Eric was bent over the kettle grill, with a silver canister rising out of it like a wide chimney, topped up with charcoal, and was inserting thin twists of old newsprint through holes around the base, twists that resembled nothing if not hand-rolled joints, and then setting them on fire with a long-necked lighter, attempting to set the bottom-most coals alight. One of the French doors behind him opened and Eric, blind to it, assumed it was his wife Carol, freshly inseminated and her thickish body wrapped in a silk kimono, which barely covered her panty if she was even wearing one.
"What do YOU want?" Eric thought, but did not say, as he flicked the trigger yet again.
Click. Click. Silence, as the long fingers of a hand slid between his thighs and encompassed his pantied balls. Eric's body stiffened. He froze.
"How's the fire coming?" a male voice, one all too familiar to him, asked.
"What...are you doing?" his reply.
"Don't you worry about your neighbors seeing you out here in your little panty?"
Eric swallowed. "Carol will see you."
"No she won't," Jake told him, while giving the balls a surprisingly gentle, sympathetic fondle. "She's in the kitchen. Blinds are closed. But what about your neighbors?"
Saliva had filled Eric's mouth, and once again he swallowed. "We're up high. They can't see..."
"I can see HER. Over there, past the hedge, by the pool. Not bad-looking either. Forty-something? If I can see her she can see you."
Eric felt his body relax. A little. "They'll think it's a Speedo," he said. And Jake let out a one-note laugh.
"Yeah, right! A Speedo covered with flowers."
"I don't care what they see. Or think."
"You feel nice in the silk," Jake said, giving Eric's balls a fresh fondle. It was a false appraisal: the narrow crotch, like the rest of the panty, was mere microfiber. "Bigger than I thought..."
Thought? Jake had seen Eric dressed like this for weeks and months now. What was there to be surprised about? And Jake's brown eyes, glassy and wide and seemingly lost, could often be seen, while the three of them sipped Cava in the kitchen, say, both before or after sex, staring at Eric's colorful crotch.
Is he bi? Eric had sometimes wondered.
"She's not looking at us," Jake now informed him. And Eric's body again stiffened.
"Carol?"
"No. The woman nextdoor. You know her? What's her name?"
"I...'m not sure."
"You never met her?"
"Once. She and her husband. Her dog got in our yard."
"I don't see a dog...," Jake, his hand still giving its gentle, pleasurable massage, said.
"I think they got rid of it," Eric informed him, in a rush of words. "Too..."
"She's hot. I could get into that. Nothing against Carol or anything," he was quick to add. "[You] say she's married?"
Eric clicked the lighter, as if in response, and put the upward flame to a twist, inside, mostly, the cylindrical base. He was still bent over, of course, and his lower back, above bikini panty's minimal waistband, was beginning to ache. A little.
Eric was in his early forties and Carol was two years older. While Jake, her latest and greatest lover, was thirty-something. And built like an NFL linebacker. He was in construction. Not doing it, just supervising it. Commercial construction. His father owned the business. Jake's hand felt soft. It still enclosed Eric's balls. Apparently he liked older women. And men?
"I just waved to her," Jake informed the man he was relentlessly cuckolding. "She didn't wave back. I don't think she saw me..."
Eric, bent there, staring through cylinder holes at flaming newsprint twists turning to ash, fragmented and black, had a vision of a blonde-haired spaniel with floppy ears and opaque blue eyes, chasing a ball with a bell in its center. The dog was blind having, supposedly, run headlong into a thorn bush once, but the spaniel could both chase the bell and, perhaps more tellingly, chase the rubber and saliva smell of it.
Mrs. Lewis, their nextdoor neighbor, just beyond the hibiscus hedge Eric's grandfather had planted, this side of a low coral rock wall, stood smiling as Eric, who can not be more than six, or seven years old, throws the slobbery ball again and again and again, and the beyond-happy dog, though blind, chases it and brings it back.
"She hears the bell," the elderly woman tells Eric, in her soft, melodic southern accent.
"You think you could introduce us?" Jake now asked.
"I don't know her," Eric shot back.
"Well maybe," Jake said, after a pause, his hand pulling back, "I'll go over there someday and introduce myself. Is her husband--"
"What about Carol?" Eric said in surprising defense of his adulterous wife.
Eric sensed a shrug of wide shoulders. "Oh I can still do Carol," Jake advised. "But while I'm out here..."
