Page 27 of Bonetide

Continuing my adventures into wholesome domesticity, I put my washing out on the laundry line, the sun breaking through the clouds enough that I think they might actually dry. I work on a sketch of the bog asphodel I cut from the verge a few days ago, sitting in its jam jar on the windowsill. As I draw, the afternoon moves on, light sliding slow across the kitchen floor and into amber as the sun goes down behind the spit. The midges come up off the bracken in clouds. The wind drops.

At nearly eight, at about the same time he came by last night, I pick up the binoculars again.

I lift them to my face. The world telescopes.

The world brings him to me.

And there he is.

He’s on the rocks of his spit where the water meets the stone, and he’s fucking naked. The same way he was naked days ago in the morning when I thought I was looking at a piece of driftwood I pat myself on the back for not making a joke about his wood.

He’s facing the shore across the loch proper, body tilted slightly away from me. The light is painting gold across the long line of him, picking out the shoulders and the chest and the long flat stomach and the dark hair at the center of him. He’s standing very still in the way I’ve come to notice.

“Are you even real?” I whisper to myself.

I lower the binoculars an inch.

I tell myself I’m going to put them down and walk away from the window and stop being a Peeping Tom.

Instead, I lift the binoculars again. I mean, I am a botanical illustrator after all. I look at things and observe them for a living. Looking is not a crime.

And so, I look.

I can see, now, what I could not see across two hundred meters of open water with my own eyes. How sculpted his muscles are, his body lean but strong, but the kind of strong that comes from lifting things naturally, not spending hours at the gym. I find myself studying the scar on his ribs, low on the left side, a clean white line about as long as my thumb. The scattering of chest hair, the dark line of hair from his navel to his cock. The cock, which is…damn.

Fully hard.

He is standing on the shore at dusk, naked and hard as the rocks around him.

I make a sound that borders on pathetic.

The binoculars shake. I steady them with both hands. The world wobbles and comes back into him, and I’m still looking, because at no point in the last few days has any part of this cottage felt like a place where I was supposed to be doing anything reasonable.

God damn, I knew that cock was going to be trouble when I could sense its size even before the binoculars could see it.

He shifts his weight to one foot, slow, taking a commanding stance. Lifts one hand. The hand goes to his chest, flat-palmed, and slides down. Slow.

Across the stomach.

Lower.

And then he takes himself in his hand.

Oh.

Oh god.

Oh.

I do not move and I don’t look away. I don’t even think I’m breathing, at least not like a normal person with autonomous body functions. I have to remind myself to take in shallow pulls of air, which is hard enough because all I can think about is the fact that he’s holding his motherfucking cock, and I can’t look away.

You have to though, I tell myself. You’re being a terrible pervert. This is wrong. You’re watching your neighbor with his cock in his hands.

But…he can’t know I’m watching, can he?

He’s two hundred meters away, and the light is failing, and the kitchen window is small, and there is no possible way he can know that I’m standing inside with these newfound binoculars and have been at this glass for nearly a minute now, watching him touch himself.

And, more than that, he’s out here in the open like this.