6. Dove
DOVE
Two weeks in and I’ve started checking for him.
Not with a flashlight, not with the deadbolt thrown, nothing like bracing for a break-in.
The way you check for something you’ve gotten used to wanting.
The way you come home from work and glance across the alley and feel something in your chest when you catch the faint glint of the scope in the dark window.
He’s there. He’s been there every day.
I know when he picks it up. Standing at my kitchen window when the scope is on me—a quality of attention, a sense of being in the frame. An awareness that has nothing to do with any rational explanation and everything to do with six weeks of watching I didn’t know about and four weeks of knowing.
I’ve stopped looking for the rational explanation.
Connor Reyes is gone. His classroom sits dark at the end of the hall.
His desk has been cleared out. The principal sent an email—personal leave, indefinite—and the other teachers talk about it in the break room in low voices and I stand at the coffee machine and say nothing because I know what happened to Connor Reyes. I know exactly what happened.
Ezra killed him. For texting me. For touching my arm in the parking lot.
I carry that the same way I carry everything else he’s given me—silently, all day, into the shower and into my classroom and back home again.
Connor’s empty desk and the bruises on my hips from last night and the fact that I didn’t call the police about any of it.
The man I’m sleeping with is a contract killer and I am complicit in what he did and I stand at my whiteboard and teach the letter M and I don’t feel what I’m supposed to feel about any of this.
That’s the part I can’t get past. Not the horror. The absence of horror.
I got up on a Tuesday morning and made coffee at the window and I was thinking about whether he was watching and I was standing differently.
Pulled up slightly. Aware of my shoulders, my jaw, how I was holding the mug.
Posing. I was posing for a man who kills people for money and I hadn’t decided to.
My body made the decision and I was catching up.
I stood there with the coffee going cold and I thought: okay. If that’s what’s happening. Okay.
I’ve been carrying him for weeks.
The physical carrying. He’s been here every night and every morning I carry the evidence of the previous night into the shower and into my classroom and back home again.
I stand at the whiteboard and his weight from the night before is still in my hips.
I sit in a staff meeting and shift in my chair and there he is—not pain, the opposite, a warmth.
The physical fact of a man who has been inside me every night and doesn’t pull out.
His cum I carry through the next day into a building where Connor’s classroom is dark and his desk is empty and his replacement starts Monday.
I’ve stopped being horrified by it.
Weeks ago I stood at the whiteboard and named the wrongs: didn’t call the police. Left the curtain open on purpose. Let him in without the chain up. Checked for the scope glint like checking for weather. Didn’t call when Connor disappeared. I named them.
Two weeks ago I stopped calling them wrong. I’m still working out what to call them instead.
It’s not only mornings.
I sit in a staff meeting on Wednesday and shift in my plastic chair and there he is—not just the memory of him but the physical fact, the warmth he left.
Every night for weeks and I walk around all day with the evidence of the previous night and I’m not even embarrassed by it anymore.
A hitman broke into my apartment and watched me through a rifle scope for six weeks and killed a man who touched my arm and is now inside me every night and I sit in a staff meeting on Wednesday and my body treats this information as comfortable, as welcome, as something worth checking for.
I check for the scope at noon from my classroom window, which faces the wrong direction entirely and catches nothing but the school’s parking lot.
I check anyway. Just the act of looking.
It’s become a reflex the same way checking for his key in the lock at night has become a reflex—the anticipation of him, the awareness that he’s out there watching, the warmth of being in someone’s frame on purpose.
I ordered the sheer curtains Tuesday. I haven’t told him yet.
At school on Thursday Raquel asks if I’m seeing someone. I say yes before the pause that usually precedes any honest answer I give about my life.
She says who and I say his name and she says where’d you meet him and I look at the window above my classroom door—the one that faces the parking lot, not the alley, not the scope—and I say: he found me first.
Which is the truest version. He found me through a rifle scope and he kept finding me and he’ll keep finding anyone who gets too close. That’s the man I’m seeing.
On Thursday evening I get home and change out of my work clothes and stand at the bedroom window in my underwear and think about the scope across the alley. Whether he’s there. Whether he can see me at this angle.
I reach up and pull the curtain all the way back.
Then I reach behind me and unclasp my bra, let it fall.
I stand at my bedroom window in just my underwear and count my heartbeats. The apartment across the alley is dark. No visible glint. I know by now that dark doesn’t mean absent.
I go to my desk. Get a piece of paper. A marker. Write four words in large block letters.
WATCH ME TONIGHT.
I carry it to the window and hold it up for ten seconds. Put it down. Go make dinner. I’m not going to examine what just happened to my pulse.
He comes at eight-thirty.
He’s barely through the door when both his hands go to my waist and his mouth is at my neck and I feel the full accumulated weight of a man who’s been at a scope since morning.
“I saw you in the window,” he says.
“That was the idea.”
“You took your bra off.”
“Mm-hm.”
“The note.” His hands on my face, tilting me up. “Watch me tonight.”
“I wanted to say it first.” I pull him toward the bedroom. “Come on.”
He follows. That’s the thing about the power shift—it’s relative. He’s a contract killer and I’m five-two and he follows me to my bedroom because he’s deciding to, and the knowing of it settles something in me that has been restless for weeks.
In the bedroom I turn around.
“Sit down,” I say.
He looks at me. Then he sits on the edge of the bed. My bed, right side, his side now, broken in.
I stand in front of him in my underwear and I let him look.
Not like Friday—the towel, the deadbolt, no choice. This is different. This is me standing in his frame on purpose. The frame of a man who put a bullet through Connor Reyes and came to my apartment the same night with the same hands.
“I’ve been thinking about the scope,” I say. “About you watching me not knowing.” I reach down and pull my underwear off. Let them fall. “I want you to know I know.”
His eyes go very still. And then not still at all.
He reaches for me. Pulls me into his lap, both hands on my thighs, and I settle over him and feel how hard he already is through his jeans. These hands on my thighs. These hands that have done the things they’ve done.
“Tell me what you want,” he says into my hair.
“Everything you’ve been giving me.” I rock against him, small, deliberate. “Except now I’m asking.”
“You’re asking.”
“Yes.” I take his face in both hands. “I’m asking.”
He strips his shirt over his head. Strips mine. Lays me back on the bed and comes down over me—his mouth at my neck, my collarbone, both breasts—and I’m already breathing hard before his hand slides between my thighs.
“You’ve been carrying me all day,” he says against my skin. “I can tell. Still wet from last night.”
“Ezra—“
“Still full of me.” His fingers push inside me, two at once, and his thumb finds my clit and I grip the sheets.
“I watched you leave for school this morning through the scope. Watched you walk to the subway. I knew you were carrying my cum all the way to the station.” He works me steady, deliberate, the same patience he brings to everything—scopes, locks, kills.
“Every night for weeks and I’ve never once pulled out. You feel me in there every day.”
“Yes—“
“Say it.”
“Yes.” His fingers curving inside me, his thumb circling, and my hips are moving without permission. “I carry you all day, I check in the morning if I can still—god—still feel where you?—“
“Right there.” He knows the exact pressure.
He’s learned it from the wall, from six weeks of watching through the scope, from weeks of being inside me.
“Every Wednesday night through the scope I watched the arc of your arm and I knew where you held that vibrator.” His fingers curve and press and my back lifts completely off the mattress. “Right there. That’s where.”
The first one hits me before I’ve finished deciding whether I’m ready.
He doesn’t stop. His fingers stay inside me, working, and when the aftershocks fade he pulls them out and strips the rest of his clothes and I watch him—this body, the size of him, the scars I’ve been learning one at a time.
The scar on his left side he got in a city he won’t name.
The one on his ribs from a contract that went wrong.
He lifts my legs.
Both of them. His hands behind my knees, pushing them up toward my chest, folding me in half. I’m completely open to him. His eyes drop between my legs and stay there and the way he’s looking at me makes my face burn and my pussy clench at the same time.
“Hold your knees,” he says.
I do. Hands behind my own knees, holding myself open for him, my legs pressed toward my shoulders. Exposed. Everything he can see.
He guides his cock to my entrance and pushes in.