Chapter 1: The Neighbor With The Translucent Secret
The last box hit the floor of the living room with a heavy thud, and Bella straightened up, pressing her palms to the small of her back. Her tank top clung to her ribs, damp between her shoulder blades, and the cotton had ridden up so the underside of her tits showed plainly, twin crescents of tanned flesh bulging out of the cropped hem. Her nipples had been hard since nine that morning, two little pencil-eraser bumps stabbing at the fabric no matter how many times she tugged the shirt down.
"Done," Jon said, dropping the roll of packing tape onto the counter. "Whole house. I'm calling that a workout."
"I'm calling it a sauna," Bella said. "I'm sweating through my shirt."
She caught him looking, that quick flick of his eyes down her chest, and she smiled because she liked being looked at. Two years of surgery and squats and cardio and she still got a little thrill every time a gaze snagged on her chest like a fingernail on silk.
"Water first," Jon said. "Then let's check out the backyard properly. Guy said the pool's shared, right?"
"Shared everything. Pool, hot tub, the little sauna." Bella pulled the fridge open and took out two bottles, pressing one against her cleavage with a happy sigh. "God, that's good."
They carried the bottles through the sliding door and out into the afternoon. The sun sat fat and white directly overhead, and the pool threw broken light across the fence in wobbling stripes. The yard was small and tidy, a strip of clipped grass, the wooden sauna hunkered in the far corner like a garden shed, the hot tub a wide blue ellipse near the pool's edge. No fence down the middle. It was all one space.
A man stood at the pool's shallow end.
He was old, easily sixty, maybe older, a thin wiry Black man with a salt-and-pepper beard and skin gone leathery and dark at the shoulders, deep lines cut around his eyes. He wore a gold signet ring on his pinky and nothing else. Or almost nothing else, and it took Bella a full three seconds to understand what the almost meant.
Around his narrow hips ran a few thin white strings, looped one over another like a bikini tie that had given up. The strings converged at his groin into a single narrow strip of fabric, and the fabric was mesh, sheer white mesh, and it was stretched over something huge. His cock lay inside the little tube of material like a summer sausage in an undersized casing, the mesh pulled so tight it had gone almost transparent, the dark shape of the head pressing against the end of it, the tip visibly pushing at the weave. Below that, a small mesh pouch cradled his balls, and the pouch hung low, swinging gently as he turned toward them, the whole apparatus shifting and settling like it had weight.
Bella stopped walking. Jon stopped a half step behind her.
The old man smiled, white teeth in the dark beard, and raised his bottle of beer in salute.
"Well, hell," he said. "New neighbors. And here I was thinking this move-in day couldn't get any better."
"Hi," Jon said, after a beat. "Jon Brambo. This is my wife, Bella. We just took the unit next door."
"Abdul Hamdan." He didn't come closer and he didn't move away. He didn't cover himself, either. He just stood there, one hand loose at his side, the other holding the beer, his crotch on full display in the gleaming mesh, his eyes going from Bella's face and down, down, and stopping. Staying. "Welcome to the building."
"Thank you," Bella said, and made herself look at his face. His eyes didn't come back up. They stayed right where they were, on her chest, and she felt her nipples twitch under the wet cotton, which was the worst possible time for that to happen.
Jon cleared his throat.
Abdul's eyes came up at last, slow as syrup, and he pointed the beer bottle lazily at her.
"You know," he said, "I've lived here eleven years, and I have never once seen a rack like that walk into this yard. Those things are magnificent. Absolutely magnificent. Like two prize melons on a shelf."
"Abdul," Jon started, and didn't have a second half to the sentence.
"No offense meant, none taken, I hope," Abdul said, waving the bottle. "I'm an old man. Old men say what they see. And I see the best tits in the county standing on my grass in a wet t-shirt, so forgive me if my mouth runs a little."
Bella laughed. It came out of her before she could stop it, a bright little giggle, because it was such a ridiculous thing to say and he said it so comfortably, like he was commenting on the weather. "Thank you," she said, and then heard herself, and laughed again. "I mean. Um."
"Don't you um, sweetheart," Abdul said. "Own it. A body like that, you worked for it. I can tell. Little waist like that, those hips. You do yoga?"
"Yes and Pilates. And I run."
"Run," he repeated, and his eyes went down her body again, unhurried, all the way to her legs, and Bella felt the look move over her skin like warm water. "You could run right over me and I'd thank you for it."
Jon shifted his weight. "So, uh. The pool. Is it heated?"
Abdul ignored the question entirely. He took a slow pull of his beer and tilted his head at Bella's chest.
"Those nipples," he said. "They've been poking at that shirt since you came out the door. You cold, or is that just how they sit?"
Bella's cheeks went hot. "They just, they always do that. Since my last surgery they kind of, they point."
"Surgery," Abdul said, delighted. He set his beer down on the pool coping and put both hands on his hips, which had the effect of pushing his crotch forward, the mesh tube jutting out over the water. "Well, good for you. A woman who invests in herself. How big are we talking? And don't be shy, I'm asking out of scientific interest."
"Abdul," Jon said again, stronger this time.
"I'm 38F," Bella said, and blinked, because she hadn't decided to say it, her mouth had just done it on its own, the way it did when a compliment was hanging in the air. "Well, F-ish. They measure me different at every store."
"38F," Abdul breathed out, reverent. He looked at her chest the way men look at championship boxing. "Lord have mercy. And you're what, a hundred pounds soaking wet? You're carrying half your body weight in your chest, girl. That's architecture. That's engineering."
"It's implants," Bella said, tucking a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. "Three sets. I keep going bigger."
"Bigger," Abdul said. "Sweetheart, there's no bigger. That's the finish line. Anything past that and they'd have to wheel you around on a cart." He picked his beer back up and gestured with it toward the hot tub, the mesh at his crotch swinging with the motion. "Now. Business. That hot tub seats four, all jets working, I keep it clean myself. You two come and soak anytime. I mean that. Anytime. Be a shame to have a yard like this and neighbors who stay indoors."
"Maybe," Jon said. "We've got a lot of unpacking."
"Unpacking can wait. Skin can't." Abdul's eyes were back on Bella's nipples, which showed no sign of softening, two blunt little points tenting the damp cotton outward. He studied them openly, no attempt at subtlety, and then he lifted his gaze to her face and grinned. "You know what, I like her, Jon. She's polite. You married a polite girl with a porn star's chest and brought her to live twenty feet from me. I'm a lucky old man."
"What," Jon said, "exactly, are you wearing?"
Abdul looked down at himself, seemed almost surprised to remember, then back up, entirely unbothered.
"This? It's a cock sock." He said it flat and matter-of-fact, like naming a tool. "Sheer mesh. Strings hold it up. Traditional in some places, modern in others, in mine it's just common sense. I'm not going to squeeze all this into a pair of swim trunks, am I? Trunks are for boys. This is a man's arrangement." He shifted his weight and the whole contraption swayed, the dark weight inside the mesh rolling, the pouch of his balls lifting and dropping. "Besides, the material breathes. Cotton, you'd cook."
"It's, it doesn't really, cover," Bella said, and then pressed her lips together.
"Cover," Abdul said, chuckling. "It presents. There's a difference. Look, I'm sixty-eight years old. I've earned the right to be comfortable in my own yard. If a man my age can't stand in the sun with his business arranged and a beer in his hand, what was it all for?" He spread his free hand, gold ring catching the light. "You'll get used to it. Everyone does. The last family, the wife used to sunbathe right there on that lounger, and by August we were sharing cold cuts and gossip like church ladies."
Jon's jaw worked. He looked at Bella. Bella looked at the mesh, at the enormous shape inside it, and couldn't figure out for the life of her how a man that thin carried something that size, the tube alone as long as her forearm, the head a blunt dark weight pressed against the end of the weave like it was trying to get out. It hung and jutted at the same time, half of it pointing straight out and the rest curving downward under its own mass, and the skin around it, glimpsed clearly through the sheer fabric, was a deep umber shading into purple at the crown.
She realized she'd been staring. She dragged her eyes up. Abdul was grinning at her like he'd caught a fish.
"It's fine," she said quickly. "It's your yard too. We just didn't, we didn't know that was, um. A thing."
"It's a thing," Abdul agreed solemnly.
"The sauna too," Jon said, grasping for anything. "You use the sauna?"
"Every evening. Eight o'clock, like clockwork. Naked, of course, it's a sauna." Abdul drained his beer and set the empty bottle upside down on the pool coping. "You're both invited. Bring towels. And sweetheart," and here his voice dropped a register, warm and slow, "bring that bathing suit you were telling me about. Or don't. I told you already, I'd enjoy either."
"I didn't tell you about a bathing suit," Bella said.
"You didn't have to. A girl built like you owns a bikini, guaranteed. Probably can't keep it on." He winked at her, slow and heavy-lidded. "Well. I'll leave you to your boxes. I'm going in, my shoulders are burning." And he turned, stepped to the pool ladder, and went down into the water, and as he went the mesh sock climbed with him, strings riding up his bony hips, and then he was in to his chest and the whole arrangement floated up behind him, blooming in the water like a pale jellyfish, and he paddled it back into place without a flicker of embarrassment and began, leisurely, to do a slow breaststroke across the turquoise water.
Bella and Jon stood there a moment longer. Then Bella turned and walked back through the sliding door, her heels clicking on the tile, and Jon followed and shut the door behind them.
They stood in the kitchen in the sudden quiet, the AC humming, and looked at each other.
"So," Jon said.
"So."
"That was."
"Yep," Bella said.
Jon ran a hand through his short hair. "Okay. Okay. Let me just, okay." He leaned against the counter. "Our neighbor wears a mesh, um."
"Cock sock," Bella said. "He told us what it's called. Twice."
"He told us what it's called." Jon stared at the ceiling. "And it does not, it doesn't actually conceal anything. It's basically, it's window dressing."
"It's a display case," Bella said, and then clapped her hand over her mouth, and giggled through her fingers. "Oh my god, Jon, I said that out loud."
Jon laughed too, helpless, the laugh of a man whose brain is trying to file something and failing. "It's just, the size of it. Is that, is that normal? Can a person, is that real? It looked like a pool noodle in a produce bag."
"I don't know! I wasn't, I only looked a little."
"You looked a lot."
"I looked a normal amount," Bella said, flushing. "He was right there. It was right there. It's very, present." She pulled at the hem of her tank top, which was useless, which was always useless. "He said it's cultural. Maybe it's a cultural thing out here. People said this neighborhood was, you know, colorful."
"Colorful," Jon said. "Sure. The man told you your tits were architecture, Bella."
"I know." She turned to the window. Out in the yard Abdul had reached the far end of the pool and hung on the wall there, bearded face tipped back into the sun, and even through the glass she could see the pale mesh floating at the surface behind him. She should look away. She looked. "He was very complimentary."
"He was ogling you. Openly. For ten straight minutes."
"I know." She chewed her lip. "It's not, I mean, he's not scary about it. He's just, bold. Old guys get bold. My grandma's friend Earl pinched everyone at Thanksgiving and nobody says anything." She turned around, hands on her hips. "Are you mad? You sound a little mad."
Jon thought about it honestly, which took a moment.
"No," he admitted. "Not mad. Weirded out. Mostly I keep thinking, how does a seventy-year-old man, physically, how does that even." He gestured vaguely at his own crotch. "He's skinny as a coat rack, Bella. Where is it all coming from."
"I don't know, and you're not going to ask him."
"I'm not going to ask him," Jon agreed. "But somebody should. For science."
Bella laughed and came over and put her arms around his neck, and her tits pressed against his chest the way they pressed against everything, firm and unyielding, two cantaloupes shoved between them. "It's fine," she said. "He's harmless. He's like a dirty old uncle. We'll be nice to him and maybe he'll water the plants when we travel."
"Maybe he'll teach the sauna at eight o'clock stark naked," Jon said. "He invited us, by the way. Hot tub. Sauna. Quote, anytime."
"I heard." She pulled back and looked at him, and there was a little spark in her eyes that Jon knew from her gym selfies and her bikini shopping and every other mildly vain enterprise of her life. "Would it be so bad? The hot tub looked really nice."
"Bella."
"What! With our swimsuits on. With plenty of swimsuits on." She was smiling now, full and bright, and her nipples were still hard under the tank top and showed no interest in stopping. "He's just an old man, Jon. What's he going to do?"
Out in the yard, Abdul floated on his back in the deep end, arms spread, the great pale sack of the mesh sock riding the surface of the water beside him like a companion, and his eyes were closed and his face wore the expression of a man who has everything he wants.
Back inside, Jon looked at his wife, at the gleam in her eye, and had the distant, formless feeling of a man who has just set a glass at the edge of a counter.
"One soak," Bella said. "We'll try it once. What's the worst that could happen?"
Three days later, the living room was a maze of half-crushed cardboard, and Bella was elbow-deep in a box marked KITCHEN MISC when the doorbell went.
She answered it in her sports bra and shorts, because the AC was out and because she'd stopped overthinking it. Abdul stood on the step holding a paper bag of figs, wearing the strings and the mesh and nothing else, his cock swaying gently inside its pale tube as he shifted his weight.
"I brought fruit," he said. "You looked like a woman who lives on celery."
"Hi, Abdul," Bella said, and stepped aside, because what else did one do. "I'm just unpacking."
"Good. I'll watch."
And he did. He settled onto her new couch like he'd bought it, crossed his ankles, and held his figs in his lap while Bella bent over box after box. She could feel the stare on her ass every time she leaned forward, a physical thing, like a sunlamp. The mesh at his crotch shifted and rolled when he adjusted himself, and she heard it, a faint whisper of fabric, every time.
"You bend over like that on purpose," he said around a mouthful of fig.
"I'm reaching the bottom of a box, Abdul."
"Mm. Reach slower."
She laughed. She always laughed. That was the problem with him, she'd decided, he was funny, and he was filthy, and the two had fused somewhere in his sixty-eight years into a single unbothered creature. She squatted to lift a stack of plates and her shorts pulled tight across her ass, and he made a low sound, a hum of appreciation, like a man at a tasting.
"That is the finest ass on this street," he said. "Firm as a drum. You know what I'd do with a week and a case of oil?"
"You'd do nothing, because I'm married."
"Married," he said, waving the fig. "I heard you the first time, sweetheart. I'm not proposing. I'm just saying what I see. There's a difference between wanting and saying, and only one of them is illegal."
"That's not even true."
"It is in my culture." He stood, and the tube swung heavily under him, the dark weight of his cock rolling left and then right inside the mesh, and he wandered over to look at her bookshelf with his genitals leading him by a full step. "This one's heavy," he said, tapping a box with his foot. "Let an old man."
He picked it up, straining slightly, and she watched the muscles cord in his skinny arms and watched, she admitted to herself later, the pouch of his balls shift and settle as he moved. It was becoming background noise. Like a fridge hum. An enormous, swaying, obscene fridge hum.
"So the hot tub," he said, setting the box down. "Thursday evening. I'm thinking eight. You in that little pink bikini, me in my sock, the steam, the jets on your neck. I'd die a happy man."
"You'd die a married-woman's-neighbor man, and that's all."
"At my age, sweetheart, I take what room is offered."
The front door opened at four-thirty, and Jon came in with his tie already loosened, and the first thing he heard from the hallway was Abdul's voice, carrying the way old men's voices do.
"And those nipples, I'm telling you, they could cut glass. All natural, you said? After all that silicone?"
"They do their own thing," Bella's voice said, laughing.
Jon walked into the living room and stopped. His wife was crouched over a box in a sports bra. His sixty-eight-year-old neighbor was standing over her in a sheer mesh cock sock, holding a fig.
"How's it going, Bella?"
She startled, actually jumped, a plate clacking inside its bubble wrap. "Jon! Hey! Hi. Great, almost done unpacking." She stood too fast and her tits bounced, heavy and rigid, and Abdul's eyes tracked the motion like a cat at a window.
"Hey, Jon," Abdul said warmly. "Good day at the office?"
"Why is Abdul over?"
"He's been here a few hours, just chatting. He brought figs."
Jon looked at the figs. He looked at the mesh. "In that."
"It's all he wears," Bella said, as if reading from the lease. "It's his whole wardrobe, basically. The strings and the sock. He says trunks are for boys."
"It's a man's arrangement," Abdul confirmed. "Jon, your wife has the finest body I have seen in eleven years in this building, and I include the year Sherry the roller derby girl lived downstairs. I hope you appreciate what you're feeding every night."
"I do, thanks," Jon said, in the flat tone of a man saying I do at a hostage wedding. He rubbed the back of his neck. He looked at Bella, bent and happy in her box, cheeks pink, nipples like rivets through the sports bra. She didn't look trapped. She looked, if anything, entertained. He exhaled through his nose. "You two want drinks? I'm getting drinks."
"Diet Coke with ice," Bella called after him.
"Beer, if it's cold," Abdul said. "And a fig for the lady. She's pretending she doesn't like them but she's had four."
Jon went to the kitchen and stood at the fridge longer than the fridge required. Then he came back with two glasses and a bottle, and Abdul had reseated himself on the couch, and Bella had gone back to the box, and the whole scene had a domestic quality that Jon found more unsettling than anything else about it. He handed out the drinks. He sat down in his own chair. He turned on the TV and put on a ballgame.
Abdul watched half an inning with him. Then he stood, slow, joints cracking, and the great tube swung out and settled against his thigh with an audible weight of flesh.
"Bella. Come here a second."
She came over, wiping her hands on her shorts.
Abdul looked up at her from the couch, from her knees to her face, unhurried, a man reading a favorite page. "That chest," he said. "I want you to know I'm going to think about it tonight. Respectfully. Like art. Like the Venus de Milo, if the Venus had gotten the good work done."
"Thank you, Abdul," Bella said.
"Two hundred pounds of pressure in those jets, sweetheart, and not one of them does what those nipples do. Thursday. Hot tub. Think about it." He patted her arm, actually patted it, avuncular, and then he shuffled to the door with his cock swaying like a pendulum and let himself out, calling back, "Figs are in the fridge, keep the bag."
The door clicked. The ballgame murmur filled the room. Bella turned around and looked at Jon, and Jon looked at Bella, and neither of them said anything for a moment.
"So," Jon said. "Figs."
"He brought figs," she said, in her own defense.
"He sat on our couch. In that. For hours. Watching you bend over."
"I know."
"His sock was right there, Bella. On the cushion. Where I put my feet."
"It's machine washable, he says."
Jon muted the TV. "And the talking. I heard the talking from the hallway. My nipples, cut glass. He talks about your tits like, like a, I don't even have the word."
"A work of art?" Bella offered, and there it was again, that little spark, the vain gleam, the pleasure she took in being seen and couldn't switch off. She dropped onto the couch next to him and her thigh touched his. "He's crude. He's really crude. But he's harmless, Jon. He's like a dirty painting that learned to walk."
"He invited you to the hot tub. Thursday. Eight o'clock."
"He invites me every time he breathes. He invited me to the sauna. He invited me to think about him respectfully tonight, which, honestly, is the nicest compliment I've gotten since we moved here, and that's including you."
Jon turned his head slowly. "Including me."
"You said my tits were architecture one time. Once. In two years. He said it four times in three hours and he compared them to championship boxing and the Venus de Milo."
"Venus de Milo has no arms, Bella."
"She also has small tits, Jon, that's the point, he upgraded her in the fantasy. That's flattering." She kicked her sneakers off and tucked her feet under her, and the sports bra rode up and the undersides of her breasts spilled out of it, tanned and heavy, and she didn't fix it. "Anyway, his cock was swaying around my kitchen all afternoon and I just, I unpacked around it. Like a statue. We have a statue in the living room now."
Jon stared at her. "You've named it a statue."
"It's a normal thing here," she said. "It has to be a normal thing here, because he's lived here eleven years and nobody's called the police, so it's normal, and once it's normal it doesn't have to be weird, and once it's not weird, it's actually kind of, it's fine. It's fine." She was talking faster. "It's kind of interesting, honestly. I've never seen one that big in person. You haven't either. It's like a zebra in your yard. You don't get upset about the zebra, you tell people about the zebra."
"I'm not telling people about his cock, Bella."
"I'm telling Dana tomorrow."
"You're not telling Dana."
"I'm absolutely telling Dana."
Jon groaned and put his head back on the chair, and she laughed and crawled half into his lap, and her tits pressed against his chest, and something in him that had spent the whole drive home tense let go, because she was his, and she smelled like cardboard and sunscreen, and her nipples were hard against him for reasons that had nothing to do with an old man's mesh.
"Take me to bed," she said. "I unpacked nine boxes today. I earned it."
In the bedroom she peeled the sports bra off over her head, and her tits came free with that heavy rigid drop, sitting high and round on her chest, the small pink areolas tight, the nipples jutting straight out and slightly outward like they always did, pointing at him. She shimmied out of the shorts and the thong in one motion and stood there in the lamplight, 105 pounds of surgery and squats, and Jon was already hard.
"God, look at you," he said, pulling his shirt off.
"I know," she said, agreeable, vain, climbing onto the bed. "You look too."
He looked. She lay back against the pillows and spread her legs without shyness, because she liked being looked at, and her pussy was smooth and pink and already a little wet, the lips plump, and above it her flat tanned stomach drew up to those impossible tits. He knelt between her thighs and put his mouth on her, and she gasped, and her hand went into his hair.
"Oh, that's, yes, right there."
He worked his tongue over her clit in slow flat strokes, then circled it, then sucked it into his mouth, and she bucked, her heels digging into the mattress. Her tits didn't jiggle, they moved as a unit, swaying heavily side to side with each twitch of her hips, two firm cantaloupes rolling on her chest. He slid two fingers into her and she was tight, always tight, gripping him, and she moaned loud and unembarrassed.
"Jon, oh my god, don't stop, don't stop."
He didn't stop. He flicked his tongue fast over her clit while his fingers curled against the front wall of her pussy, and she came in under a minute, crying out, her back arching, her whole rigid chest thrusting at the ceiling, and he felt her clench around his fingers again and again.
When she sagged back, flushed and glassy-eyed, he wiped his mouth and climbed up over her. She grabbed his cock through his shorts.
"Get these off," she said. "Get in me."
He shoved the shorts down and she pulled her knees up, and he pushed into her, slow, and her pussy took him inch by inch, hot and slick and gripping, and she made a sound low in her throat.
"God, you're so tight," he said.
"You make me so wet."
He started moving, long strokes, and she wrapped her legs around his back and her tits pressed and rolled between them, and he dropped his head and took one hard nipple in his mouth, sucking, and she yelped and dug her nails into his shoulders. He fucked her harder, the bed knocking the wall, her ass bouncing off the mattress with each stroke, that firm little butt she'd built on the yoga mat slapping down over and over.
"Harder," she said. "Harder, Jon, I'm, yes, yes, oh my god."
She came a second time with her legs shaking, clamping around him, and the clutch of her pussy pulled him over the edge, and he drove deep and came inside her, pulsing, groaning into her neck. They lay there breathing, sweaty and tangled, her hand idly stroking his hair.
After a while she said, "So Thursday."
Jon, half asleep against her shoulder, made a noise.
"The hot tub. I told him maybe."
"You told him maybe?"
"I told him we'd think about it. Together. As a married unit." She turned her head and looked at him, blonde hair across the pillow, nipples still hard, a small smug smile on her face. "It does look really nice, Jon. And he keeps it clean himself."
Jon looked at the ceiling. Somewhere across the wall, faintly, he thought he heard the low murmur of the old man's TV, and the creak of a lounger taking weight, and the soft slap of water as someone settled into the pool in the dark.
"We'd wear swimsuits," Bella said. "Plenty of swimsuits."
Jon closed his eyes. "We'll see."
Jon came home at five-fifteen the next day with his tie already off and slung over his shoulder. The front door was unlocked. That was the first wrong thing. The second wrong thing was the sound from the living room, Abdul's voice, warm and unhurried, going on about shelving.
He walked in and there it was again. His living room. His wife. And Abdul, on the couch for the second time in two days, in the strings and the mesh, a fresh bag of grapes in his lap, watching Bella reach into a box marked OFFICE.
She had on a white cotton tank top today, thin, no bra, and her nipples stood out through it like two thumbs pushed against the fabric. Every time she leaned forward the tank hung away from her chest and you could see straight down to her navel, the deep shadowed channel between her tits, the gold chain swinging in it.
"There he is," Abdul said, not moving. "Jon. Your wife was just telling me you got a great deal on the bookshelves."
"We did," Jon said. "Why are you here?"
"I brought grapes." He held up the bag. "She's been showing me the house. Slowly. Very slowly." His eyes were fixed on the front of Bella's tank and did not rise once during the sentence.
Bella straightened up with a stack of picture frames in her arms. "He's helping, kind of. He supervised."
"I supervised," Abdul agreed. "Jon, come here, sit down, I want to talk to you both about something. A household matter."
Jon stayed standing by the door. "What household matter?"
Abdul set the grapes on the coffee table. He leaned back, and the mesh tube lifted and settled against his stomach, the dark shape inside it thickening visibly at the tip, the fabric at the end denting inward under the pressure of the head.
"It's come to my attention," Abdul said, "that your wife walks around this house in shirts like that all day. Thin little thing she's got on right now. And I've been sitting here twenty minutes, and those nipples have not gone down one time. Not once. It's a hot day, Jon, she's sweating, and she's wringing that shirt out with her chest." He turned to Bella. "Sweetheart. In this heat, in front of my big cock here, you should really be at least topless. It's only decent. Take your top off."
The room went quiet. The AC ticked. Bella stood there holding the picture frames, and her mouth opened, and nothing came out of it, and Jon watched a flush climb her throat and spread over her chest, pink flooding up between the tops of her tits.
"Take it off for Abdul," Abdul said, gentle, reasonable, like a man suggesting she open a window. "Show me them tits. I've been polite about it. I've complimented them for two days. Let me see what I've been complimenting. One shirt, sweetheart. That's all I'm asking."
"Abdul," Bella said. Her voice came out small.
"What the hell, man." Jon's keys hit the floor. He crossed the room in three steps. "Get up. Get off my couch. What is wrong with you?"
Abdul turned his head, unhurried, and looked at Jon properly for the first time. His eyes were half-lidded, deep-set, wet.
"Oh," he said. "Sorry. Didn't see you there." He said it exactly the way a man says it when he's bumped into someone at a buffet. Then he turned back to Bella as if nothing had happened at all. "Anyways. How about it. Take your top off for Abdul and show me them tits."
Abdul before Bella can respond. "Show me them, Bella."
Bella set the picture frames down on the box. Slowly. Her hands were shaking a little. She crossed her arms under her chest, which pushed her tits up and together until they were two hard spheres stacked on her ribs, and she looked at Abdul, and then at Jon, and her chin came up.
"I'm married," she said. "No."
"That's it. Out." Jon took Abdul's elbow. The old man's skin was dry and warm, loose over the bone.
Abdul let himself be pulled up off the couch. And when he stood, it was impossible not to see it. The cock inside the mesh had thickened along its whole length, the tube gone from loose to strained, the weave stretched to threads at the widest point, and the head was a blunt dark wedge now jammed hard against the end of it, purple-black where the blood had crowded into it, the fabric moist-looking where it pressed. Half-hard. The strings dug into his bony hips. His balls had drawn up in the little pouch, tighter, heavier-looking.
"There's my answer," Abdul said, looking down at himself with something like fondness. "Well. I'll be back another time."
"Sure, whatever," Bella said.
Abdul picked up his grapes. He stepped past Jon without a word, without a goodbye, without a nod, and walked out the front door the way he'd come, and they heard his bare feet on the walkway, and then the click of his own sliding door, and then nothing.
Jon stood in the middle of his living room with his hand still half-raised where the elbow had been.
"He asked you to take your shirt off," he said. "While I was standing right there. He looked at me and said sorry, didn't see you, and then he asked you again."
"I know." Bella sat down on the arm of the couch. Her nipples were still hard under the white cotton, two blunt points tenting the fabric, and she looked down at them like they had betrayed her. "He watched me unpack for twenty minutes, Jon. I thought it was the same as before. Figs, grapes, comments. And then he just, he said it. Topless. Like it was a chore list."
"Are you okay?"
"Yes. I said no." She picked at the hem of the tank. "I said no fast, didn't I?"
"You said no fast."
"Good." She exhaled. "I'm going to the gym. I need to hit something or lift something or I'm going to sit here and think about that and get weird about it." She was already moving, pulling her gym bag from the closet, and she paused at the door and pointed at him. "Don't let him in anymore. Even with fruit."
"No more fruit," Jon said.
She kissed his cheek and left, and the apartment went quiet, and Jon stood looking at the couch cushion where the mesh had sat for twenty minutes, and then he got a dish towel and sprayed it with cleaner and wiped the whole couch down anyway, twice.
She came back two hours later, showered at the gym, hair damp, and found him making pasta. She told him about the workout. She told him the squat rack was taken for forty minutes by a teenager. She was halfway through the garlic bread when she said it.
"He's not that bad, you know. Abdul."
Jon put down the spoon.
"Bella."
"No, listen." She turned on her stool, bread in hand, earnest. "Today was too much. Today he crossed a line, I'm not saying he didn't. But mostly he's just, he's over-friendly. He's lonely. He's sixty-eight, he lives alone, he has nobody, and we're the first people in eleven years who talked to him for more than a minute. He brought fruit twice. He carried our boxes. He's crude, but crude old men are everywhere, my grandfather told my mother she'd filled out at Christmas dinner and everyone just passed the yams."
"He asked my wife to strip in front of me. Today. This afternoon."
"He asked, and I said no, and he left." She shrugged. "He didn't grab me. He didn't push. He got told no and he took his grapes and went home."
"He didn't even say goodbye to me."
"He's old, Jon. Old guys sulk." She took another bite. "Honestly, the worst part is I'm going to feel weird about the couch now and it's my favorite couch."
Jon looked at her for a long moment, at the damp hair and the easy shrug and the nipples faintly visible through her fresh shirt, already hard again under the cotton like they had no memory of the afternoon at all, and he decided, not for the first time, that his wife processed things in a swimming pool and he processed them in a filing cabinet, and the two systems did not talk.
"Eat your pasta," he said.
The next morning he took the trash out at eight, in gym shorts and a hangover from trying to sleep through the memory of it, and the walkway was bright and empty, and he got the bin to the curb and turned around and Abdul was standing at the property line watering a hydrangea with a green hose, in the strings and the mesh, the morning sun coming through the weave and lighting the whole thing up like a lantern.
"Morning, Jon," Abdul said. He set the hose down. Water dripped off his fingers.
"Morning," Jon said, because his mouth answered before his brain could stop it.
"About yesterday." Abdul didn't sound sorry. He sounded like a man clearing an item off an agenda. "I got ahead of myself. I do that at my age. Time's short, Jon. When you're young you think there's time. When you're sixty-eight you know the whole bottle of wine goes bad if you wait."
"You told my wife to take her top off."
"I did." He nodded, agreeable. "And she said no, and I respect it, and I left. That's the deal. I ask, they answer, everybody moves on. I've been asking for eleven years, Jon. Everybody answers. Most of them say no. A couple didn't." He picked the hose back up and moved the spray to the next bush. "Here's what I actually came to say. One day, and I'm a patient man, one day you're going to send that big-tittied bimbo of yours over here topless. Or I'm going to get her there. Either way it's going to happen, because a chest like that doesn't stay under a shirt forever. I want to see her jugs', Jon. Properly. In the light. I want them out in my yard with the sun on them before I die, and I don't have more than ten years, so the clock's running."
Jon stood there with the empty bin in his hand. Somewhere behind his eyes a spreadsheet of possible responses filed itself and came up empty.
"Yeah, right," he said. "I'll get right on that."
"Thanks, Jon," Abdul said, warm and immediate, not a flicker of a pause, not a trace of irony received. "Send her soon." And he turned back to his hydrangeas, whistling something low and tuneless, the great pale tube swinging gently between his stringed hips, and Jon stood a moment longer watching an old man water flowers with his cock hanging out in the morning sun, and then he went back inside.
Bella was at the counter in her sports bra drinking a protein shake.
"Who was that?"
"Abdul. Watering plants."
"He's actually not that bad, you know," she said, wiping her mouth. "I've been thinking about it. He's just a bit over-friendly. Yesterday was too much, but he's lonely, and he's been decent otherwise, and honestly the comment about my chest yesterday, before the topless thing, was practically sweet."
Jon put his gym bag down. He looked at his wife, who had decided the afternoon's event was weather, and he thought about the walkway, and the words send her soon, and he decided some things did not need to be a shared filing.
"Fat chance, buddy," he said.
"What?"
"Nothing." He picked the bag back up. "I said, fat chance, buddy."
"That's what I thought you said." Bella tipped the last of the shake up and drained it, and her throat moved, and the sports bra rode up over the lower curve of one immense firm tit, tan and heavy, the underside showing plain, and she didn't fix it, because she never fixed it. "I'm going to the gym. Chest day."
"Of course it is."
"Someone has to maintain the architecture," Bella said, and kissed him, and went, and Jon stood in his kitchen listening to the floorboards, and outside, faintly through the wall, the whistle went on.
The next afternoon Bella was on her knees in the hallway, taping the last seams of a box of winter clothes, when the knock came at the sliding door instead of the front. She looked up and Abdul was standing on the patio with his face to the glass, holding a folded square of paper, the mesh sock riding high on his hips with everything swinging gently beneath it in the heat.
She let him in because the alternative was shouting through the glass.
"Morning, sweetheart. Or afternoon. I lose track." He held out the paper. It was a flyer, glossy, from a swim shop two towns over, END OF SEASON LIQUIDATION stamped across a photo of a woman in a string bikini.
"What's this?"
"A proposition. A purely retail proposition." He wandered in and sat on the couch without being asked, the pale tube settling against the cushion with the soft weight of it. "That place has bikinis at seventy percent off. I drove past yesterday. Rows of them, hanging in the window like candy. And I thought, you know who needs a new suit? Bella."
"I have suits."
"Not like what's in that window." He patted the couch beside him. "Come here, sit, look at the flyer with me. Little triangles of fabric, sweetheart, that's all they are. Three strings and two dots. They'd look like a joke on you, they'd be so small. I'd pay. Consider it a housewarming gift from your neighbor."
Bella stood in the hallway with the flyer in her hand and her spine straightening. "Abdul. I'm married. You know I'm married. You can't ask me to go shopping with you."
"I can ask. I just did. It's a store, Bella, not a hotel."
"It's inappropriate. You want me to try on bikinis so you can look at me. That's a date. It's a date and I'm married and it's inappropriate for you to ask."
He leaned back and laced his fingers over his stomach, above the mesh, entirely comfortable. "You know what I'm dying to see? You. Walking. Strutting, the way you strut, you can't help it, that little ass sways like a metronome. In a bikini. One of the micro ones. The kind they sell to girls with no shame and a good lawyer. Those jugs would swallow a suit like that whole, one wrong breath and you'd be topless in the parking lot, and I'd be right there to pick it up off the ground for you. A gentleman. That's all I want, sweetheart, is to watch that bimbo beauty of a body do what it was built to do in public."
"Stop it." Her voice came out harder than she meant it to. "Stop. I'm married. Stop."
"Ok for now," Abdul said, cheerful, and stood up, and the whole arrangement swung and settled. "For now is a long time, Bella. It's only eleven in the morning and I've got all afternoon." He tapped the flyer in her hand. "Keep that. Sale runs till Sunday."
And he let himself out through the sliding door, bare feet soft on the concrete, whistling.
Bella stood there with the flyer. She should throw it away. She looked at the woman in the picture, the tiny triangles, the deep tan, and she thought about what a 38F would do to a top like that, how it would fight her, how she'd win. She put the flyer on the counter. Not a decision. Just a place to put it down.
Jon's key hit the lock at five-forty, and he knew before he got his shoes off. There was a particular quality to the quiet when that man was in his house, a warmth, a presence, like a dog had gotten in.
He walked into the living room and there was the dog. Abdul, on the couch, third visit in four days, in the strings and the mesh, holding a peach. Bella was across the room on a step ladder hanging curtains, up on her toes, and from where Abdul sat the angle went straight up the back of her shorts.
"Again, Abdul."
"Again, Jon." The old man took a bite of the peach and didn't turn his head. "Don't be sore at me. Be sore at the view. The view is magnificent. I can't pass it up, no man could, you'd have to be dead, and dead men don't appreciate curtains going up."
"That's my wife's ass, Abdul, not a view."
"Everything's a view, Jon. That's the whole trouble with the world. Some men see a curtain going up. I see a woman built like a nightclub on a ladder." He finished the peach and set the pit on a napkin with strange neatness. "I was just leaving, anyway."
"I think you should go," Jon said. "Now, I mean. And generally. I think you should stop coming over. Uninvited. With fruit. In that."
Abdul rose, slow, joints popping, and stood there a moment at his full thin height, the tube hanging heavy down his thigh, the pouch swaying with his breath. He looked at Jon with those deep-set patient eyes.
"You'll change your mind, Jon. You're new. New people always fight it for a month or two." He nodded past Jon at the ladder, at Bella, whose nipples were plainly visible through the thin white tank, pointed and blunt, tenting the cotton toward the window. "Wednesday. Curtains look good, sweetheart. So does the view from up there." And he shuffled out, and the door clicked, and the house exhaled.
Jon stood with his fists half-closed.
"I said no," Bella called down from the ladder, before he could open his mouth. "Whatever it was, I said no. He wanted to take me bikini shopping. I told him it was inappropriate and I told him to stop and he left."
"He wanted to take you shopping."
"He had a flyer." She came down the ladder and there it was on the counter, glossy, and Jon picked it up and looked at the woman in the string top and the string bottom, and something in his chest did a slow complicated turn.
"You kept it."
"It was in my hand. I was going to throw it away." She took it from him and looked at it herself, a moment too long, and put it in the drawer. "He said I'd look like a joke in one of those. A good joke. He said my chest would swallow it."
"Bella."
"I know." She blew out a breath and sat on the arm of the couch. "He's getting bolder. I noticed. I'm not stupid, Jon. Shopping is different from figs. Shopping is a thing you do with a person. But I shut it down, and he said ok for now, and then you came home and he left, and I don't know, there's a part of me that keeps filing him under harmless when he clearly isn't anymore."
"He told me he'd change my mind."
"Of course he did. He's sixty-eight and bored." She tipped her head back against the couch. "Anyway. Enough Abdul. How was your day?"
"Long. Mine's longer now that I come home to an old man eating a peach in a mesh sock on my couch."
"He really does have good fruit taste, though."
"Bella."
"I know. Dinner?" She smiled at him, that bright vain warm smile, and unzipped her shorts where she sat just to be cooler, and his eyes went there before he could stop them, to the white cotton and the hard little points showing through it, and she saw him look and liked it, always liked it.
They ate pasta at the counter and talked about nothing, the movers' deposit, a lampshade that arrived cracked, whether to stain the deck. It was good. It was them. By ten they were in the bedroom with the lamp on and Bella peeling her tank off over her head, and her tits came out heavy and rigid and high, sitting on her chest like sculpture, the small pink areolas puckered tight, the eraser nipples jutting straight and slightly out, aimed at the ceiling, at him.
"Do you think about it?" she asked, crawling onto the bed on her hands and knees. "The mesh. Be honest."
"No," Jon lied.
"I think about the size of it. Not, like, sexually. Architecturally. It's like a load-bearing element." She pushed him back on the mattress and pulled his sweats down, and his cock came up hard against his stomach. "This one's my favorite, though." She wrapped her hand around it and lowered her mouth.
She took him in slow, tongue flat, lips tight, down until the head pressed the back of her throat, and she hummed, and the hum went through him like a wire. He fisted his hand in her blonde hair and watched his cock slide between her lips while above it those giant firm tits pressed together against her arms, deep cleavage pooling around her gold chain.
"Bella, come up here."
She came up. He rolled her under him, and she spread her legs wide without shyness, knees out, and her pussy was already slick, the smooth pink lips swollen a little, glistening. He ran his fingers through the wetness and she arched.
"Jon, get in me, come on."
He pushed in slow and her pussy took him, hot and tight and gripping, and she made that low sound in her throat, the one that started in her chest and came out through her mouth. He bottomed out and she squeezed around him deliberately, the way she'd learned years ago, and he groaned.
"You're soaked."
"Your mouth did that earlier this week and it's been on my mind since." She hooked her ankles behind his back. "Now fuck me. Properly. I did cardio twice today."
He started moving, long and deep, and her tits rolled as a unit with every stroke, firm, barely a jiggle, just that heavy synchronized sway from one side to the other, and he bent and sucked a nipple into his mouth, hard, and she yelped and clawed his shoulder.
"Harder. Jon. Harder, I want it hard."
He gave it to her. The bed knocked the headboard in rhythm, her firm ass bounced off the mattress under his hips, slapping down with each stroke, and she was loud, always loud, moaning his name and then just sounds, and her pussy clenched around him in the first flutter of a orgasm and she dug her nails in and came, shaking, legs trembling, crying out at the ceiling.
"Yes, yes, don't stop, I'm coming, oh my god, Jon."
He didn't stop. He drove through it while she shuddered and sagged, then flipped her over, and she went willingly up onto her knees, ass up, the cheeks of it firm and round and tanned, and from behind he could see everything, the slick pink of her pussy, the tight little pucker of her asshole above it, and he pushed back into her and she pushed back to meet him.
"Oh, that angle, right there, right there."
He fucked her like that, gripping her hips, watching her pussy stretch around him and slicken further with each stroke, and she reached down between her own legs and rubbed her clit fast, and in ninety seconds she came again, harder, her whole body clamping, her tight cunt milking him so hard he lost his rhythm.
"Inside me," she gasped. "Come inside me, Jon, please."
He drove deep and let go, pulsing into her, groaning, and she moaned along with him as the heat of it filled her. They collapsed together, tangled and sweating, her giant rigid tits pressed against his side, her hand stroking his chest slowly.
After a while, in the dark, she said, "The flyer's in the kitchen drawer."
Jon stared at the ceiling. "I know where it is. I watched you put it there."
"The sale runs till Sunday," Bella said, drowsy, and her nipple was still hard against his ribs, and down the wall, faint through the plaster, came the low murmur of the old man's television, and then silence, and then the soft creak of a lounger taking weight in the dark yard.
Jon came home the next evening at five-forty and sat in his car in the driveway for ten full seconds, listening. No murmur through the open window. No peach pit on a napkin. He let himself breathe and went inside.
Bella was at the stove in a little sundress, spaghetti straps, stirring sauce. Her nipples pressed the thin cotton out in two soft tents, and the hem swayed against her thighs when she moved.
"Smells good," he said.
"There's a salad, and I found the wine opener. Today was a normal day. Zero visitors." She smiled over her shoulder. "I unplugged the doorbell, actually. Temporarily. It felt powerful."
He laughed and kissed her neck, and they had almost finished the first glass when the knock came. Not the front door. The sliding door, soft, familiar now, like a knock that had learned the house.
Bella looked at Jon. Jon looked at the door. Through the glass, Abdul stood with his hands clasped behind his back like a man arriving at church, the mesh catching the last of the sun.
"Stay here," Jon said. "I'll get it."
"Jon, he's our neighbor, not a bear."
"He's a bear in a sock."
She laughed and opened the door anyway, because she always did, and Abdul came in with the evening air behind him and a small plastic container of olives in one hand.
"Kalamata," he said, offering them. "From the market on Fifth. Your husband looks like a man who eats olives."
"I do eat olives," Jon said. "Abdul, it's dinner time."
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.