Page 119 of Letters From A Stalker

Three weeks have passed since Julia stood at her living-room window and let me watch her, and somewhere along the way my night rides stopped being about riding. I still tell myself otherwise sometimes, usually while I’m pulling on my jacket or wheeling the ZX10R out of the garage, because there was a time when getting on the bike meant choosing a direction based solely on which road looked emptiest. I could disappear onto the highway for an hour, let the engine drown out whatever had followed me home from work and come back when the cold had worked its way through enough layers to make coffee sound better than another twenty miles.

Lately, I know where I’m going before the garage door finishes opening. I may take the long way there, and some nights I deliberately do because admitting I have built an evening routine around watching one particular woman through the windows of her house feels considerably worse when I ride directly to her street, but the end point never changes. Julia. Her house has replaced the highway as the place my mind goes quiet. Sometimes I arrive after she is already home and find her halfway through dinner with music playing from the speaker in her kitchen, her head moving faintly to something I can’t hear from outside. Other nights I get there first and wait for her headlights, which is when the whole thing starts feeling dangerously close to domestic in a way stalking should never be allowed to feel. I know approximately when she leaves the office on an ordinary day, which nights she is likely to stop for groceries, and how long she usually stands in the entryway after coming home before kicking off whichever shoes have annoyed her for the last several hours.

There have been nights when I stayed for less than twenty minutes because she went upstairs early, and nights when an hour disappeared while I watched her cook, clean something that was already clean and open the refrigerator repeatedly without ever taking anything out. After the first time I followed her home, I convinced myself I wanted to know what she looked like when nobody needed anything from her. That excuse has worn so thin I don’t bother using it anymore. I come because I want to see her. That’s it.

The letters have changed with the routine. They started carefully, at least by the very questionable standards available to a man writing anonymous correspondence to a woman whose house he watches from the woods. The first one was more about the things I noticed than the things I wanted, as though keeping desire off the page somehow made what I was doing less personal. That ended the night she left the lamp on. After Julia knowingly stood at that window and gave me something private because she wanted me to have it, the letters became harder to keep at a distance from the man writing them. Each one has gone a little further, not because I decided on some deliberate escalation plan but because restraint becomes more difficult every time she answers me without ever putting a pen to paper. She answers with the way she holds the envelope before opening it. With the blush that sometimes appears before she has even read the first line. With the way her attention drifts toward the windows after she finishes, as though wondering whether I am already there.

Once, she pressed the folded letter against her chest for a second before catching herself, rolling her eyes and muttering something I couldn’t hear. I spent half the ride home grinning like a fucking teenager. I have also learned how much can happen between two people when one of them believes the other exists only after dark.

During the day, I sit across from Julia with a notebook on my lap and remember exactly what my role in her life is supposed to be. I listen to her talk about her mother, Nanna, work and the parts of herself she is finally beginning to question instead of automatically blaming. I watch for the small changes that tell me when we are getting too close to something painful, and I keep my own reactions exactly where they belong.

At night, none of that disappears, but it moves out of the way. There is no Dr. Blackwood standing in the woods. There is only a man watching a woman he wants far more than he has any right to. That difference has started bleeding into both lives whether I want it to or not.

Julia walks into my office Thursday afternoon looking like someone who has quietly decided she belongs wherever she happens to be standing. It is not a dramatic change, and if I hadn’t seen her every week for the last few months, I might not notice it at all. She still arrives with her bag tucked against one side, still pauses long enough to greet Mara and still chooses the same lounge chair once she comes inside, but she no longer seems to enter a room already wondering whether she is taking up too much of it.

Today she is wearing a cream sweater with dark slacks, her auburn hair loose around her shoulders and the faintest hint of color on her mouth. She sits without rearranging herself three times, crosses one ankle over the other and looks toward me while I finish the last line of a note from the appointment before hers.

I realize I have been watching her when one eyebrow begins to rise.

“You’re doing that thing again,” she says, her tone carrying more amusement than suspicion.

I set the pen down. “What thing?”

“Looking at me like you’ve noticed something and you’re deciding whether to make it my problem.”

There is a small smile playing at the corner of her mouth when she says it, and six weeks ago she probably would have softened the observation by immediately claiming she was joking. Today she simply waits for my answer. That alone makes me want to smile.

“I was thinking you seem different.”

Her expression tightens for half a second before curiosity replaces it. “Different good, or different in the way doctors say something looks interesting before ordering six tests?”

“Good,” I tell her, and my voice comes out softer than I intended. “You seem more comfortable.”

Julia glances down at herself as if checking whether comfort has become physically visible. “I wore a sweater that doesn’t itch.”

“That explains everything.”

Her eyes come back to mine and she smiles. It is easy. That is what I keep noticing lately. There was always humor in her, even when she first arrived here, but back then she used it like a pressure-release valve. If a conversation got too close, she made a joke. If she thought she had said too much, she made a joke. If emotion appeared anywhere she couldn’t immediately control, she tried to make me laugh before I had the chance to look at it too closely. Now sometimes she jokes simply because something is funny. It is a small distinction but it feels enormous.

“How are things with your mother?” I ask, resting the pen across the notebook rather than keeping it poised as though every answer needs documentation.

Julia settles farther into the chair, and the ease in her posture tells me the question doesn’t immediately put her on the defensive.

“Actually pretty well.” Her mouth twists slightly before she adds, “Which makes me suspicious.”

I smile. “Naturally.”

“I go to see Nanna on days that I want to, but I don’t tell Mom I’m coming because I want one visit that doesn’t somehow become part of whatever was happening between the two of us.”

I nod. “How is Nanna?”

“She’s fine.” Julia’s expression warms immediately. “She made me breakfast despite the fact that I brought breakfast specifically so she wouldn’t cook, then spent most of the morning criticizing a woman on television for dressing ‘like she doesn’t own a mirror.’”

The imitation is affectionate rather than mocking, and I can hear how much lighter Julia’s voice becomes when she talks about her.

“She sounds well.”

“She is. Ninety-four and still mean enough to survive another twenty years out of spite.”