We should get one thing straight from the outset: Samantha wasn't in the habit of taking her clothes off in front of strangers.
We should get one thing straight from the outset: Samantha wasn't in the habit of taking her clothes off in front of strangers. Sure, she might have thought about it once or twice, but she never figured she'd actually do it. Especially not strangers who knew where she lived.
She'd been a little uncomfortable when she'd first taken the apartment; it was weird for her, a country girl, to be living in the city with a picture window right across from another apartment. The rental agent had explained that this apartment building had been built before the other one that once the picture window had looked out over a beautiful view of the lake. But a few years ago, the high rise had gone up across the alley, and now the view was of some other person's living room. Not that it had inspired the landlord to lower the rent or anything but Samantha didn't care; she was just glad to have an apartment after her long and frustrating search.
Besides, the second she'd seen the picture window facing the apartment across the alley, her mind had turned to the idea of taking her clothes off in front of it, and the deal was closed. Not that she thought she'd actually do it, mind you. Samantha wasn't exactly a good girl; in fact she really wasn't a good girl; in fact she wasn't anything even remotely like a good girl, but she drew the line at taking her clothes off in public. Her provocative clothing was nothing more than a matter of physical geography, albeit one she relished. She didn't go out of her way to display her full hips, her large breasts, her thick, strong legs they just sort of displayed themselves, and she liked it that way. Samantha's tasteful office attire was always a little dressier than necessary, maybe even slightly tighter than was necessary, showing off the swell of her it is and the curves of her ass. It never crossed the line of propriety, mind you, not quite "slutty," just, how would you say it, "body-comfortable" that worked. She drew more approving looks than she would have thought possible when she was the quote-unquote "overweight" ugly duckling living in Wisketaw, Minnesota. Funny how that happened.
Guys at the office were always asking her for dates, but after all, Samantha had moved her to "find" herself, that obscure thing people were supposed to do when they turned twenty-five or maybe twenty-nine, or in Samantha's case twenty-seven, two years late or early, depending on your perspective.
So Samantha turned her admirers down for their dinners and movies and impossible-to-eat seats at Miss Saigon and stayed home, reveling in the pleasures of her new apartment. And the pleasures of that big picture window.
Samantha would stay home weekend nights, often having turned down a date or two for the technicians up on the fifth floor or the lawyers on seven most of the bastards married or once, even, the FedEx dude, who she'd been sure was gay. She just couldn't stand the thought of going through another love affair when finally had an apartment to herself, a place where she could stretch out on the expansive, luxurious floor more luxurious than a couch would have been, even had she been able to afford one and ease out of her office clothes, enjoying the sight of herself in the big mirror on the closer door, enjoying the sight of her sexy garter belt, stockings, tight panties, sometimes even no panties, the knowledge of that making her uncomfortably but deliciously wet all day long. She could put a porn movie in the VCR, one of those "women's erotica" movies she'd discovered at the feminist porn shop recently. The porn was disgustingly PC compared to the sleaze her ex-boyfriends used to want to watch with her, but yet it was somehow unbelievably sexy precisely because it was aimed at her, like it represented the fact that everyone in the world knew she was masturbating right now or something. She would put on one of the movies and stretch out on the floor with a bottle of red wine and her vibrator and maybe even a dildo or two, enjoying the feeling of being horribly, terribly, irrevocably bad not because she was watching porn or masturbating with sex toys, but because she was drinking red wine on that immaculate white carpet, and her anxiety about losing part of her cleaning deposit was matched only by the decadent thrill she felt and laughing about it, and because she was going to be alone in this apartment for a long, delicious time.
Samantha would keep the curtains closed on that window, thinking about who might be beyond it, thinking about what they were doing. Maybe the people who lived there had their curtains open and were doing nasty things in front of the window, wishing Samantha would open her curtains so she could see them. The thought gave her a thrill. Samantha was as mush a closet voyeur as a closet exhibitionist. Once when she lived in Minnesota she'd heard her downstairs neighbors fucking. She'd fantasized about that for months, still fantasized about it sometimes when she was masturbating. When she'd found out, weeks later, that two women lived there, a handsome diesel dyke and a curvy femme, that only fueled Samantha's savoring of her illicit carnal knowledge. There's something so delicious about things you're not supposed to know, like what two lesbians sound like in the throes of lovemaking.
Now, she would fantasize about the people on the other side of those curtains. She would think about them watching her as she looked at porn and stroked herself; as she spread her broad thighs; as she tugged her skimpy panties to one side and slipped the silicone dildo smoothly into her body; as she turned the vibrator on HIGH and pressed it to her clit; as she came, screaming, to the images on the TV screen and the knowledge of sexual beings right behind her curtains, watching the red fabric ripple in the twenty-fifth-floor breeze, knowing that wind might carry her orgasmic screams to the people across the alley, or and this never failed to get her off the people in the alley many floors below.
But Samantha never actually opened the curtains not even when she was just hanging out to see who lived there. That might have spoiled the fantasy, she figured. Or would it?
Samantha discovered her very favorite video one night when she was just a little tipsy from a glass of wine and pleasantly satisfied by take-out Chateaubriand from Francesca's Italian Restaurant she'd just gotten a midmonth paycheck and wanted to treat herself. There wasn't a bite of irony in her liking it, because Samantha watched a lot of videos, having grown up in a place where "women's erotica" meant Cosmopolitan articles on "How to Give Your Man Orgasms!" At this point, she'd seen practically every so-called "sex-positive" video, both lesbian and straight, that the sex shop rented, and she was starting in on the commercial stuff out of sheer desperation. But somehow she'd missed The Hungry Gaze in her first whirlwind tour through the video section. It had been made by a tiny lesbian erotica company in Minneapolis. The company's location was an interesting coincidence, to be sure, and one that would drive Samantha even more perverse fantasies of sexual exhibition. But given how many videos Samantha had watched since moving to the city, there really wasn't that much irony in her response.
