The New Neighbor Mowed My Lawn the Week My Divorce Went Through novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Open Window

Across the side yard she and Tyler watch each other in their windows and finish, and she sets the rule: windows only.

The phone on the nightstand buzzed against the wood, and I jumped.

It was a number I did not know, and it said: "I can see you."

I looked across the side yard.

The slat was still lifted, and behind it was a dark window with a small blue glow low in the frame.

That was his phone screen, lighting him from the chest down.

I could make out his shoulders, and the shape of his head, and nothing else.

I was standing in the middle of my bedroom in a pair of plain cotton underwear, and I had never been so awake.

I picked up the phone and typed with both thumbs: "Then look."

The glow dipped, and I knew he was reading it.

He typed for a long time and deleted it, I think, because the little dots came and went twice.

Then: "You turned it on for me."

"I turned the lamp on myself," I wrote. "I'm not an accident, Tyler."

He wrote back: "Okay."

"Okay what?" I typed.

"Okay, I'm looking," he wrote.

My whole body went hot from the neck down.

I walked to the window, got both hands under the sash, and shoved it up.

Night air came in over the sill, smelling of cut grass, my cut grass.

Crickets were going somewhere in the yard.

The slats across the way rose all the way up with a rattle I could hear from here.

He stood there in the open frame, in the dark, with his phone in one hand.

He was bare-chested again, and I could see the lines of his stomach by the screen light.

I walked backward from the window and sat on the edge of the bed, facing it, with my knees apart.

The lamp was behind me and to the side, so every inch of me was lit.

"You can't see me properly from there," I said out loud, to nobody.

I texted it instead: "Turn on a light. I want to see you too."

A desk lamp came on in his room.

It was a cheap one with a bent neck, and it threw a yellow square onto his floor and lit him up from the side.

He had a long, hard body, with a flat stomach and a line of dark blond hair running down it into his jeans.

He wasn't hiding it.

He stood there and let me look, and he was breathing fast enough that I could see his ribs move.

"God," I said.

My phone buzzed.

He had written: "You're beautiful."

I read it three times.

Greg had called me "fine" and "good" and, once, at a wedding, "put together."

I hooked my thumbs in my underwear and said, "Watch."

I lifted my hips and slid them down my thighs and dropped them on the floor.

I sat back down on the edge of the mattress, completely naked, with the window open.

I saw his hand clench on the phone.

I put one palm flat on my belly.

Then I slid it down, slowly, because I wanted him to see every inch of where it was going.

My hair there was dark and trimmed, and I was already wet when I touched it.

I gasped, and the sound went out the window into the dark.

"Can you see that?" I said, not into the phone, just into the air between us.

My phone lit up on the bed beside me: "Everything."

"Good," I said, and I spread myself open with two fingers.

My pussy was slick, and I stroked up through it to my clit with my middle finger and drew a slow circle.

My whole spine curled.

It was the first time in two years that anyone had looked at me with a light on, and I was not covering it.

I did it again, and my hips rolled up off the bed.

Across the yard, he put the phone down on the sill.

He used both hands on the button of his jeans.

"Tyler," I said, and I don't know how loud, "take them off."

He could not have heard me, and he did it anyway.

He shoved the jeans and his boxers down together, and he stood in the lamp's yellow square with his cock in his hand.

He was hard, and he was thick, and he held it at the base with his whole fist.

My mouth went dry, and everything below my navel clenched.

I reached into the nightstand drawer without looking and found the purple vibrator by feel.

I had bought it in February, online, in a plain box, and used it exactly four times, in the dark, in the guest room.

I held it up in the light so he could see it.

Then I thumbed it on, and it hummed.

"That's what I'm going to do to myself," I said. "And you can do what you want to yourself."

I pressed the tip against my clit.

I hissed through my teeth, and my head went back.

It was a high, steady buzz that went straight up through me, and I let my knees fall open as wide as they would go.

I slid two fingers of my other hand inside, and I was so wet that they went in with no effort.

I curled them up, and I moaned out loud.

On the other side of forty feet of dark, he stroked himself, once, slowly, from base to tip.

I watched the head of his cock catch the lamp.

I saw his hand go back down, hard, and I saw his mouth open.

My phone vibrated on the sheet, and I picked it up with a hand that was wet and shaking.

"Tell me when," he had written.

I stared at that.

Nobody had ever asked me when.

I typed it with my clean thumb: "Slower. Stay at the bottom. Don't you dare go fast."

He slowed his hand down so much that I could see it from here.

He stroked the whole length with his fist, and each time he reached the bottom he squeezed.

"That's it," I said. "Good. Like that."

I worked the vibrator in small circles and fucked myself on my fingers in the same rhythm.

My thighs were trembling, and the sheet was wet underneath me.

The air from the window crossed my breasts and my nipples drew tight, and I thought, He's watching that.

I took my fingers out and pinched one nipple, hard, and made a sound I did not know I owned.

He groaned, and I heard it.

It came across the dark, low and torn, and it was real and it was for me.

"Louder," I said. "I want to hear you."

"Lena."

He said it out loud, across the yard, with his hand fisted on his cock.

I came so close to the edge that I had to pull the vibrator back.

I breathed, and I sat shaking in the lamplight, and I laughed once, out loud, at the ceiling.

My phone buzzed: "Don't stop. Please."

"Please what?"

"Please let me watch you finish."

Heat rolled all through me at the word please.

"Faster," I said. "Both of us. Now."

I pushed the vibrator hard against my clit and drove two fingers deep.

His fist sped up, and I could hear it, a small wet rhythm coming across the grass.

I looked straight at him, at his face, at his gray-green eyes in the lamp.

He was looking at me and nowhere else.

I had waited eleven years for that.

Then it hit me, from low in my belly, and it was so big that I cried out.

My back arched off the mattress and my feet came up and my pussy clamped down on my own fingers.

I said "Oh" over and over.

I shook all the way through, with the vibrator still humming against me until I had to throw it onto the sheet.

Across the yard he let out a ragged shout, and his hips jerked forward into his own hand.

I watched him come.

It spilled over his fist in the yellow light, thick and white.

He bent over and braced himself on the sill with his other arm.

His shoulders shook.

He stayed bent there, breathing, with his head down.

I lay back on my bed with my legs hanging off and my chest going up and down, and I stared at the ceiling.

Then I started to laugh, helplessly, and the laugh turned into something wet in my throat.

I wiped my eyes with the back of my wrist.

The phone buzzed against my hip.

"Are you okay?" he had written.

"I'm perfect," I typed. "That was the best thing that has happened to me in two years."

"Same."

"You said it was your day off. You lied. You came over to look at me."

"I came over to mow your lawn," he wrote. "I'm just not sorry about the rest."

I smiled at the ceiling.

I sat up, picked up the phone, and said what I had to say.

"Rules. Windows only. Nothing crosses the fence. You don't come over, you don't knock, and nobody on this street knows."

The dots came and went.

"Okay," he wrote. "Windows only."

"Say it like you mean it."

"I mean it."

I got up and went to the window, naked, and stood in it with the night on my skin.

He had straightened up across the way, and he was standing in the lamp with his jeans in his hand, not covering anything.

I could see that he was smiling.

My phone buzzed one last time.

"Windows only. I'll be at the window."

He turned off his desk lamp, and the room went dark.

But the blinds stayed up.

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