There Are No Saints (Sinners Duet)

I had a meeting for the SF Artists Guild I was supposed to attend, but I skipped it in favor of further reconnaissance.

I found the house directly behind Mara’s listed on Airbnb for eight hundred dollars a night. After messaging the owner, I convinced him to cancel his next three bookings so I could take the place for a month, starting immediately.

So intense was my desire to spy on Mara that I probably would have bought the damn thing.

I drive over to the townhouse early in the evening, parking my Tesla at the curb.

The three-story Georgian isn’t nearly as nice as my own house, but it’s ten times more habitable than Mara’s. The pale oak floors look freshly polished, and the host left a bowl of foil-wrapped chocolates on the kitchen island, as well as stocking the fridge with bottled water.

As long as the house is clean, I don’t give a fuck about anything else.

Strike that—it’s the view I care about.

I climb the creaking stairs to the third floor, which includes an office, a small library, and a sitting room.

The library window is the one that looks across the back garden to Mara’s house. The beveled glass offers a watery view into the protected alcove of Mara’s balcony.

She could be forgiven for thinking that she has complete privacy in that space. The library window is small, set high up on the wall, divided into a dozen diamond panes.

I cut out the entire window with my glass cutters. Then I cover the space with black paper, leaving only a hole for my telescope.

From a distance, it will look like nothing more than a dark window into an empty room.

My efforts are rewarded when Mara rushes into her bedroom only twenty minutes later, before I’ve completed my preparations.

She rushes everywhere she goes, running from job to job, always late.

I respect the hustle, but her existence is tawdry and depressing. The thought of waiting tables, taking people’s orders, and serving their food is offensive to me. Picking up dog shit in the park for mutts you don’t even own is worse. I’m surprised she wanted to save herself the night Shaw took her, if this is all she had to come home to.

My interest in this hectic, desperate girl baffles me.

My desires have never been mysterious to me. In fact, they’ve always felt rational and natural.

Danvers irritated me, so I removed him from my sphere. I put his bones inside my sculpture as my own private joke. The art world is always looking for the symbolism behind the work. Fragile Ego proclaimed a statement that every viewer felt all the way down to their own hollow bones, without consciously understanding what they were perceiving.

This is the first time in my life that I’ve desired something without understanding why.

Out of all the thousands of women I’ve encountered, how did Mara catch my attention like a hook through the gills of a fish?

It’s not because Alastor threw her in my path. Or not only for that reason.

I noticed her the very first moment I saw her, when she spilled wine on her dress. She hardly even flinched—just marched into the bathroom, emerging with that makeshift tie-dye that was creative, beautiful, and possessed of a spirit of playfulness quite opposite to anything I could have come up with.

Then Alastor knocked her down hard, so hard I thought he’d killed her. Yet she rose again: stubborn, unbroken.

She has me wondering what it would take to break her. To shatter her into so many pieces that she could never put them together again.

The view through the telescope is so clear that I could almost be standing in the room with her.

I watch Mara strip off her clothes, revealing a lean, taut body with small breasts and narrow hips. I’m intrigued to see that she hasn’t removed the piercings from her nipples—the twin silver rings remain in place.

As she hunts for clothes, a cold bead of excitement runs down my spine. I already know she has no clean underwear.

Sure enough, she spots the discarded panties on the floor. My heart stops and I can hardly breathe, riveted in place, eye to the telescope, watching . . .

She picks up the underwear and steps into it.

Blood rushes to my cock so fast that I’m lightheaded.

She’s wearing panties soaked in my cum without knowing it. The most intimate part of me pressed up against the most intimate part of her.

She hesitates, standing still in the center of the room.

She’s feeling the wetness of my cum against her cunt.

My cock is so hard it tents out the front of my trousers.

I love the thought of my cum on her bare flesh. How long does sperm survive? I wonder if those desperate, minuscule swimmers are trying to wriggle inside her right now.

She yanks down the underwear, examining the material.

I watch the panic and confusion on her face, my cock harder than it’s ever been.

She touches my cum. Smells it. Then rips off the underwear and flings it away from her.

My whole body is warm and throbbing. I can’t remember when I last felt this level of excitement. I’ve been so fucking bored lately. Nothing impresses me. Nothing interested me. Until now . . .

Tormenting Mara without even touching her is so stimulating that I can hardly imagine what it would be like to put my hands directly on her flesh . . . to circle them round her throat . . .

Mara shifts her weight back and forth, trying to decide what to do.

She’s wondering if she felt what she thinks she felt.

She doesn’t trust herself.

Finally, she snatches up her purse and exits the room.

I’m already heading down the stairs. She’s not dressed for work—I want to see where she’s going.

A date, I suspect.

At the thought, my pupils contract, my throat tightens, my heart slows. I’m cold and focused.

Who does she date? Who does she fuck?

I want to know.

I exit the townhouse, not bothering to lock the door behind me. I cut across Frederick Street, catching sight of Mara walking ahead in her tight black dress and ankle boots. She doesn’t wear heels often. I like how it hobbles her, slowing her pace.

It’s easy for me to track her, walking along the opposite side of the street like a disconnected shadow. I follow her to a trendy little restaurant a few blocks away, where she meets some scruffy-faced hipster in a too-tight t-shirt.

Unlike Mara and her date, I don’t have a reservation. A hundred-dollar bill pressed into the hostess’s palm solves that problem. I probably could have convinced her just by holding her gaze and letting my fingers trail across her wrist. The hostess giggles and blushes as she leads me to the table I requested, tucked away in a corner with several hanging plants shielding me from Mara’s view if she were to glance this way.

I have no problem attracting women. In fact, it’s too easy. The wealth, the fame, and the looks suck them in before I say a word. There’s no challenge.

I wonder if Mara will fall at my feet as easily as that hostess.

She doesn’t seem particularly enthralled with her date. In fact, she twitches irritably as he rests his arm across the back of her chair.

Her date yammers on about something, oblivious to her expression of boredom. He doesn’t seem to notice how she angles her body away from him, only rarely meeting his eye. When he tries to tidy her hair, she jolts away from him.

I feel a strange sense of satisfaction in her rejection of this buffoon. It would have lessened her in my eyes if she were besotted with someone so . . . pedestrian.

My pleasure evaporates as he reaches under the table to fondle her pussy.

In its place: a sharp spike of fury.

I want to rip that hand off his arm, leaving a ragged stump with a bare glint of bone.

Even in my most extreme moments, when I’ve slit the throat of someone I hated and watched their blood run down my arm, my heart rate barely rises.

The feeling of that lump of muscle pounding in my chest is something new to me—something that makes me sit back in my chair, breathing hard, hands clenched into fists on my lap.

What the fuck is happening.

I almost feel . . . jealous.

I’ve never been jealous before. Why would I? No one on this planet has anything I envy.

Yet I’ve already decided, with absolute certainty, that no one should be touching that sweet little cunt except me.

I’ve smelled her scent on my fingers.

I want it fresh from the source.

As if obeying my command, Mara jumps up from the table, shoving back her chair. I hear her hasty apologies as she throws cash by her plate. Then she leaves, abandoning her disgruntled date before they’ve even ordered their entrées.

Lucky for him—I was already planning how I’d cut off his balls with a box cutter.

He’s saved by the expedient of following Mara instead. I leave my own folded bills tucked under my unused fork.

The sky is fully dark now, thick with clouds. The wind is colder than before.

I walk back to Frederick Street, feeling a curious elation at the prospect of watching Mara alone in her room.

I like her best in her private space. It’s a look inside her mind—her comforts and preferences.

Settling myself behind the telescope once more, I see her pacing her room. Mara is a skittish horse. When she’s calm, she moves with grace. But when she’s frustrated or uncomfortable—and she was certainly both in the company of her incompetent date—she becomes stiff and withdrawn, hypersensitive to irritants.

She hauls her mattress out on the small deck attached to her room.

This is all the better for me. I can see her as clearly as a figure in a diorama.

She lays down on the futon, a pair of headphones over her ears. It takes a long time for her breathing to slow, for her to settle deeply into the mattress. Her lips move in time with the lyrics of the song.

Though she’s not actually singing, I can make out a few scattered words:

Don’t know if I’m feeling happy . . .

I’m kinda confused, I’m not in the mood to try and fix me . . .

I google the lyrics, pulling up the song on my phone, one I haven’t heard before. I play it aloud in the dark library, listening to what Mara is hearing over on the balcony.

She’s so still now that I wonder if she fell asleep. Her chest rises and falls with metronome regularity.

The breeze whispers through the hedges in the garden between us. It slides across Mara’s skin, making her shiver. Her nipples are hard, visible even through the black dress.

Why did she keep those piercings? Does she like them? Is she afraid to take them out?

I hear the soft rumble of thunder.

A few scattered raindrops hit the black paper covering the library window.

Mara stirs, feeling the rain on her skin.

I expect her to rise, to pull her mattress back inside.

But Mara seems determined to surprise me at every turn.

She sits up. Lifts her palm. Feels the rain pattering down.

Then she pulls her dress over her head and tosses it aside.

She lays down on the mattress once more, fully nude.

I let out a soft sigh, my eye pressed against the telescope.

Thunder rolls and the rain falls harder. It shatters all across her naked skin: on her thighs, her stomach, her bare breasts, her upturned palms, her closed eyelids. It falls in her partly opened mouth.

She’s soaking it in. Feeling the delicious coolness and the tiny impact of each droplet breaking on her skin.

Her expression is dreamy, floating. Soaked in pleasure. Fully relaxed for the first time since I’ve been watching her.

Again I feel that strange, squirming feeling in my guts.

Jealousy.

The rain falls harder, soaking her hair, drenching the mattress, chilling her skin.

She doesn’t give a fuck.

Mara reaches between her thighs. She begins to stroke her fingers back and forth across her pussy lips. Touching herself lightly, delicately.

Her lips part wider, allowing more rain into her mouth.

The rain beats against the side of the house. A bolt of lightning sizzles across the sky, illuminating Mara’s shining body like a camera flash. Every detail stands out in sharp relief: the long column of her throat, the divot of her collarbone, the points of her nipples, the long, flat expanse of her abdomen, the delicate bones of her hands, the slender fingers slipping inside of her.

I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.

She’s bronze as a statue in the purplish light. If I could sculpt her exactly like this, it would be my greatest work.

I want to pour molten metal over her, freezing her in time forever.

I put my own hand down the front of my pants, feeling the thick rod of my cock, painfully hard.

My skin feels feverish.

I want to be out where she is, drenched in rain, touching that cold flesh . . .

I pump my cock in time with the motion of her hand.

Her pace quickens, back arching, head thrown back.

I fuck my hand harder and harder, imagining I’m about to explode over her body, hot cum raining down on her harder than the storm.

Her eyes squeeze tightly shut, her cries drowned out by the rain. Her thighs clamp around her hand, body shaking.

I’m cumming for the second time today, a hot flood that pours over the back of my hand, dripping down onto the floorboards.

I can’t tear my eyes from the telescope.

I can’t stop looking at her for a single second.