I like to watch, he tells Jacey
the day they meet, deep into their Irish coffees at the ski
lodge bar. And I never have more than three lovers at one time.
She doesn’t know that he’s been watching her all day on and off
the mountain, observing the new ski clothes and equipment, no rings,
no man around, just a lovely red-haired, freckled, 30-something woman
probably recently freed from a relationship, with an edge about her
that says I’m here, I’m adventurous, I’m high-energy, and baby
I just might be looking for some hot sex.
It takes her a minute to respond to him
through her laugh, and although he hopes that someday a woman will answer
with her own needs and kink right up front, something along the lines
of I like to get fucked from behind pretty
roughly, and I probably won’t stay with you longer than three months,
she does not. They never do.
Why three? she asks, and
he knows she’s hooked, never imagining the kind of voyeur that he actually is. Pretty women are used
to being watched, and assume it will be nothing out of the ordinary.
He seems like a normal guy – tall, athletic, regular kind of job at
a financial firm, sociable, on the make after a long day of skiing just
like every other guy in the lodge. He doesn’t really know why three,
it’s just right – three different body types, different skin tones
and hair, and always, always, three new ways of watching. They overlap
continuously, in his bedroom, and in his heart.
I don’t know, he offers sheepishly,
It seems wise to limit it…maybe my version of safe sex?
Women love this -- after all, three is not really that many, not like
a guy who’s hooking up with someone new every Friday and Saturday
night. He moves a little closer, his arm wrapped tightly around
her shoulders. Will you let me watch you, Jacey?
They fumble toward his room, carrying
a bottle, sipping and kissing, laughing, but always kissing,
and then kissing some more, kissing the way she forgot you could be
kissed. The kiss to make a woman lose her
inhibitions, the Dancing Kiss, he calls it, taught to him
by the only woman who ever broke his heart.
In the room: a pile of discarded
ski clothes, music on the speakers, more drinks and laughter, and then
only Jacey standing in front of the drapes, perfectly nude. She is more
muscular than he thought, and has absolutely no pubic hair, giving her
the look of a child-like gymnast. This is what he waits for, this is
what he worships – the surprise and the beauty beneath the clothing. She waits for
his next instruction. He sits on the bed and strokes his cock while
he tells her to touch her clit the way she likes a man to touch her,
and she does. She has made him promise that there are no cameras involved,
and he did, though he does have his simple equipment handy on the nightstand.
He asks her to show him any special poses
that she can do, and she laughs and makes funny faces, but in between
touching herself and saying she needs him to touch her -- he hasn’t
touched her since they stopped kissing, and this is wildly compelling
to her, men are always touching her everywhere – she moves
slowly, from a handstand to a backbend to a yoga downward-facing-dog
position, every man’s dream sex-position. He tries not to come
at that view, with her ass raised so high in the air. He knows he will
have her return to that position, later, when he is ready to enter her
from behind and control her and fuck her from there down into the ground...but not until after he fulfills his obsession.
Give me one more pose, be free, be
wild, he says, never knowing what this will mean to a woman, yet
aware that it turns them on. She slides easily into the splits, like
the cheerleader she once was, arms raised high, smiling at him with
her own sexual kind of pride, and as his vision clicks into place, he
tells her to hold that pose, He picks up his pencil and paper,
an ordinary 3 x 5 canary yellow post-it notepad. He writes #198 in the
top left corner -- this is who she will become in his collection, #198
-- and then he begins to draw.