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.