The Next (9 page)

Saturday was the day Mrs. Abraham took her weekly stroll to the farmer’s market, and thus the day she made apple strudel. Just as I anticipated, she knocked on my door to retrieve last week’s casserole dish before her trip to Union Square and ask me if I wanted anything special. I looked at her blankly as she smiled her yellow toothy smile, Minnie in her arms yapping. I didn’t care one iota what she decided to make.

“I’d love strawberry rhubarb,” I responded, trying to sound invested.

“Oooh, that sounds nice. But it’s winter. I don’t think I can get strawberries or rhubarb.”

“Aww,” I said, doing my best to be disappointed, “Then anything’ll be just fine.”

I returned last week’s dish to her, smiled, and asked her if she would mind dropping this envelope off with the doorman in Rebecca’s building on Sixth Avenue near Union Square. It was basically on the way. Or it could be.

I wondered if this was what a sociopath would feel like: adopting particular facial expressions and vocal tones with intellectual exactitude to hide his true agenda. I wondered if I would have to be this deliberate for the rest of my life.

Was Mrs. Abraham completely unaware what an ungrateful prick lived in this apartment? Beyond her yellow-toothed smile, underneath one of three floral sundresses she owned, on the other side of her sparkly green eyes, did she see who I was? Would she continue to be so neighborly if she knew? I suddenly felt a deeper guilt as I realized the answer was yes. Mrs. Abraham would be this generous to me even if she’d learned I’d been a convicted baby killer.

She accepted the package with an affirmative nod and a smile that said she was grateful for the opportunity to be of help.

She
was grateful to
me!

She lived alone like me and she suffered loss like me, but she radiated so much contrasting energy. She was a little old lady of unstoppable love, and that made me feel like a fucking monster.

What was her secret?

I closed the door as she slowly wobbled her way down the hall, Minnie yapping goodbye.

Nap time…perchance not to dream…

The arpeggios above stopped, followed by the irritated clunk of a wooded keyboard cover closing.

It was six o’clock.

I was sweating and needed a shower.

As I was toweling my back, I heard a raspy moan from above.

Oh my god, again?

In the darkness, covered only in my towel, I peeked out of the window. Mr. Perfect was once again at the bedroom window. He steadily feasted his eyes on the window above mine. His engorged and upright dick protruded from his pressed five thousand dollar suit.

He slowly undulated his hips, tightening and releasing his manhole. He released his dick and unbuckled his belt. His pants dropped to his ankles, revealing thick, muscular, hairy legs. His scrotum was full and round, and his pubic hair neatly trimmed to frame that long spitting cobra, cocked, splayed, and unhooded.

The bastard was prepared tonight. He picked up a bottle of lube, squeezed the gel into his hand and greased his dick. The sensation caused him to gasp. I heard Ruben upstairs moan again. Then Mr. Perfect reached behind his ass with his slick finger, inserting it and causing the cobra to grow another half inch. His eyes practically crossed in the ecstasy of that instant. His lips formed an O as he attempted to control his breathing, his heart thumping wildly in pleasure. His thighs flexed as he dipped six inches, bending at the knees. I could see the definition of his muscular thighs.

Mr. Perfect suddenly opened his eyes and extracted his finger. He looked at Ruben with intent and motioned with his hand. At first I didn’t understand the meaning of this motion, then I realized he was beckoning for Ruben to come over.

Oh, my god.

This was not good news. It’s one thing to flirt with a neighbor, it’s another to invite him over. It requires a certain kind of pathology to think it appropriate to invite a complete stranger over to fuck the shit out of you in the very bedroom in which you sleep with your wife, in which your kids climb into bed when thunder scares them, in which your wife braids your daughter’s hair.

I heard the window above me open. Ruben descended the fire escape, trying to step as lightly as possible on t
he thin metal stairs with his red Converse shoes. He was wearing well-fitted khaki pants that showed off his long thick legs and his tight ass, and a tight thermal shirt with a V-neck that accentuated the development of his chest and the breadth of his shoulders. When I’d seen him face-to-face, I was too busy being an asshole to realize there was a goddamn good reason the show he’d been putting on upstairs for the neighborhood was well worth watching. I ducked out of sight
as he circled around the platform to climb down the second flight of the fire escape. I popped back up as he reached the bottom of the stairs, which ended at the approximate height of the top of the foot wide brick wall that separated my building’s section of the courtyard from that of the Perfects.

Rather than lower the rusty ladder that would allow him to climb down to the ground, he hopped onto the brick wall. With catlike agility, I watched Ruben’s silhouette traverse the top of the wall, which took a right angle toward the Perfect’s building. Ruben then climbed onto the mirroring fire escape. He dexterously ascended the metallic stairs to the bottom of the Princess’s apartment. She was reading a fashion magazine on her bed, dipping a spoon into a container of yogurt. She was facing the window. Ruben could not get past.

I looked up and saw Mr. Perfect observing Ruben’s actions from above. All that elation halted because of the Princess’s innocuous positioning. Mr. Perfect opened his window and stuck his head out to get a better look at what Ruben was doing. Ruben looked up at him, smiling, pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and shrugged his shoulders helplessly, pointing with his index finger at the problem. Mr. Perfect seemed unperturbed. He pulled up his pants and exited the bedroom. I watched him walk through the short dividing hall to the living room and then exit the front door to the hall.

What was he doing?

The other neighbors were completely oblivious to this ridiculousness.

The Couch Potatoes glued their eyes to their screen and their garlic bread to their asses.

Schlongzilla was holding a script opposite some beautiful dark-haired actress who was also holding a script. They were rehearsing, apparently, gazing into each other’s eyes, mouthing soft dialogue. A love scene? He glanced away to pour two glasses of red wine. Right. Wasn’t difficult to see what kind of catharsis this rehearsal was leading to.

I could tell by the way the Broadway Dancer kept grasping his forehead as he typed in his underwear on his laptop that he was nursing one whopping hangover.

The Princess looked up from her magazine. The doorbell just rang. She put down her spoon and headed down the hall. Ruben seized the opportunity and darted up the stairs to Mr. Perfect’s open window and entered. Clad only in slacks and a long shirt, he must have been freezing. The Princess returned from the hall with a confused expression on her face; nobody was at the door. She stretched out on her bed again, picked up her spoon, and continued reading.

It seemed like a lot of trouble to get from point A to point B. Why not just get buzzed in the front door like any normal person?

Ahh, but this building had a doorman. Like many buildings on the island, it’s entirely possible the doorman in Perfect’s building had
too
watchful an eye on visitors. And perhaps a more fluid exchange of information with the Missus than the Mister would have. I wondered if this close eye on her husband was something the Missus felt was warranted from a previous matrimonial faltering.

Hmm hmm.

The fucking marathons married New Yorkers run to get ass.

Moments later, Mr. Perfect entered the front door. He strode through the living room, tossing off his suit coat to the floor. As he entered the short dividing hall, he removed his belt and dropped it to the floor, and by the time he entered the bedroom he had dropped his trousers, leaving him clad only in his white button-down shirt. I doubted they even had a second to introduce themselves before Mr. Perfect pounced on Ruben and locked lips with him. With their mouths suctioned together like lampreys, Mr. Perfect unbuckled Ruben’s pants, simultaneously pushing him to the bed.

Wow. How long had Mr. Perfect been storing up these impulses? Since he was sixteen?

As the pair of lampreys approached the bed, Ruben’s dick was missile hard and sticking out of his khakis in launch position. Mr. Perfect smeared a finger of lube onto it and massaged it to a shine. The platform bed was the kind with a layer of drawers underneath and a thick box spring, making it perfectly high enough for what they were about to do. Romance was not the name of the game at the moment. In lust-driven swiftness, Mr. Perfect bent over the bed, his stomach on the shiny quilt, his arms in front of him, stretched out to the pillows, burying his nose and forehead into the quilt, with his legs bent at perfect right angles down to the floor, his muscular hairy globes thrust into the air. With one hand strangling the pillow in front of him, he reached with his other to pull Ruben’s dick between his bulging lobes.

The Peasant was crowning The King.

My penis was responding to the coronation.

Ruben plunged deeply into Mr. Perfect’s hole, slamming his thighs tightly against Perfect’s thick, muscular hamstrings. My imagination supplied the sounds of the thighs and hamstrings slapping together, the squish of lube frothing into a white foam around the base of the piston, the primal moans caused by Perfect’s hole stretching to accommodate Ruben’s beefy dick, of Ruben’s breathless shock of having his flesh forcefully engulfed and squeezed tight by a lubed pink hole.

Mr. Perfect opened his jaw and took a large mouthful of the quilt, and then clenched down, muffling grunts and screams of pain and unimaginable pleasure.

I started stroking my dick furiously. Straight, gay, bi-sexual—I didn’t care one iota. This was
hawt
man-on-man action in the flesh and, although part of my brain judged it to be the antithesis of what I really wanted, another part of my brain was sending blood down to engorge my member by the pint. My whole pubic area was sweating again from the intensity of what I was watching, providing a sweet slickness to my strokes.

The men’s pistoning was rapidly becoming more frenetic. Mr. Perfect began sweating through his white button shirt, and as the cotton clung to his back, the details of his well-developed lats and rear deltoids appeared. God, he was a sexy motherfucker.

I heard a raspy “Oh, Fuck!” echo across the courtyard.

Mr. Perfect grabbed his shirt and wrestled it over his head, free and naked. His back shone wet, hard, and striated with muscles. A pool of sweat gleamed in the small of his back. I grabbed my dick tighter. Ruben’s face glistened. His abdomen peeked out from under his shirt occasionally, flexing, tightening, releasing.

Suddenly something caught my eye.

My heart fucking froze.

Mrs. Perfect opened the front door. She had returned unexpectedly.

Oh my fucking god!

She dropped her suitcase on the floor. That noise caused Mr. Perfect and Ruben to freeze like the snapping of a Polaroid. Mrs. Perfect uttered something—perhaps, “Honey, I’m home?” I watched in horror as Ruben scrambled to hide somewhere.

Mrs. Perfect eyed the coat on the floor. She lifted her brow.

Ruben hopped out the window onto the fire escape, his shiny dick still waving in the air. Mr. Perfect grabbed the lube, made one sweeping brush with his forearm across the quilt to smooth it out, and darted to the bathroom, closing the door. Ah, he would pretend to take a shower.

Mrs. Perfect entered the dividing hall and saw the belt. She picked it up, rigidly grasping it.

Ruben descended the fire escape only a couple steps, but stopped before he’d be forced to enter directly in front of the Princess.

Yappity yap yap.

Mrs. Perfect paused in the empty bedroom. She sniffed and widened her eyes. Confusion? Anger? Disgust? I could not tell because steam drifting from the bathroom into the bedroom, fogged up the window. Mrs. Perfect went to the open window.

Knock knock knock.

Was that my door?

Ruben flattened against the cold brick wall beneath her. He sucked in his stomach, simultaneously tucking his dick back into his pants.

Knock knock knock.

“Who’s there?” I barked.

“It’s Johanna.”

I shut the curtain with a swift movement, sending dust flying.

Shit me to hell!

Chapter Ten

“You ill?” Johanna asked, easing her Kelly green couture dress into my office chair, the only one vacant.

“No. Yes. No. I don’t know.”

I was definitely flustered. I’d managed to buy some time to let my dick deflate by throwing on sweats and holding a mound of dirty clothing in front of my groin as I answered the door, pretending to be cleaning.

“You look like shit,” the lady volunteered.

“Thank you.”

“My therapist thinks I need closure.”

“On what?”