Chapter 7: The Return
The walker is gone. The yellow square of our window persists.
My hand is still in my pants. The pressure is a dull, insistent throb against my palm. I should do something about it. Just get it over with. The car seat creaks as I shift, trying to find a comfortable position. The thought is crude, functional: rub one out and go to sleep in the car. I’d wake up stiff-necked and sour, but at least the wedding would be today, and this night would officially be over.
I glance at the backseat. It’s a mess of garment bags and a discarded jacket. I could ball the jacket up, use it as a pillow. The door locks are down. It’s as safe as it’s going to be.
But my eyes drift back to the window.
Cathy is up there, still asleep. Or maybe she’s awake now, staring at the ceiling, wondering if I’m ever coming back.
I unzip my jeans. The night air from the cracked window touches my skin. It should feel like a decision, but it just feels like another moment of waiting. I think about the woman with the phone. She has a digital record of my wife asleep and naked. I think about the walker, his hand massaging himself through his pocket. They have their memories. Their proofs. What do I have? A keycard I threw on the nightstand. A dead phone. This erection that feels more like a physiological complaint than desire.
My fingers curl around myself. The touch is clinical. I close my eyes, trying to summon an image that isn’t the walker’s silhouette, or the blurry shapes of the athletes. I think of Cathy's enormous ass pointed at the open window as they watched. I work myself slowly, methodically, my fist a dry, rhythmic pump in the quiet car. The friction is there, a building biological urgency, but it feels disconnected from the rest of me. It’s like I’m troubleshooting a faulty machine.
My breathing shallows. I stare at that window, wishing I could see at least a slice of empty bed, an ankle, a shadow, something to tell me how she is positioned now. Maybe she burrowed into a blanket in her sleep. But I lose myself in the simple mechanics of it. A bead of pre-cum smears against my thumb. The sensation is slick, real, a pinpoint of genuine feeling in the numbness. It’s working. I’m getting there. My head tips back against the headrest.
Then movement catches my eye. A shadow detaches itself from the deeper darkness near the corner of the walkway.
My hand stops. It’s him. The walker. He’s back. He’s just standing there, leaning against the railing, fully facing the window. He’s given up all pretense. Both earbuds dangle now, forgotten against his white shirt.
He watches. A full minute passes. His head doesn’t move. He is a statue of concentration.
My own arousal, so tenuous a moment ago, crystallizes into a hard, painful throb. I don’t move my hand. I watch him watch her.
He glances left, then right, a final check. The parking lot is dead. The other rooms are dark. My car is a shadow among shadows. He sees nothing as he saunters up to Cathy's window. Nothing but Cathy.
His hands go to the waistband of his shorts. He pushes them down, just enough. The streetlamp catches the pale length of his cock as he takes it out. It’s a casual, unhurried motion. He spits into his palm once, then begins to stroke himself, right there in the open air.
His pace is leisurely, almost contemplative. He shifts his weight, getting comfortable against the railing, a man settling in to enjoy a private show. His enjoyment is plain, uncomplicated. He takes his time.
A low, rusty sound escapes my throat. My own hand is still wrapped around myself, frozen.
The sight of his hand moving on himself is a command my own body can’t ignore. My grip tightens, then relaxes into a gentler rhythm, a mirror of his unhurried strokes.
I sync my pace to his. Up. Down. A slow, shared metronome measured in the faint yellow light. My breathing hitches when his does. The entire world funnels down to the connection between his fist, my fist, and the unconscious woman in the rectangle of light.
“You stupid bitch,” I whisper, but the words have no anger. They’re just breath. I’m thinking of her this afternoon, slamming the car door after I’d criticized her choice of shoes for the rehearsal dinner. Her furious profile outlined against the sunset. She called them comfortable. I called them cheap. We had bickered for the next forty miles. I pump myself gently, thinking of the sharp line of her jaw when she’s mad, the way she cuts her eyes at me without turning her head.
The walker’s back arches slightly. A soft, carrying groan floats down to the parking lot. It’s a sound of pure, uncomplicated gratification. He braces himself against the railing, head bowed, and shudders. He's pointed right at the window, spilling his seed out on the walkway.
"You stupid bitch," I whisper again.
The walker finishes and tucks himself away. I am still stroking slowly. I didn't time my climax with his. Maybe I should have.
He turns and walks away, his steps echoing with a new finality down the metal stairs. He doesn’t look back. The walkway is empty again, save for the dark, wet patch I assume he left gleaming under the security light's piss-yellow glow. Silence reclaims the lot. My hand falls away, limp and useless while my dick still twitches. But the urgency is gone, replaced by a hollow, buzzing static in my skull.
I stare up at the window.
The question unfolds in my mind, quiet and absolute. How is she lying? It’s not a wonder. It’s a compulsion. The geometry of it grips me. Did she roll onto her side after the family’s car doors slammed? Is she curled up, knees to chest, the sheet tangled around her ankles? Or is she still sprawled exactly as she was, one arm dangling off the bed, half hugging her pillow like she's cuddling it?
The position is everything. It’s a code I need to crack.
If she’s on her side, facing the window, then everything is visible from her face on down. The walker saw a full, nude profile. The tiny bumps of her chest, the curve of her waist, the slope of her hip, the dark triangle between her legs. If she’s on her stomach, then the view was just her back, the twin dimples above her ass, the perfect roundness I’d watched those athletes study. That’s a different kind of exposure. Less intimate, maybe, but more offered.
If my phone wasn't dead I could jerk off to that. But my phone is dead.
The walker knows what position she was in. If she was covered a little or uncovered all the way. He stood there for so long. He memorized it. He used the details to get himself off. He knows if her mouth was open, if her hair fanned across the pillow, if the rise and fall of her breathing was slow or quick. I need to know what he knows before I come.
This is insane.
But the thought roots. It grows tendrils. I lean forward, forearms on the steering wheel, peering up as if I might develop x-ray vision. The window mocks me with its bland, uniform light.
Maybe she’s shifted to her back. That’s the worst possibility, and the best. That’s the most vulnerable. Arms at her sides, legs slightly parted, everything open to the sky and the night and any passing gaze. The walker would have seen everything.
“Goddamn you, Cath,” I whisper, but the anger is thin, a veneer over a sucking dread.
I think of her sleeping in our bed at home, how she always hogs the covers and ends up wrapped like a burrito. She’s a side-sleeper. Always. She says it’s better for her back. So she’s probably on her side. The logic comforts me for half a second.
But this isn’t our bed. This is a stiff, unfamiliar mattress in a room that smells of bleach and mildew. She was angry. She was a little drunk, and passed out in defiance. All her normal patterns are void here. She could be in any position. She could be splayed like a starfish.
I need to know.