In the evening

Ed watched his neighbor undress in the moonlight in the window in the apartment across the way. He dimmed his reading lamp so he could better appreciate the natural contrasts of the moon against the inky blackness of her room, put down his book on Celtic mythology filled with more fiction than the latest bestselling high fantasy novel. It was truly awful scholarship, if there was any scholarship involved in its writing at all. The lack of references and indices told most of that tale.

It was not the first time he had played peeping tom and he doubted it would be the last. Although he suspected his neighbor knew full well that he often watched her in the semidarkness, her eyes never once stole to the window framing her slow dance from clothing to skin. That his neighbor had never once drawn her curtains in the name of modesty, Francis Edward Carlisle (“Ed” to most folks) was damned if he was not going to allow himself to take in the show visible in varying degrees of light as the moon waxed and waned throughout the year. His neighber was “a looker” by his book and Ed was not exactly flush with offers from women willing to share their naked bodies with him at fifty-two. That had stopped happening someplace in the last decade or so and, to be honest, he had never had all that many offers in life but it still happened on the rare occasion before he had acquired his permanent beer belly and man tits.

Ed had never been able to guess what his neighbor did for a living, but she almost always began clothed in some variation of a sensible, knee-length skirt, sensible flat shoes, sensible “nude” pantyhose and an equally sensible white blouse. On what Ed thought were possibly her more adventuresome days, she might wear Mary Janes with higher heels but those days were rare. However, the rest of the ensemble only varied in the pattern and color of her skirt. For some reason, one that he could not articulate, he found that particular observation to be as much of a turn-on, maybe slightly more so, as the final stage of her nudity before she stepped into the bathroom across the hall from her room to shower.

His neighbor followed her usual ritual this evening, kicking her shoes (flats today) into the corner by the room-length closet on the west side of the bedroom. She shimmied out of her pantyhose with her skirt still on and it was deposited in the same place as the shoes. Then, she unzipped the side of her skirt and wiggled out of that to add to the pile. Next would come the blouse, the bra, and Ed’s favorite, her lacy black underwear.

Only, tonight, none of that happened.

Instead, with her blouse decidedly still buttoned up and the tails of which obscuring his view of her lovely black lace, his neighbor walked over to the window, looked up at the night sky as if checking the weather and did the unthinkable: She drew the drapes.

“No,” Francis Edward Carlisle (“Ed” to most folks) breathed out in disbelief, more of a death rattle than anything resembling speech. “No fucking way,” he added.

He sat there in the semidarkness for a few minutes, stunned. He could have sworn that they had an unspoken covenant of a kind. How could she just shut him out like that?

Disgusted, he got up from his Lay-Z-Boy, grabbed the unscholarly work of fiction about Celtic myth and walked down the hall to take a shower of his own. On the way, he chucked the book into the kitchen trash, muttering a mantra of “no fucking way” over and over as he walked down the hall.

Then, Francis Edward Carlisle (“Ed’ to most folks) stripped down in the bathroom and took a cold shower. Nobody played the role of peeping tom as he did so.