Work Text:
I don’t know who you are, but based on the few hours I watched you from my bedroom window, I will know you.
I don’t know why you chose this neighborhood. The house across from mine is a typical ranch style brick. It doesn’t suit you. You are color and life and I haven’t seen your smile fade once since the day began. I could see you in something old and historic, something with stories underneath the ornate wallpaper and rustic frame, but not this plain, suburban cookie cutter crap built after you were born. You are a breath of fresh air in this dull little cul-de-sac, and I am breathing for the first time in a long time.
You wear typical 90s moving day attire. Your hair is pinned up, and I’m already imagining the easy access of those stone washed overalls. Your bare hip peeks underneath your white shirt, and I know I’m already done for.
The furniture is fine. It’s typical cherry wood and dark oak type and fits some comfortable monetary place between IKEA and Ashley furniture. You’re not one for trends but for tradition, and I already know you won’t be one of those Instagram whores with their white and gray kitchens. Your cabinets will remain brown, and you’ll decorate them with warm colors. I’m already seeing oranges and golds being brought in on your throw pillows. You seek comfort, not cleanliness. Thank God. If I see another white kitchen I’m going to scream at the grass.
Because I know you will ask when I invite myself over, let me say now, you don’t want to get to know the rest of the neighborhood. I’ll spare you from them. The neighbors are friendly enough, if artificially. They invite me to their barbeques and their kid’s birthday parties and I’m not so used to the suburban thing after life in the buzz and vivacity of New York. The South is a complex melting pot. They brag about their five figure jobs and complain about the laziness of fast-food workers and immigrants while simultaneously preaching about love and acceptance from the Word of God. And of course, like every other small town in Rockwell’s America, meth is a staple, but no love and acceptance is gifted to zombies. Southerners are both kind and unkind, and I can’t stomach most of them, but damn, if their food isn’t some of the best shit I’ve ever tasted.
Are you a cook? I assume someone in your little family is. You and the fellow with you bring in crockpots and pans and fryers. Someone in the house is a coffee drinker with that Keurig and espresso machine and basic Mr. Coffee. You’ll probably set up an entire coffee bar on its own little counter with all the bells and whistles, won’t you? It’s cute, and I know there’s a good chance you don’t take your coffee seriously. You love color and probably love flavor as well. Half of your fridge will be various Coffee Mate flavors, and you’ll set your bar up with Torani syrups for your own Starbucks-at-home experience. Normally, I would write you off for this offense, but somehow, it’s endearing with you.
Will your kitchen be white? I’ve seen the neighbor’s kitchens. The wives have all decorated the exact same way, as if they all follow the same ten home decorating boards on Pinterest. Their plainness suits them. But plainness doesn’t suit you. You are a shimmering rainbow and my God why are you here in this sad Southern neighborhood with the brick ranch and sun-burnt Hostas lining the front porch and the Pampas grass along the sides and the overworked, overstimulated man barking orders at you from the open garage?
You met him early in life, clearly, and you’ve clung to him because he is the only person in your whole world, but you neglect to see how utterly breathtaking and resplendent you are next to his working man’s hands. I can see the ash of his calluses as clear as day from my window, and he touches you with those hands? No, no. You deserve nothing less than Curly’s hand in a Vaseline filled glove. You are soft and deserve only softness. I could give you that softness, right before I’m plowing into your softest spots. You laugh at something he says, and I can only imagine what your orgasm sounds like.
I don’t see how you ended up with him. You are loyal and committed to this relationship. You smile at him while he frowns at everything else around him. You see only him and the start of your new life together, and he sees work. Fuck that guy. After watching you work, I vow to make you mine.
“I’m making enchiladas for dinner.”
Christ on a cracker, how long has she been here in the bedroom?
“Great. Do I need to go pick up anything from the store?”
I’m a dutiful husband. I offer to do things when I never want to. I’m better than him as he snaps at you carrying the other end of a sofa. You are patient and wait as he tells you to ‘fucking pivot’ like he’s Ross Geller and you’re nothing more than a spoiling rat in the apartment hallway.
“Not necessary,” she says. She pops up over my shoulder and peers down at you through the window. “What are you looking at?”
I gesture with my glass of bourbon. Shit’s awful, but if you drink anything else in this neighborhood, the folks come for your neck in the middle of the night. “New neighbors. Getting an idea what kind of stuff they’re into. He brought in golf clubs, but they look too new.”
She laughs, light, airheaded. “Stalker.”
This isn’t stalking. This is researching.
“Should we invite them over for dinner?” she asks.
Yes. But not yet. “Let them settle in first. They’ve been at it all day and it’s just the two of them. They’ll probably be exhausted.”
“This weekend then.” She plants a chaste kiss on the back of my shoulder and leaves. A flourish of lavender scented lotion is left in her wake, and I wrinkle my nose.
She used to be you. After Beck, she came along and for a moment made life feel normal again. She was simple and easy. She was corn flakes for breakfast. She didn’t make me crazy. It felt easier to simply exist beside someone without too much expectation. Her predictability made my day to day predictable, down to the gray cabinets and white countertops in our kitchen. She was no red ladle waiting to be spanked by Daddy.
Was I ever in love with her? I think we had the kind of love I shared with Karen Minty. It was good, but there was nothing to rock the boat, and Karen Minty wasn’t Beck, and she isn’t you.
I could love you. I see that, watching from my window, hiding behind white blackout curtains and hidden bodies in the proverbial floorboards. I could make you mine, and I wouldn’t just be on the other side of the sofa bringing it inside. I would be hiring movers to do the work for you, and then fucking you on that sofa once they had left. I wouldn’t yell at you from the garage. I would be the reason you screamed in the dark, and then I would make you a better cup of coffee afterward than what that first generation Keurig could ever make. We would order Chinese takeout, and I would suck the duck sauce from your chopsticks without a fuck to give if it was bad luck or not, because if we were together, there would be no such thing as bad luck anymore.
He's yelling again. No, not at you, but his anger holds an orbit, and you are sucked into it whether you actively avoid it or not. You’re confused. You shake your head. God, how does this pissant not have a heart attack right now? His blood pressure is approaching a phone number, it has so many digits. You’re trying to calm him down. I can almost hear your voice singing through the glass and I imagine the way you say ‘I love you’ in the dark is the equivalent to hearing the hosts of heaven in a near death experience.
I hope you’re not the religious type, but if you are, you’d better fucking believe I would be memorizing every NIV, KJV, ESV, NASB, Message, and Apocrypha in the world to fully understand you and I will sit in the front pew of every service with you beside me. But religion is far from my mind as I watch him throw a plastic jerrycan into the garage with the emotions of someone who just found out his favorite football team lost his previous paycheck. What a prick.
I can’t stand here all day. I’ve already spent hours in this spot unmoving and I know if any of the other friendly neighbors were to glance out their windows and notice me, I wouldn’t have a good answer for what I’m doing. Married men look at other women sunbathe. Married men don’t watch other women sweat and move boxes for hours. I can’t let them come between us. Not when I haven’t had the chance to formally introduce myself.
I return to the hospital white and gray kitchen downstairs and wash my glass in the sink. I’m a dutiful husband, after all, and dutiful husbands keep things clean when they can. Happy wife, happy life. I want to keep her happy because I know something about an unhappy everythingship, and I can’t afford to force feed anymore books down someone’s throat.
I will be dutiful to you, whoever you are. I will be more than dutiful. You will be my Queen, and I won’t be just your King. I will be your thrall and the ottoman under your feet and the sparkly purple vibrator in your bedside table and no task will ever be too humiliating to worship you the way you deserve to be worshipped. Fuck me, I’m rock hard and I can’t be rock hard as a dutiful husband. I run through some bullshit Breatharian breathing exercise Beck taught me many lifetimes ago and hate that it actually works.
She’s set out a frozen package of beef tips, and I already know it will take hours for them to be ready in time for dinner. The frustration of having the Instagram wife is that the tradwifery is almost always for show, and it shows in this white and gray kitchen she insisted on decorating and it shows in her failure to attend any of the cooking lessons I signed her up for on her birthday.
You cook. I know it’s you and not him. Your appliances are old and worn, as if they were hand-me-downs or garage sale finds, and you love them to death and love on them with the thousands of meals you’ve prepared in your lifetime. I remember seeing very used, very loved cast iron skillets being brought in through the garage. Nothing in your kitchen matches because it’s not about the appearance but the love that shows in the dishes you meticulously prepare. A cottagecore gem lost in the suburban Southeast.
These beef tips mock me. I pop them in the microwave defrost and don’t care that it will breed bacteria or dry them out or make them lose taste because honestly, everything in this whole house lacks taste and it’s causing me a small death every time I fucking breathe. If she insisted on cooking tonight, the least she could have done was put the beef tips in the refrigerator last night. I don’t know much about cooking but what little I learned for Beck, but it was enough to know everything my other half does is a travesty to food everywhere. The Southerners are rolling in their graves before they’ve laid in them.
He doesn’t cook. I can bet my left nut he can barely boil water without looking at a recipe. But what does he do? Not golf, that’s for damn sure. Not love you proper, the way you deserve, and I am certain of that more than the golf thing. He must have something that occupies his time. His truck is shiny and undamaged, despite it being a work truck, so he likes the look of urban country. His hands are callused but nothing in the garage or coming off the moving truck indicated any hobby. I saw a toolbox, but it was unopened.
How could you fall for someone so obviously uninteresting?
You rely on him. Something happened in your life to cause this dependency because a woman with her ducks in a row would not fall into these hands unless they were the only hands to catch her.
I could be your safety net. I will be your safety net.
Still rock hard. My dutiful husband duties do not include some romp around the fucking white kitchen with my dick at full salute. It needs to make itself scarce or not-Karen Minty upstairs is going to come down and think it’s all for her.
The bathroom sink is running, thank the Southern gods, and I am in the living room window faster than a married man’s quick jerk. The room remains dark, and I watch you from behind the curtains, you delicate, beautiful, supple thing, prancing around like fucking Bambi all over your new lawn in the overalls with gaps in the sides, and my palm sprints down my cock in quick pumps. The prick pulls you into a reluctant kiss and a squeeze of the inside of your asscheek, as if to tell the world and any neighbors watching that you are his. I laugh right through my climax and shoot my load into a Kleenex from the nearby table.
God, that felt right, but it was such a waste to not unload it inside those asscheeks. I want to paint the walls of your cunt until you’re spilling all over that couch our movers just finished moving in, but dutiful husband duties demand I now make the evidence of my ejaculation scarce. My cock is softening but not fast enough to avoid her emerging around the corner. The kitchen island is my only haven as I hide behind it.
“Not fast enough for you?” she asks.
Too fast. She’s too fucking fast because one moment I hear the sink running and the next she’s standing in front of me and I never even got to experience the golden glow of my sage moment. It takes far too long for me to see she’s nodding at the microwave. The fucking beef tips.
“Thought I would give you a hand,” I offer.
“I didn’t need the help but thanks anyway. I know you said not to disturb the new neighbors but go invite them over for a drink. They’re going to need it.” She glances at my hand. “Coming down with something?”
The balled-up Kleenex sits in my fist. I ball it further and shove it down into my clenched fingers. “Spider. I know how you hate them.”
She grimaces and thanks me with all the displeasure in the world, then leaves. My sage moment finally hits me. God, it feels wonderful to pump into you in my imagination. There is no sage moment, there is no regret. It’s all I envision now, and I’m expected to go across the road to speak to you and invite you over like we didn’t just commit the most heinous violations in my head over the course of twenty seconds? You dirty thing. I like that I can humiliate you into a shaking mess and you come out unbothered. Maybe I should buy a red ladle for you, too.
Dutiful husband. Dutiful husband. Dutiful husband.
My dick is finally soft, but I know all it will take is one look at that ample ass bounded up tight in those overalls and I will be a goner again. I repeat another Breatharian exercise, ignoring that I can hear Beck chanting some nonsense to me in the recesses of my memory, and open the front door.
Overalls. Color. Light. And a single fist raised, ready to knock on my own front door. Your mouth drops in surprise, and I want to stuff my cock into the perfect little ‘O’ it forms on your face.
“Oh, hi! Sorry to bother you, but I’m new to the neighborhood,” you say. “I wanted to introduce myself and ask if you and your family would like to come over and have a drink with us?”
You truly are a breath of fresh air, and no Breatharian shit is going to help me breathe better than your presence alone. A drink. Absolutely. And I forget to say it out loud.
“Of course, hi. Yeah, to tell the truth, I was just about to come on over to invite you to the same.”
You smile big, and your teeth dazzle me back into my imagination where you are sucking me dry, and those same teeth are scraping dangerously along my shaft. You extend a hand. I take it. Your skin is butter, and I am a hot knife, devouring every inch.
You give me your name, and I’m already cumming to the sound of it in the middle of the night, over, and over, and over. I smile back.
“Nice to meet you, new neighbor. You can call me Will.”