Chapter 1: The Peephole
The wall thumped.
A slow, wet rhythm that vibrated through the cheap drywall and into the spine of Marcus’s desk chair. He didn’t need to look at the clock. It was 10:17 PM on a Tuesday, and right on schedule, Lydia Hart was getting fucked.
He let his physics textbook fall shut. The fluorescent light overhead buzzed like a trapped wasp, bleaching the color from everything: the half-unpacked cardboard boxes, the peeling moonscape of wallpaper, his own hands. They were sweating. He wiped them on his jeans.
Another thump, sharper this time, followed by a muffled cry. Not pain. The opposite.
His heart began a clumsy knock against his ribs. He didn’t want to. He shouldn’t. But his body was already shifting, a silent pivot of the swivel chair toward the window. The blinds were a mess, one slat permanently bent from when he’d moved in. It created a narrow, shameful aperture overlooking the mirror-image window of Lydia’s apartment.
Her lights were on, curtains wide open. She didn’t care. Why would she?
Marcus leaned forward, his breath catching the dust in the air.
There they were. Thomas Vance, a mountain of tanned muscle and tribal tattoos, his back a geography of ridges and valleys rolling with his movement. And beneath him, Lydia. Her auburn hair was fanned out across her pillow, her mouth a perfect ‘O’ as her head tilted back. Her legs, smooth and strong, were locked around Thomas’s hips, her heels digging into the small of his back.
Marcus’s mouth went dry.
He could hear the low, animal grunt of Thomas’s voice, though not the words. He could see Lydia’s fingers, nails painted a deep burgundy, raking down his shoulders. She was saying something, her lips moving rapidly, eyes glazed and fixed on the ceiling. Then she laughed. It was a bright, gasping sound that pierced through the wall and slid, cold and sharp, right between Marcus’s ribs.
He looked so big. Thomas. Everywhere. His shoulders blocked the light. His hands, splayed on the mattress beside Lydia’s head, looked like they could palm a basketball. Or crush a skull. Marcus glanced down at his own hands, pale and narrow, the wrists like twigs.
The familiar, corrosive heat began in his gut—a cocktail of envy, awe, and a longing so violent it felt like sickness. His own body reacted, a pathetic, autonomic twitch in his boxers. He pressed the heel of his hand hard against the fly of his jeans, a gesture of punishment. As if he could shove the feeling back down.
But he couldn’t stop watching.
Lydia arched her back, a beautiful, impossible curve. Thomas’s pace changed, became punishing, purposeful. The headboard started a steady, rapid drumbeat against the wall. Thud-thud-thud-thud. Marcus’s own breathing synced with it, shallow and quick. He was a ghost in the machine of their passion, a silent, skinny phantom drinking the scene through a bent slat of plastic.
His hand, treacherous, moved. He unbuttoned his jeans.
The act was filled with a self-loathing so practiced it was almost ritual. He fumbled, the button slipping twice in his sweaty fingers. Finally, the fabric loosened. He didn’t look down. He kept his eyes glued to Lydia’s face, to the ecstasy contorting her features, hoping some phantom thread of it might leap the twenty-foot gap and connect with him.
He reached in.
His fingers found only soft, familiar skin. He touched himself, a frantic, clinical probing. There was nothing to grasp. Just a numb, retreating nub, hiding in its pathetic hood of flesh, turtling away from his touch, from the entire humiliating situation. It was like trying to stir a dead thing.
A whimper escaped his lips, thin and reedy in the empty room.
On the other side of the wall, the symphony hit its crescendo. Thomas roared, a sound that was all chest and power. Lydia’s cry was louder, a sharp, soprano shriek of release that seemed to go on and on. Marcus watched, his hand still, as Thomas collapsed onto her, and she wrapped her arms around his sweaty back, her fingers stroking through his short hair. She was smiling. A tired, satiated, conquering smile.
Then she spoke. The walls were too thin for words usually, but in the sudden quiet, her voice, husky and clear, carried.
“Jesus, Thomas. You ruin me. Every damn time.”
Thomas’s laugh was a low rumble.
“You say that like it’s a complaint.” His voice was a smug, satisfied thing.
Marcus flinched back from the blinds as if they’d burned him. The slat snapped back into place, cutting off the view but not the sound. The low murmur of their after-talk was worse, somehow. The easy intimacy of it. He fumbled with his jeans, his fingers clumsy and cold, finally jerking the button closed. A hot wave of shame flushed from his chest to the roots of his hair. He was still empty-handed, disgustingly unchanged.
He needed to move. To do something. The silence of his own room was now a screaming contrast to the living warmth next door. He stood up too fast, the chair legs screeching on the linoleum. He paced the three steps to his bed, turned, paced back. The remnants of last night’s pizza sat in a greasy box on his desk, the smell suddenly nauseating.
From next door, a toilet flushed. A pipe groaned in the wall. Real life, inconvenient and mundane, was resuming over there. He was stuck here, in this fluorescent tomb, with the phantom echoes of their pleasure ringing in his skull.
A knock at his bedroom door made him jump.
“Marcus? Honey, you awake?” His mother’s voice, feathery and strained, came through the wood.
“Yeah.” His own voice cracked. He cleared his throat. “Yeah, come in.”
The door opened a sliver, then wider. Eleanor Webb stood there in her lavender bathrobe, her face a mask of careful concern under a layer of peach foundation. Her eyes, the same washed-out blue as his, scanned his room, lingering on the textbook.
“Studying hard?” she asked, her smile tight.
“Trying to.”
“That’s my boy.” She drifted in, her slippers whispering on the floor. She reached out and smoothed his hair, her fingers cold. He stood statue-still, letting her. “You look peaky. Was the wall… loud again?”
He couldn’t meet her gaze. He stared at a water stain on the wall near the ceiling. “A little.”
“Animals,” she sighed, but there was a vacant quality to her judgment. Her focus was already on him, on the project of him. “Listen, Mrs. Gable from book club is coming for coffee tomorrow. She’s bringing her niece. A lovely girl, about your age. Pre-med.”
Marcus felt a familiar dread pool in his stomach. “Mom.”
“I just think it would be nice for you to have a friend. Someone quiet. You could come out, say hello. I’ll do your face.”
The humiliation was layered, sedimentary. The watching, the hiding, his own failed body, and now this—his mother’s solution: concealer and a forced introduction. The urge to scream itched in his throat. I don’t need my face done, I need a new body. I need to be him. I need to not hear them every night.
He said nothing.
She took his silence as assent. “Good. It’s settled. Try to get some sleep, darling. Don’t let the… noise… get to you.” She patted his cheek and left, closing the door softly behind her.
The moment she was gone, the sounds from next door filtered back in. They were in the kitchen now. He could hear the clink of glasses, the running tap. Lydia’s laugh again, lighter this time. A social sound.
An idea, desperate and stupid, uncoiled in his mind.
The recycling. His bin was full of soda cans. Taking it out was a chore, a reason to be in the shared hallway. A chance, however slim, for a glimpse. A real one, not through a bent blind. A chance to be a person in her periphery, instead of a ghost in the wall.
He moved on autopilot, gathering the overflowing plastic bin from beside his desk. He opened his door, the hallway dark and cool compared to his room. The patterned carpet was worn thin down the center. He could hear their voices clearly now, through Lydia’s door.
“—total loser, I swear,” Lydia was saying, amusement coloring her tone. “At the gas station today, he just stared at my chest while my card was declining. Like a confused goldfish.”
Thomas said something he couldn’t catch.
“I know! They’re just so pathetic. It’s almost fun.”
Marcus froze, his hand on his own doorknob. The recycling bin felt impossibly heavy. Her words, so casual and cruel, wrapped around him. Loser. Pathetic. Confused goldfish. He felt seen, in the worst possible way.
Before he could retreat, Lydia’s door opened.
Light and the scent of jasmine perfume spilled into the hallway. She stood there, backlit, wearing a silky short robe tied at the waist. Her hair was mussed, her face glowing. Thomas loomed behind her in the doorway, shirtless, pulling on a leather jacket.
“Oh!” Lydia said, her eyes landing on him. They were green, flecked with gold. They didn’t look cruel up close. They looked… interested. “Hey, neighbor.”
Marcus’s tongue was a dead weight. He managed a jerky nod, his grip tightening on the plastic bin. A can teetered and fell with a clatter onto the carpet. He flinched.
Thomas chuckled, a dry, dismissive sound. “Careful there, buddy.”
“Sorry,” Marcus breathed, the word barely audible. He bent to pick up the can, his face burning.
“No worries.” Lydia leaned a shoulder against the doorframe, watching him straighten up. Her gaze was a physical thing, traveling from his nervous eyes down his thin frame to the bin in his hands. “Doing your chores? That’s sweet.”
“Yeah,” he rasped.
“We’re just heading out,” Thomas said, his arm snaking around Lydia’s waist, his large hand splayed possessively on her hip. “Don’t wait up.”
Lydia smiled, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes as she looked at Marcus. It was a different smile than the one she’d given Thomas. This was assessing, calculating. “See you around, neighbor.”
They moved past him, Thomas’s bulk forcing Marcus to press himself against the wall. He caught another wave of perfume, mixed with the clean, sharp smell of Thomas’s soap. He stood there, glued to the spot, listening to their footsteps recede down the stairwell.
The hallway was silent again.
He looked at Lydia’s still-open door. From this angle, he could see a slice of her living room: a bright red sweater tossed over the back of a couch, two wine glasses on the coffee table, one still half-full.
His heart was a frantic bird in a cage. Loser. Pathetic.
He took a shaky step forward. Then another. He wasn’t thinking. He was a pool of want and shame, and the open door was a gravitational pull. He crossed the threshold.
The air in her apartment was warm and alive. It smelled like sex and candles and her. He just stood there, breathing it in, the recycling bin hanging from his hand. This was where the sounds came from. This was where the life was.
His eyes fell on the wine glasses. On the half-full one. A perfect burgundy lipstick stain marked its rim.
A floorboard creaked behind him.
He whirled around, panic icing his veins.
But it was just the building settling. The hallway was empty. He was alone. Standing in Lydia Hart’s apartment, a trespasser, a thief of atmosphere.
The thrill was electric and nauseating. He set the bin down silently. He took one more step toward the coffee table. His hand hovered near the stem of the glass. He didn’t pick it up. He just looked at the imprint of her mouth, a perfect, intimate crescent.
Then, from downstairs, the front door of the building slammed.
They’d forgotten something.
Pure, animal terror shot through him. He stumbled back, snatched up his bin, and fled into the hallway, pulling his own door shut behind him just as he heard the lower stairwell echo with footsteps.
He slid down the inside of his door, his back against it, the plastic bin spilling across his floor. He hugged his knees to his chest, waiting.
The footsteps passed his door. Went to Lydia’s. A key turned. The door opened and closed.
He waited for the sound of her noticing something off, a cry of alarm. Nothing came. Only the steady, normal sound of her moving around in her own space, a space he had just polluted with his presence.
He had been inside. He had stood where Thomas stood. He had seen the stain of her lips.
And as he sat there on the floor, the tremors in his hands slowly subsiding, a new feeling began to seep through the cracks of his shame. It was dark, and quiet, and possessive.
It was a seed. And it had just found soil.
And it had just found soil.
For three days, the seed grew in the dark. It fed on the memory of her lipstick stain, the warmth of her air, the sound of her voice calling him ‘neighbor.’ It fed, too, on silence. Thomas hadn’t been back. The wall had remained just a wall, a bland partition of beige drywall and hidden wires. The quiet was worse. It left room for the fantasy to put down roots, to whisper that his intrusion had changed something. That somehow, she knew.
He was listening for her now, always. Not just at night, but during the day. The clatter of a coffee cup. The rush of her shower. The tune she hummed in the mornings, off-key and sleepy. He’d hear her door open and close, and he’d freeze, waiting to see if her footsteps paused outside his. They never did.
It was Friday evening. His mother was at a fundraiser, a fact that filled the apartment with a rare, loose emptiness. He heard Lydia return home from work, the click of her heels, the jingle of keys. Then, nothing. An hour of nothing.
He sat at his desk, a history textbook open to a chapter on war. The words blurred. The quiet from next door was a vacuum, pulling at his attention. Was she on the phone? Reading? Was she just sitting on that couch, thinking?
Driven by a compulsion he no longer fought, he slid from his chair and lay down on the thin carpet. He pressed his ear to the baseboard where the wall met the floor. A cold draft seeped through. At first, only the hum of the building’s electricity. Then, a rustle. The soft, wet sound of… chewing? A slow, deliberate crunch.
He squeezed his eyes shut, concentrating. A chip bag rustled. A reality so mundane it was almost painful. She was eating snacks. Watching TV, probably.
Then she spoke. Not to him, of course. A phone call.
“No, it’s just so boring tonight… I know, right? Yeah, he’s got some guys’ thing.” A pause. A low, warm laugh. “Don’t even start. You have no idea. I’m basically in a pornographic famine over here.”
Marcus’s breath hitched. His whole body went rigid against the floor.
“I’m serious! I’m climbing the walls. Two nights? It feels like a year. I’m going to lose my mind.” Another pause, longer. Her voice dropped, became conspiratorial, thick with a kind of hungry amusement. “I saw the little ghost boy next door today. Taking out his trash. He jumped a foot in the air when I said ‘hi.’ Like a scared rabbit. It’s pathetic. But kinda cute in a weird way. You should see how he looks at me.”
The blood roared in Marcus’s ears. Little ghost boy. Scared rabbit. Pathetic. Cute.
A key turned in the front door of his own apartment.
He scrambled up from the floor, heart slamming against his sternum, but it was too late. The overhead light in his bedroom flashed on, blinding him.
“Marcus? What on earth are you doing on the floor?”
His mother stood in the doorway, still in her fundraiser dress, a strand of pearls stark against navy blue. Her eyes, sharp and suspicious, darted from his prone form to the wall, then back to his face, which he knew was flushed a guilty, feverish red.
“I… dropped a pen,” he stammered, the lie withering in the dry air.
Eleanor Webb did not look at the floor for a pen. She took two steps into the room. The silence from next door was now utter, complete. Lydia had probably heard the door, the voices. She was listening, too.
“Were you listening?” His mother’s voice was low, dangerously calm. “At the wall? Like some… some creepy little pervert?”
“No, I wasn’t, I swear—”
“Don’t you lie to me!” The calm shattered. Her whisper was a serpent’s hiss. “I come home hoping to find my son studying, being a good boy, and I find you sprawled on the floor like a dog, eavesdropping on a grown woman! What is wrong with you?” Her eyes welled with theatrical tears, but her hands were steady as they clenched at her sides. “The shame. My god, the shame. If anyone knew… This ends. Now.”
“Mom, please, it’s not—”
“Quiet.” The word was a slap. She moved with a terrifying efficiency. She grabbed him by the upper arm, her grip surprisingly strong, and marched him out of his bedroom, down the short hall to the living room. The plastic cover on the sofa squeaked in protest as she pushed him face-down over the plump arm.
“What are you doing? Stop!” He thrashed, but she pinned him easily, her weight on his back.
“You will be disciplined. You will learn to control these… these filthy urges.” She hiked up his shirt. The air was cold on his skin. “This is for your own good. To cle