On the Balcony

What I am going to write about happened at a strange time for me, during a sad, crazy, and yet somehow bittersweet summer.

My husband Mark—now my ex-husband--was an airline pilot. Before I had met him, he had been engaged to a gorgeous, shapely flight attendant named Sherry. Sherry left him and married a doctor and, he told me, broke his heart. I should have listened when my friends said not to take up with someone who was on the rebound and was still bouncing around, but Mark was sweet to me and clever and after only a few months he asked me to marry him.

Just before our first anniversary, Mark informed me that he was scheduled to fly to Chicago on our big day. He said we could celebrate when he got back to Denver the next day. No way, I thought. I planned a romantic surprise. I knew he always stayed at the Chancellor Hotel when he was in Chicago. I flew there myself on a later flight. At first the hotel manager was reluctant to even tell me what room my husband was staying in, but I produced my ID and and some wedding pictures dated one year earlier. I flirted with him some too. I guess he had a sentimental streak because he gave me a copy of the electronic key to Mark's room.

I let myself in. I was hoping that Mark would be out for dinner—he often ate with other pilots when he was in Chicago, he told me. However, when I went in, I heard the shower running. Even better. I iced the champagne I had brought. I turned down the bed and scattered rose petals on the sheets. I took off my clothes and scattered some rose petals on me. I lay there in the twilight, thinking how surprised Mark would be.

Of course, he was very surprised. So was I. So was Sherry. They came out of the bathroom completely naked. Mark had a huge erection. I guess they had been fooling around in the shower and now they had adultery on their minds.

I don't remember much about that night. I don't even remember what I said to Mark and Sherry. I do remember thinking, it's because of her body, her breasts, her boobs are bigger than mine and her rear is smaller. I remember trying to cover myself up so that she wouldn't see that I was a weaker competitor. I don't remember getting dressed and going downstairs. I know I ended up in the hotel bar and got completely, totally, stinking, falling-down drunk. I remember hoping some lonely businessman would come into the bar and I would seduce him. We'd be making out wildly on the elevator and, by happenstance, Mark and Sherry would get on the elevator. However, no likely male came into the bar. I walked down the street and checked into another hotel and the next morning, with a throbbing headache, I flew back to Denver. That afternoon I got in touch with a divorce lawyer who had a reputation for ruthlessness. By June, we had settled. I got quite a lot of Mark's money.

So, that summer, I moved out of the house where Mark and I had been living. It was basically mine but I couldn't stand to live there. I moved into a third floor apartment while I was looking for a house of my own. I'm a school teacher—fifth grade—so I was off for the summer. For that matter, after stripping my husband of most of his worldly wealth, I probably could have avoided working for several years.

I did very little that that summer. Woke up late. Read trashy novels and magazines. Watched some soaps. Shopped a lot. I hardly saw my friends. All I could talk about was Mark, and how pissed I was at him, and I knew that they were getting bored with my whining. I certainly had no interest in dating.

And I sunbathed. I know, I know, it's not "politically correct" to sit in the sun these days—you get skin cancer and make yourself look old and leathery before your time. But I grew up in an era when you didn't really look healthy, you just didn't look right, somehow, if you were pale between June and September. And somehow, I didn't care, that summer, about my future health, so I spent at least an hour a day in the warm Colorado sunshine, reading my trashy books and drinking white wine.

One Saturday afternoon in June, I noticed a kid on the balcony next to mine. Probably in his late teens or early twenties, he was not an attractive young man. He was overweight, quite a bit overweight. He had freckles and a buzz cut, which gave him a 1950's air, and he wore a baseball cap facing the wrong way. He looked like the kind of kid who lived in a basement playing video games and stuffing his face with junk food all the time. In fact, I thought I could see some orange cheese-puff dust on his hands and around his mouth. The only thing remarkable about him was the look of lust on his face. I was wearing a not-so-revealing, not-so-flattering one-piece swimsuit, yet he was staring at me as if I were a fully nude supermodel. I had never seen such a shameless look of desire. His piggy little eyes were so hungry for me, it was embarrassing, and yet ... and yet, I somehow basked in his crude longing for me. I had no clear idea why, but inspiring this kind of lust made me feel better than I had felt since that terrible evening in Chicago.

We didn't acknowledge each other's existence that first day or for many days to come. That first day, I stayed out on my balcony until the sun had disappeared behind the building next door. Several times I put on suntan lotion, rubbing it slowly into my skin. When I went inside, I ran a bath, got into the warm water, and slowly brought myself to climax while imagining this young man watching me masturbate.

I asked around. I made inquiries. No one in the building seemed to know this young man well. According to one woman who lived across the hall from me, the kid's name was Jackson. He lived with his father and was studying to be a mechanic at a community college. I couldn't find out much more than that about him.

He wasn't on the balcony during the week. I suppose he had a job, maybe as an apprentice mechanic. On weekends, though, he was always there. Although he was overweight, he had a starved look on his round face. I began to look forward to Saturdays and Sundays, and finally began to live for them. I went to the mall and bought several skimpier, more flattering bikinis. I even started working out and went on a diet to get in better shape. We still had no contact, Jackson and me, no communication. Often I would lie on my tummy, feeling his eyes on my bare back, my legs, my butt. I worried that he thought my bottom was too big. On other days, I was on my back, pretending to read my book or a magazine without looking up, or I pretended to be napping. Then I worried that he thought my breasts were too small.

By the Fourth of July I was sunbathing without my swimsuit top. The first time he came out on the balcony and saw my breasts, I heard him gasp. I guess he didn't mind their size. I was pretending to be asleep, but I was wearing dark sunglasses. Through my slitted eyelids and behind my dark lkenses, I watched him, watched his face. I heard him pull his zipper down. There was a brick railing, so I couldn't see his lower body, but I could tell he was stroking his penis. In just a few minutes, he rolled his head back, his face contorted, his whole body shuddered, and he moaned like a sick walrus.

Why was I obsessed by being seen by him? I was as fascinated by being looked at as Jackson was with looking at me, maybe even more so. His viewing me was like sweet cold water to a woman lost in the desert, yet I truly have no idea why. Possibly because, in my imagination anyway, he had never seen a woman nude; not a real living, breathing woman, anyway, maybe one on the Internet. Being his first woman intrigued me. All his life, he would compare other women to this strange sunbather who had once lived next door to him. And then too, at that odd, awful juncture of my life, having anyone—even this unattractive boy—so interested in me, so unquestioningly approving of my body, so nakedly attracted to me physically-- well, this was a powerful pump for my uninflated ego.

By August I was sunbathing in the nude. I could practically feel Jackson's eyes on my private places, feel them push my thighs apart to give him an unobstructed view of my secet parts. When he had finished drinking me in, he would throw back his head and get this twisted, sweet, goofy, almost spiritual look on his face that told me he had climaxed while staring at my sexual organs.

That month I found a house in the canyon above Boulder. There were no next door neighbors, up there; no one would be peeping at me. Somehow that was okay. I spent most of that month packing. I had stopped sunbathing during the week.

It was Friday, and I was moving out of my apartment on Sunday. I did something I had never done before. My ex-husband Mark had asked me to, but I had always told him that it would make me look immature, and that it was sick for him to want me to look like a little girl. But, for this last Saturday, I decided to shave off my pubic hair. I wanted to show him, I wanted Jaqckson to really see my privates, to see my full lower lips, to see inside me.

On Saturday I was waiting for him. It seemed like I had been waiting forever out there. It was a cloudy day, an unseasonably cool day, the kind of day when no one in her right mind would sunbathe, but nothing could have kept me off that balcony, not even a blizzard. Shivering, I heard him talking to his father; his father had never been around on Saturday afternoons. What if Jackson didn't come out? Or what if his father came out instead? What if ...

Then, I head the door in his apartment close and in a few minutes, I saw his dad go out the front door of the building, heading for the parking lot. Jackson appeared. He stood at the railing, leaning over. For the first time he was holding a camera, a digital camera with a big zoom lens, and it was aimed at my hairless crotch. At first, this panicked me. I imagined my image being spread all over the Internet, imagined being the featured nude on a pay-for-view voyeur site. "Click here to see a thirty something shaved slut sunbathing on the balcony next door." I had no interest in being seen by the world; I only wanted Jackson to see me. And yet ... and yet I imagined him looking at these pictures in five years, in ten years, in twenty years, seeing me, my body frozen in time, looking forever as I had looked that summer, my thirty-third summer, never growing older, still as exciting as desirable as I was long ago.

I reached for my suntan lotion and poured some into my palm. I rubbed the lotion across my small breasts. My little brown nipples popped up with excitement. I rubbed lotion on my stomach and my thighs. I heard his camera clicking, clicking. I put some more lotion in my palm and spread my legs wide. He was leaning dangerously far over the balcony railing to get the best possible shots.

I opened my lower lips so that he could see the entryway into my body. I put a finger inside me, in and out. I was very, very wet in there. I lifted myself up a bit from the chaise lounge, so that my anus was exposed to his sight as well. I didn't want to hold anything back. I wanted to be totally revealed to him. I began tracing circles around my clitoris. It was too sensitive to touch directly but my figners circled it, tickled it, teased it. I knew it would not take long. The intensity of my pleasure heightened, I arched my back, and I had my orgasm. The climax flowed from deep inside me and washed over me. It was wrenching, exhausting, shattering, the closest thing I have ever had to an "all body" orgasm.

When I opened my eyes, I was shocked. Jackson was standing in teh nude with one foot on his railing and one on mine. What if someone looked up and saw him? Would they call the police. Would we both be arrested for indecent exposure? My balcony and his was separated only by about two feet, but Jackson was not an athletic young man. He teetered for a second and I feared he'd plunge to the ground three floors below, breaking his neck. How would I feel then? But then but he managed to jumped onto my balcony, landing with an "ooof."

He stood over me. I kept my eyes closed though he had to know I wasn't asleep. If he touched me, I wouldn't stop him. I had probably led him to believe that I was interested in sex and I thought it would be wrong and hypocritical of me to stop him. But I hoped it wouldn't come to that. And apparently he understood our unspoken rule, that our relationships was "for the eyes only." He simply stood there, looking down at me. He took a few close-up pictures and then put his camera down and started stroking his penis. My hand was still at my crotch, and I opened my lips wider so that he could see better. His penis was small, and although it was standing straight up, it was only about two inches long, like an aroused little boy's penis. I sensed that he was dying to touch me, that he was struggling not to feel me, but that he realized that physical contact would somehow be a betrayal of our pact.

It took him almost no time at all to rub himself to climax. He alternatively squeaked and bellowed with pleasure. His orgasm was a match for the one I'd had moments before. When I was married and didn't feel like making love, I used to let Mark masturbate on me. Somehow it excited him to get his stuff all over me, I think it made him feel somehow superior, but I didn't mind. It was fascinating to me to watch the teaspoon or so of Mark's male fluid come welling out of the tip and dripping down on me. But Jackson's ejaculation was of another order altogether. It seemed like three times as much semen came from his tiny penis as had come from Mark's. The first few drops fired sprayed wildly out of the tip and flew like liquid rockets onto the glass door leading into my apartment. Then a long string fell across my breasts. Somehow several gobs landed in my dark hair. It smelled like mushrooms, He draped another strand across my tummy and more landed on my newly-shaved pubis. There was semen on my cheeks and chin and a pool of semen on my breastbone. My God, somehow there was white stuff on my knees, my feet, and later, I discovered, on my tomato plants and barbecue grill. I wondered if he would ever stop ejaculating. Finally, when just a few last drops were dribbling from his penis, he picked up his camera and took one last picture of my body covered with his semen.

I opened my eyes and for the first time, looked right at him. He silently mouthed the words, "Thank you.." I nodded, and silently replied, "No, thank YOU." He wasted no time getting back to his own apartment. The last I ever saw of Jackson was his plump, pink bottom going over his railing.

I moved the next day. For months, on weekends, I would think about him. I even though of going back to my old building, knocking on his door, and then stripping naked. I started seeing a therapist, and my relationship with Jackson gave me somethint to talk about for many sessions. My therapist recommened that I forget about Jackson, and move on with my life, and I knew myself that it was time. I started dating one of the teachers at my school and we are going to be married in a few months. But Jackson was a spark in a dark time. I hope he still remembers me, the crazy lady next door who wanted only to be looked at, and only by him. I hope he has saved his photographs of me in some locked, unnamed file in his computer. And I hope he has never shared the story of our secret relationship.