not taking that version.
I close the notebook. Set it down.
Look at the scope. At my window, pale curtains open, my apartment laid out in full view.
I put my hand in my pocket. I find the edge of my phone case. I think about my sister’s contact, the call I haven’t made, four days of not making it.
“You found the notebook.”
I spin around.
He’s in the doorway. He moves the way people don’t—without announcing himself. He looks at me, at the notebook on the table, and doesn’t come into the room.
“You left the door open,” I say.
“Yes.”
“On purpose.”
“I didn’t lock it.”
Not a yes. Not a no. We both know what it is.
“You wrote about me,” I say. “Like a file. Like a—“ I look at the scope. At my apartment in the lens. “Like I was a contract.”
“You were the thing I was watching.” He comes into the room.
Slow, deliberate, the same pace he uses for everything—the controlled movement of a man whose profession requires him to cross rooms without being heard.
“I write about what I watch. Targets get field reports.
You got—“ He looks at the notebook. “Something else.”
“There’s a difference between surveillance and—“ I hold up the notebook, open to She shouldn’t be allowed to do that. “This.”
He reads the line. His face does something—not embarrassment, he doesn’t have that gear, but recognition of what he’s being shown.
“It stopped being a report.”
“Early on.”
“You kept writing it like one.”
“That’s how my mind works. Eighteen years of field notes. Doesn’t mean that’s all it is.” He crosses toward the scope. Toward me. I hold my ground. “You came over here,” he says.
“I wanted to see it.”
“You wanted to understand the scope of it.” He’s close now. The notebook between us, and then it isn’t—my hand at my side, nothing between us except the four days of his visits in the dark and the thing I’ve been carrying in my body since the first night. “Now you understand.”
“It’s worse than I thought.”
“Yes.”
“Something is wrong with me,” I say. “I found this notebook and I read it and I’m not—“ I stop. Start again. “I need you to know that I know something is wrong with me.”
“Tell me,” he says.
“I should call the police.”
“You should.”
“I’m not going to.”
“I know.”
“Because I read the notebook and the dancing and the chair and what he wrote about my sleep—“ My voice has gone quiet. I’m looking at the scope, at my apartment in the lens. “No one has ever. I’ve been in this neighborhood three years and no one noticed. No one noticed the chair or the 2 AM light.” I look at him. “You noticed everything.”
“I was watching for everything.”
“I know. I know that’s what makes it wrong.
” I’m wet. Standing in his surveillance apartment, reading his field notes about my loneliness, and I’m wet.
“Being known this completely. By someone who had no right to know me. Who took everything without asking.” I look at his handwriting on the notebook, the precision of it.
“It’s the most desired I’ve ever felt. That’s what’s wrong with me. ”
He reaches for me.
I go.
Not passively—I pull him in, my hands in his shirt, which tells him and me everything about where we are now, four days past Friday.
He makes a sound against my hair—hunger and recognition together—and then we’re against the wall.
His scope and his notebook three feet away.
My apartment visible through the lens across the alley.
He gets my underwear down in about four seconds. The efficiency of a man who’s used to working fast in rooms he’s not supposed to be in.
“You’ve been inside my home,” I say into his shoulder.
“Yes.”
“You know where I keep my vibrator.”
“Third drawer from the top.” His hand between my thighs. I’m soaking. “I know exactly which hand you use it with and how long you hold it there before you’re close.”
“God—“
“I watched you.” His fingers move and I grip his shirt.
“Through the scope. The shadows on the curtain. I know the specific tilt of your head when you’re about to come.
” He pushes two fingers inside me and I gasp.
“There it is. Your pussy gripping me right now exactly the way you grip that vibrator.”
“I hate you?—“
“No you don’t.” He pulls his hand back. Puts his mouth against my ear. “Get on the floor. Face down.”
My stomach drops. My pussy clenches around nothing.
“I’m not?—“
He turns me. Gentle hands, nothing gentle about the intent.
He puts me face down on the floor of his surveillance apartment—the floor he’s paced for six weeks watching my window, three feet from the scope.
My cheek against the hardwood. His weight comes down over me, his body covering mine completely, and I feel his cock pressing between my thighs from behind.
“I watched you from here,” he says. His mouth at the back of my neck.
His hips settle over mine. “Every night. Right here. My cock hard, watching your window.” He pushes into me, slow, from behind and above, and the angle is—the weight of him pressing me flat into the floor and his cock going deep, deeper than the wall, deeper than the bed—I can’t breathe.
“I killed a man on Tuesday,” he says against the back of my neck.
“Packed the rifle. Came straight here. Redirected the scope to your window.” He pulls back and pushes in, and his weight keeps me pinned, and I can feel every inch.
“You were making the pasta. You didn’t finish it.
I watched you put it in the fridge and I thought about you all night. ”
“Ezra—“
“You’re going to look at that window.”
He turns my head. The scope. My apartment framed in the lens.
I look. My lamp. My couch. My life in perfect resolution from this angle. And he’s inside me from behind, his weight on my back, pressing me into the floor where he watched me for six weeks.
He drives in hard. My moan hits the hardwood and bounces back.
“That’s what it looks like from here,” he says.
“Every night. That light on. You at the counter. You at the window in the sleep shirt not knowing.” He moves again and I grip the floor.
“I watched that window every night with my cock hard.
I stood in your hallway and came listening to you.
And every night I thought: I need to be the one?—“
“Don’t stop?—“
“I need to be the one making you come.” He pushes in deep and holds. His weight on my back. His cock so deep I can feel it in my ribs. “Your pussy knows the difference. Right now you’re gripping my cock so hard I can feel your heartbeat.”
“God—“
“My hands killed a man this week,” he says against my ear. “These hands.” He grips my hip with one and slides the other under me, finds my clit. “And right now they’re on you. And the only thing they want is to make you come.”
I come looking at my own kitchen lamp through a rifle scope.
His cock buried inside me from behind. His weight pressing me flat.
His voice at my ear telling me everything he’s done.
A long, shaking orgasm that starts at my clit and goes all the way through me.
My pussy gripping him in waves. His cum flooding into me—deep, warm—and I hold on through every beat of it and I do not close my eyes.
He holds me against the wall after. Both of us breathing.
“You can’t keep doing this,” I say. It comes out without conviction. He hears the conviction I don’t have.
“I haven’t started yet,” he says.
I look at the notebook on the table. At the scope. At my apartment in the lens.
“The man across the alley,” I say. “The police tape.”
He looks at me. Doesn’t blink.
“Yes.”
“You did that.”
“It was my job.”
“And now you’re here. With me. On this floor.” I’m lying on the floor of his apartment with his cum inside me and the scope aimed at my window and I just came while he told me about killing a man. “What does that make me?”
“Mine,” he says. “It makes you mine.”
I should be horrified. I look at his hands—the hands he just told me about, the hands that pulled a trigger this week and pulled my hair last night—and I feel the absence of the horror I should be having. I feel, instead, a warmth that has nothing to do with temperature.
“Come back tonight,” I say.
I hate that I say it.
I say it anyway.