Page 4 of Voyeur

Chapter Three

Kylie

He had to have known I was there, right?

But maybe he didn’t… maybe the guy really did just hang out on the deck in his underwear all the time.

I had been living in the mountain cabin for a few days and was starting to feel settled. I had unpacked most of my boxes, filled the small refrigerator with groceries I had to drive an hour away to purchase, and set up painting stations inside and outside.

I mostly painted outside, because what was the point of living in solitude in the mountains if you couldn’t use it to inspire your art? But I was too afraid to stay outside once darkness fell. Thanks to Ben, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever truly feel safe again.

After we’d broken up, Ben kept popping up wherever I was unexpectedly—at my job at the coffee shop near my apartment, waiting for me outside a classroom at school, on the corner of the street when I went for a run…. Despite the restraining order, he haunted me.

All I could do was report him to the police, but they could never get there quickly enough to catch him. Ben was trying to scare me, and it had worked.

He even went so far as to break into my house one night while I was out with a friend. I suspected he knew exactly where I was, and knew that it was a male friend I was seeing, and did what he did in a fit of rage and jealousy.

I came home that night and saw my apartment door wide open. I was always extra careful about locking up, especially since everything with Ben, so I knew there was no way I’d forgotten to lock it, let alone close the door. I immediately called the police.

My place was trashed. It looked like a tornado full of wild animals had blown through the apartment. Ben had ransacked everything, knocked over furniture, shredded cushions and pillows, broken glass, and stolen any cash or jewelry I had lying around.

And because he knew me and really knew how to hurt me, he destroyed the one thing he knew would break my heart the most—an antique wooden travel easel with a drawer compartment to store paint and supplies. It had been a gift from my grandmother, who was no longer alive. The easel was beautiful, useful, and held a lot of sentimental value.

He had smashed it to smithereens.

As I sobbed over the splinters, I knew I had to disappear.

He would always stalk me. He would always harass me. The police couldn’t stop him; he was crazed.

I also feared he might have bugged the place—after the hidden camera incident, I wouldn’t have put it past him to hide a spy camera or microphone in the apartment.

So even though the mountains were gorgeous, I didn’t appreciate being forced into moving. But it was the only way I could think of to keep myself safe.

I still had lingering fears, though, that somehow Ben would find me.

Spying on my superhot neighbor down the hill certainly helped take my mind off of things.

Whenever I noticed from my back window that he was outside—which seemed to be an awful lot—I scurried out to my easel and painted. Well, at least I pretended to paint. I found myself dabbing at the same tree on the canvas over and over with my brush while I watched the shirtless neighbor lift weights with his shaggy blond hair gleaming in the sun, or soak in his hot tub with his washboard abs on display.

It was during another evening of this—he was sitting in his hot tub with his back to me, I was perched behind my easel, gawking at his huge shoulder muscles—when suddenly, and very deliberately, he turned to face me and waved.

Fuck!

So, he had seen me watching him. Horrified, I wondered how long he had known.

I dropped my paints, spilling them across the deck, and ran inside, slamming the door behind me. His throaty laughter echoed faintly through the woods. He was laughing at me!

I could feel my cheeks burn and my heart race. I couldn’t believe he knew I was staring at him—what if he thought I was some kind of creep, like Ben?

But I would never do the horrible things Ben had done. I just liked admiring the physique of an attractive man.

From a purely artistic standpoint, of course.

In art school, we studied live nudes while painting, and I had never reacted this way to seeing a naked guy before. There was just something captivating about the man down the hill that I couldn’t quite explain.

I stood with my back against the wall of the kitchen, then slid down to a seat on the floor, cringing at how unsubtle I was. I’d never been so mortified in my life.

Someone knocked at the door, breaking the silence.

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