The Voyeurs: Feeling/Seen (Patreon)

It was a stupid fantasy, Pippa knew. Seb and Julia were bad, but she was no better. They’d laid the trap, but she’d gone barreling into it, fast as her little legs could carry her. She wasn’t the hero and she wasn’t the victim and the two of them weren’t cackling comic book supervillains. It was embarrassing to even dream about the blame for Thomas’s death being on them.

It was worse, so much worse, to daydream about them being murderers… about taking her revenge on them… about being a good person after all that had happened.

None of them here in the land of the living were that good.

Was that why she was punishing herself? Why she hadn’t moved away? She hadn’t even done anything about the cameras in the room above her and Thomas’s apartment—her apartment. Maybe she was trying to guilt the two artistes. Shame them with still being there after all that had happened.

Maybe she wanted them to punish her.

Maybe she still wanted what she’d gone to Seb’s exhibition for.

That was the worst possibility of all, but there was a thrilling obscenity to it. She was waist-deep in the muck anyway. Of course it was tempting to dive in, over her head, breathe it in, feel it in her pores and her lungs and her belly and… between her legs.

Pippa thought, again, of revenge. There was a self-flagellating air to the fantasy—she knew it was sick and toxic and unhealthy. But better to think of that indulgent heroes-and-villains scenario than how she’d had Seb inside her, how many times she’d had him in her mind. Spying on him, fantasizing about him… fondly recollecting what they had done, before she’d found out Thomas had died for that orgasm of hers.

Puffing up her cheeks, Pippa blew the air out of her lungs like she could purge some of her swirling thoughts with the exhale. Did she want to drown in being an awful person? Did she want revenge? Or did she just want to feel something other than guilt and recrimination?

Seb was home alone; no Julia, even though she was back from the dead. And why were there still no curtains on his floor-to-ceiling windows? Why was he taunting her with still being able to see them? Was it a taunt at all? Or was it still an enticement?

Did he think she wouldn’t take him up on that temptation? Did he think she would?

She couldn’t keep watching. She had to do something. She opened her laptop. She wrote five words in a text document. She sent the print-out over to his apartment.

Seb looked up from his newspaper—so satisfying to make him dance to her tune, even a little—to make him feel being watched. He cast a glance out the window; Pippa resisted an absurd urge to wave. Then he went to the other room and picked up the print-out with its five big words.

The cameras are still up.

He read, read again, dark eyes trawling over the page as if he could find something secret in the plain block letters. Then, not yet looking at her, he turned the page over, took out a marker, and wrote his own message before carrying it to the window and showing it to her across the street.

I know.

Then he got out his phone.

So stupid of her to have given him her number… but he’d probably had it all along.

“I’ve seen all you have to show me,” he said over the line—something heady about how Pippa could look through two layers of glass and see the man who was making all those tinny little words she heard. See every little face he didn’t want to show her, going with the words he did want her to hear. Or maybe it was the other way around.

Impersonal and intimate all at once.

“That sounds rehearsed,” Pippa snapped. “Do you keep telling Julia that or just yourself?”

He was silent. The line was still open.

“I watched you,” she reminded him. “With her. With all those other girls. And I remember how you were with me. I know Julia doesn’t mind that you fucked me—but does she care that you came harder with me than you do with her?”

He still didn’t say anything. And Pippa wouldn’t let him.

“It’s your turn to watch now,” she told him, hanging up.