The house was nondescript, like any of a hundred thousand others. A two story cape with black asphalt shingles, white vinyl siding, a one car garage that didn’t look large enough for a modern SUV, and a tiny front porch. Surrounding the porch were sparse, gently rotting panels of wooden lattice blocking it’s underneath from the occasional skunk looking for a place to build a den. In short, nothing about it was remarkable.
He must have passed it a hundred times, maybe a thousand, as it roughly bisected the route he would walk late at night for exercise and to clear his head.
There was absolutely no reason why such a house would capture his attention, but without fail, every time he walked by he would notice things about it, little mysteries that didn’t add up. Mysteries such as how the house always gave off this smell, a unique blend of vanilla, bourbon, laundry detergent, and incense that he could not directly place. Individually they were some of his favorite smells, but each compounded exponentially upon the other as they reached out from the house to the sidewalk. He would walk through the cloud of intoxicating perfume four times over the course of his two round trip journeys to the Chinese food restaurant that marked the quarter mile distance from his apartment, each time drawn by it to sneak a glance into one of the windows that faced the street. Each window was covered by a gossamer lace, occluding the view of the interior beyond, and wondering what constituted the fascinating smell.
At first his curiosity was confined to placing the strange mixture of smells, but when no answer to that dilemma was forthcoming, his search for clues led him to notice other odd details about the house. He would typically leave for his walks at around 10pm, the full double circuit taking him a little under an hour, putting his last pass of the house at around 11pm. Every few months, there would be a gathering at the house, the assortment of vehicles overflowing from the single lane driveway onto the lawn and side of the street on some occasions.
But he never saw a single person at the house. Judging by the number of vehicles in the lot at the time, there must have been twenty to thirty people in the home, but in all of the dozens of times he noticed the gatherings, there was never an instance of someone outside. Nobody stepping out for a smoke, nobody grabbing anything out of their vehicles, nobody arriving or departing. Taken on it’s own, it wouldn’t have been noteworthy, but when measured against the mysterious smell, and the fact that no matter how many people were at the house, the occasional subdued desk lamp would be the only light in the home.
It didn’t line up in his mind. The house should have been a hive of activity with that many vehicles there, should have been lit up like the fourth of july as the gathering spread to various rooms. Their voices, at least once, should have reached him out on the sidewalk. There should have been movement visible through the windows, conspicuous at even one of his momentary glances. There should have been forms passing the windows, dancing lights of a television screen playing a football game of fight.
But there was never a sign that there was anyone home.
The dilemma ate at him, his mind as wired to solve mysteries as the rest of humanity. The incongruity of it all would not let his mind discard the mysterious house, the mysterious smell reaching out like a sirens song to remind him of it when a stretch of bad weather made his walks less consistent.
It ate at him, but his sense of wanting to respect the privacy of the homeowners and their guests kept his curiosity at bay for over a year. Then, one night, as he was making his final pass of the house on his way back to his apartment, he saw something through one of the windows.
A form, which he couldn’t really make out from the distance, had to be a person, the first real evidence of habitation that the house had divulged in all his time walking by it. He’d fabricated all sorts of fantasies and nightmare scenarios of what the house contained, the imaginings of an otherwise bored, middle aged man with no other sources of excitement in his life. He would always laugh these mirages off, understanding them for what they were, his mind attempting to pick up the slack of his pedestrian existence.
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
But he had seen someone. His curiosity threatened to overwhelm him, overwhelm his better judgment. He didn’t know what to expect, but several of the more colorful options came back to him, and the prospect of sneaking a peek at an Eyes Wide Shut level orgy or secret bult meeting found him stepping off the pavement of the sidewalk and across the dozen or so feet of grass to the side window where he had detected the movement.
Picking his way through the lawn, careful to avoid downed twigs or branches that might give him away, he told himself he would just get close enough to make out what he had seen, and then he’d be back out onto the sidewalk, continuing his walk before his heart rate tracker even registered the change of pace. The streetlights, not overly bright but present, made it impossible for him to go unnoticed if a car drove by, and the town, while small, had a relatively active police force in the downtown area where the house stood.
No, getting arrested for being a peeping tom would not be worth whatever secrets the nondescript house had to offer.
With that in mind, he focused on being invisible, silent, and kept to the shadows, making his way to within a half dozen feet of the nearest window. The sensation of getting away with something flooded his body with adrenaline. The form looked to be that of a woman, slight of build, wearing a white blouse, green pencil skirt, and black high heels. Her black hair shimmered in the half light of what appeared to be a kitchen, or a mini bar. She was facing away from him, moving slightly, but never quite turning around enough for him to see her face. She lifted a glass to her lips, a short tumbler glass, and took a sip before setting it down onto the nearby counter.
Suddenly, he was certain there was nothing nefarious going on, and that the risk of getting caught would clearly outweigh the value of knowing what happened inside the house. He turned to make the handful of steps required to return to the safety of the sidewalk, but more movement out of the corner of his eye caused him to halt his movement and look back.
A man stepped up behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist and kissing the back of her neck before reaching up to her waist and presumably dragging down the long zipper at the back of her skirt. The skirt fell away, the two forms shifting slightly to reveal slivers of her pale hips before the black lace of thigh high stockings peeked out from either side of the man's legs.
The man worked something at the front of his pants, which he assumed was his zipper and/or belt, and then he pushed her back forward, bending her over the counter, and she writhed back against him, soundlessly from his perspective outside the house.
He glanced around, wanting to make sure that he could hear no vehicles approaching, but his luck continued to hold.
The two twisted slightly to the side, and he could see her then. The front of her white button up shirt had been opened, and too-perfect breasts in a black lace bra had been pushed free of the restrictive fabric. Her hair cascaded around her face, head down, as their bodies crashed against each other repeatedly.
He could feel his own erection growing, pushing against the soft fabric of his joggers, and they had his full attention.
Her legs were impossibly long, fair in the way that he liked, the entire view straight out of one of his own personal fantasies. Part of him wanted to see her face, but the remnants of sanity he had managed to hang onto understood that if he could see her eyes, there was a chance she could see his. Ready to take his winnings back to his apartment to be thoroughly lusted over while he did his best to impersonate how she must have felt with his hand, he was startled by a rectangular prompt appearing in his vision, bright as a stop sign in headlights.
Gasping, he recoiled slightly, managing to maintain his balance but otherwise in shock.
SKILL UNLOCKED - SNEAK
You are 5% less likely to be noticed when attempting to avoid detection.
CLASS TREE UNLOCKED - ROGUE
Out of reflex, he reached up to bat it away, assuming that if he could see it, anyone within a two block radius could see it, including the couple fucking a mere dozen feet away from him. The prompt disappeared, the light around him not changing as much as he would have thought given the brightness of the floating rectangle in his vision just a moment prior.
Glancing back at the couple one last time before he turned to run, he saw that the woman had most definitely noticed him, as she stood mere inches from the glass, the window coverings thrown back, staring at him with what could only be called a smirk on her face. The man was nowhere to be seen, but he did notice that one of her hands was between her legs, rubbing at the nub of flesh slightly beneath an almost invisible triangle of black fuzz.
It was the last thing he saw before everything went black.