Page 34 of There Are No Saints

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9

Cole

Ihad 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 Egoproclaimed 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.

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