8. Dove
DOVE
Seven months in and I’ve made peace with the sheers.
He helped me hang them. Ivory linen, light enough to let the morning sun through, sheer enough that at night with the light on behind me I’m fully visible to anyone with a scope and an elevated position across the alley.
At night with the light on, I’m exactly where I want to be.
He put the first rod up crooked and I corrected it and he watched me fix it wearing a look I’ve learned to read in months of mornings—the look a man wears when he can field-strip a rifle blindfolded but can’t hang a curtain rod straight and finds this acceptable because the woman correcting him is carrying his baby.
He’s gotten better at being readable, which I suspect took effort, and I appreciate the effort even when I don’t say so.
The scope is still up.
The apartment across the alley is still his—he kept it, he goes there sometimes on the days when I’m at school.
I know because I’ve started checking from my side the way he checks from his: a feeling, an awareness, a sense of being in the frame.
I go to the kitchen window and feel the scope on me and smile into my coffee.
It hasn’t been seven months straight. It’s been six weeks of watching and then more, and I’ve stopped trying to measure where the watching ended and the everything-else began.
I’m seven months along. Significant. The kind of belly that changes how I move through my own apartment—slower, more deliberate, the geography of my body different enough that it surprises me in mirrors sometimes.
I like it. That surprises me too—that I rest my hand on my stomach and feel what’s coming and feel settled.
Like someone rearranged the furniture and it’s actually better and I just needed time to stop noticing the change.
He touches my stomach every night. Flat hand, deliberate, the same attention he gives everything.
He’s been reading about what happens week by week.
He doesn’t announce this. I know because I find the browser tabs open on the laptop I now share with a man who was watching me through a rifle scope and killing people for money when we met.
He doesn’t ask me questions. He reads the weeks and then he adjusts things—the pillow arrangement, the blanket pull, the way he positions himself in the night so I can rest against him without my back aching.
He noticed the back aching before I mentioned it.
The same attention he gave to my schedule and my cycle and Connor Reyes’s apartment address.
He always notices.
The scope caught the glint this morning. Early. I was at the kitchen window with my coffee when I saw it—the angle of early light hitting glass across the alley. The familiar direction. The feeling of being in the frame.
He went there before I woke up. He went there to watch me wake up.
He’s been in this apartment for months and he still goes across the alley to watch me wake up. Because some hungers don’t reduce just because they’re fed.
I know. I leave the curtains open. I put the light on when I come to the kitchen. I stand at the window with my coffee like a woman who knows the scope is on her and wants it there.
I am a kindergarten teacher engaged to a contract killer. That sentence doesn’t get less strange the more times I think it. I’ve stopped trying to make it strange. It just is.
The ring is a month old. He did it in the dark, the way he does everything—his hand finding mine, a band of platinum on my ring finger, I told you soon.
No question. No bent knee. The hands that put the ring on me have done things I will never know the full scope of and I wear it to school and Raquel said who’s the lucky one and I said his name and I smiled and I didn’t explain any of it.
There’s no explanation for any of it. He crossed the alley and he’s been here since and the scope is still up and the door is unlocked and our baby is coming in eight weeks and Connor Reyes is still missing and I wear the ring the man who killed him put on my finger.
It requires what it has, which is me.
I hear him before I see him—his key in the lock, the weight of his footstep I know now the way I know my own. He comes to the kitchen. His hand on my shoulder. His mouth against my temple—the greeting, his version, which has evolved from nothing to this over six months without announcement.
“You were watching me,” I say.
“Yes.”
“From the scope.”
“Yes.”
“At seven in the morning.”
“The light is good at seven.” He comes to stand beside me at the window. Both of us at the window, his building across the alley, the third floor dark. “Are you hungry?”
“I’m always hungry.”
“I’ll make the eggs.”
He moves toward the stove. He’s learned where everything is—my kitchen, my apartment, my life—and he moves through it with the ease of someone who’s been here long enough to stop being careful. He’s not a man who belongs easily in places.
He belongs here. I’ve watched it happen.
I turn from the window and look at him at my stove in my kitchen and I think about the first night: the deadbolt, the chain, my phone in his pocket, the towel.
What I felt when I came out of the bathroom and found him on my bed.
He knew me before I knew he was there. He’d been killing people and watching me for six weeks and the hands scrambling those eggs have held rifles and garrotes and a man’s head underwater.
He’s making eggs. He researched cribs. He made a spreadsheet.
The man who put a bullet through Connor Reyes made a pediatrician spreadsheet.
“Come here,” I say.
He turns from the stove.
“Eggs are going to burn.”
“I’ll make more.” I reach for him and he comes—he comes when I reach, every time—and I put his hand on my stomach. His palm flat. The baby moves, a small internal percussion, and his face does the thing: still, and then not. The stillness cracking just enough to see what’s underneath.
“Eight weeks,” he says.
“Eight weeks.”
He looks at me. The full look, the one I used to only catch as a glint across the alley.
Six months of close range and I’m still not used to the weight of it—the accumulated want that doesn’t reduce.
Six weeks of watching plus six months of having and it’s still there. Having only made the wanting larger.
“Come to bed,” I say.
“It’s eight in the morning.”
“The eggs are burning.”
“The eggs are—“ He turns. They’re not burning yet. He looks back at me. “You’re using the eggs.”
“I’m using the eggs.”
He takes them off the heat. Follows me to the bedroom.
I’ve learned, in six months, to ask for what I want.
Before him I didn’t do that—I managed and accommodated and said sure when I meant something else.
Now I lie on my side in the sheer curtain light and I tell him what I want and he gives it.
He gives exactly what I ask for and more, because he’s been watching long enough to know before I finish asking.
He moves behind me—this is what works now, seven months: his body along mine, his arm under me, his mouth at my neck. He pushes his cock into me from behind, slow, and I’m already wet—I wake up wet most mornings now, have been for months, something that started with him and hasn’t stopped.
“Good,” he says against my ear when he feels how wet I am. “Already.”
“It’s you,” I say. “It’s always been you.”
He moves. Slow, deliberate. His hand comes around my hip and finds my clit and I grip his wrist and hold it there.
“Don’t stop,” I say.
“Never.”
His mouth at my neck saying my name into my skin. His thumb on my clit working slow circles and his cock moving behind me and his other hand flat on my stomach feeling what’s there—the baby moving, a small percussion, both of us here at eight in the morning in the sheer curtain light.
“I saw the scope glint this morning,” I say.
“Good.” His thumb circles and his cock pushes deeper and I grip his—and hold on. “I was watching you make your coffee. You stand at that window the same way you always have—like you know you’re in the frame and you want to be.”
“I know I’m in the frame.”
“You always have been.” He puts his mouth at my ear.
“I watched you every morning for six weeks through a rifle scope while you had no idea. Now I watch you every morning while you leave the curtains open and the light on and you stand at the window on purpose.” He moves harder.
“You chose this. You put the sheers up. You chose my watching.”
“Yes—“
“Your pussy goes tight when I say that,” he says. “Every time.”
I come with my eyes on the curtains—the ivory sheers, the morning light through them, the alley beyond where the scope is still set up in the dark apartment. His cum warm inside me. His arm around me after, both hands on me now, one on my stomach and one on my hip, holding me close.
“I ordered a crib,” he says. “It comes Thursday.”
“What kind?”
“The kind with the adjustable mattress height. And the side that converts.”
I turn my head to look at him over my shoulder. He’s looking at me the way he looks through the scope—same attention, same want, except no glass between us.
“You researched cribs,” I say.
“Thoroughly.”
“When?”
“The morning after the test. You were asleep.” He tucks me closer. “I made a spreadsheet.”
“Of cribs.”
“Of cribs. And pediatricians within walking distance. The maternal care unit at General has a better outcome record than St. Michael’s, in case you haven’t chosen yet.”
I face front again. The sheer curtains. The morning light. The glint of the scope across the alley that I can’t see from this angle but know is there.
“I walked into this,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Not just Friday. All of it.” The first curtains pulled all the way back.
The note: WATCH ME TONIGHT. The door I stopped chaining.
Connor’s empty classroom and the police tape across the alley and the night I found out and came back and let him fuck me on the kitchen floor anyway. “Every part of it.”
“And you stayed.”
He doesn’t answer because he doesn’t have to.
The crib research and the pediatricians and the spreadsheet are the answer.
The scope across the alley is the answer.
The sheer curtains I chose and the ring on my finger and the baby eight weeks away and the plain ordinary Wednesday morning of it—him at my stove making eggs while the scope watches my window—all of it is the answer.
A contract killer watched me through a rifle scope for six weeks.
Broke into my apartment. Stole my underwear.
Listened to me come through a wall. Crossed the alley and put his hands on me and I’ve been letting him back in every night since.
He killed a man for texting me. He tracked my cycle and put a baby in me and put a ring on my finger and he is making me eggs at eight in the morning and I chose every single piece of this.
I knew what he was. I knew what the scope meant and what the notebook meant and what Connor’s empty classroom meant. I knew and I held up a note that said WATCH ME TONIGHT and I ordered sheer curtains and I stopped locking the door.
The woman who did all of that is the woman I am. I’m done pretending she’s a version of me I don’t recognize. She’s the only version.
“Watch me tonight,” I say.
“Always,” he says.
He pulls me closer. Outside, the light shifts. The curtains let it through.
The scope is still up.
It always will be.