Liz had been acting strangely towards me all evening. I had arrived home from work late and I could immediately tell that something wasn't right. We ate dinner in relative silence. I tried to make conversation and she answered my questions, but didn't ask any in return. After dinner I asked if she wanted to go out somewhere, but she said she didn't really feel like it, so she spent the evening having a bath and doing her nails and other girly things while I watched TV with her sisters, Vicky and Anne, and her brother Charlie.
It wasn't like Liz to give me the silent treatment. She had always been one of those people who said exactly what she thought, which was one of the things I loved about her. I knew she was starting to get a little tired of our living arrangements. In a weird sitcom-like plot, I had moved in with her family after we got engaged. Since then we had been trying to save up to buy our own house, but progress was slower than we would have liked. We were slowly saving towards a down-payment, but we were both young with entry-level jobs, so this was not happening as fast as we would have liked. And we knew that it was a false economy to buy something too small that we didn't really want, so for now we were stuck living with my in-laws. To be fair, Liz's parents had plenty of money, and had offered to help us out with a loan, but we were both adamant that we wanted to do this by ourselves.
At about eleven o clock I decided that I was going to bed and to my surprise Liz perked up and said that she was coming too. We got to the bedroom, where I expected her to embark upon the needlessly long bedtime ritual that all girls seemed to have, but instead she just sat on the bed and looked at me with a serious expression.
"Do you mind sitting down for a minute Craig, I think we need to have a talk," she said.
I didn't like the sound of that. Nothing good ever starts with 'I think we need to have a talk'. The various possibilities started to swirl around in my head. Could she be pregnant? Surely not, we were always so careful! Maybe it was going to be the dreaded 'where is this relationship going?' conversation. But we had met in the flesh less than a year ago after 'dating' over the internet for a while and we were already engaged and looking to buy a house together, so how much faster could the relationship really go? Did she want to set a date? There was one other possibility, but I didn't really want to think about it. She couldn't know about that could she?
"Of course," I said, with faked casualness, sitting down on the bed next to her. Liz looked uncomfortable and appeared to make several attempts to start a sentence before one eventually came out.
"I know about your voyeur thing," she eventually blurted out.
I felt my heart sink immediately. That was it, the one thing I had been afraid of Liz ever finding out about. For a long time I had been spying on her younger sister Anne through the gap in her curtains, watching her undress and masturbate. One day she caught me looking and I was certain she would tell on me (Anne didn't really like me very much), but it turned out that she was much more afraid of me telling Liz about what I had seen. I promised never to tell anybody in return for one really good 'show', which she duly delivered. This had been a few weeks ago now and I had not attempted to spy on Anne since. I knew if Liz ever found out it would probably be the end of our relationship, but I had no reason to think Anne would ever tell and I had
hoped
the whole saga was behind us.
Surely this wasn't how our relationship was going to end. No big scene, no fireworks, no tears, just a 'you're dumped' conversation sitting on the bed? How had she found out? Had she, or someone else, spotted me looking through the window? Anne's bedroom window was secluded, tucked away around the side of the house where nobody went very often, especially at night, but it was certainly a possibility I could be spotted and it was always in the back of my mind that it could happen. But why now, weeks after I had last looked through the window? Maybe Anne had confessed all in a wave of guilt. Or maybe in a moment of stupidity she had told one friend in confidence, who had told one friend, who had told two friends and so on, the gossip spreading around the small town until it eventually got back to Liz. That was probably a more likely explanation.
"Oh," was all I could manage in reply.
"I wasn't spying on you," said Liz, "I promise I wasn't. I was just looking up something online before you got home and I saw a bunch of websites in the page history thing."
"Wait, what? Hold on a minute, what do you mean?" I said.
"Craig, there's no point in denying it, nobody else uses my PC. Hidden cam porn dot net? Dream amateurs dot com? My voyeur tube dot net? Ring any bells?"
"Oh that!" I said, trying my best to contain my relief.
It was true; I had been looking at those websites. When I was in the early days of my obsession with Anne, I started researching voyeurism to learn what I could about the fetish, wondering if it was Anne I really liked or just the thrill of watching someone who didn't know they were being watched. I did find the sites a turn-on and I spent a bit of time jerking off to hidden cam videos, but I soon found that it was no substitute for the real thing. I knew I should have done something to 'delete my history' on Liz's PC, but I'm not very good with computers. I made a mental note to find out how to do it, but unfortunately I got caught up with other things and I never quite got around to it. It was my own fault, I was lazy about covering my tracks and now I had been busted.
"Look, I'm not judging you," continued Liz. "I know that most guys watch porn sometimes and it doesn't really mean anything. And I guess of all the things you could be into, voyeurism isn't really
that
bad. I mean it's not like you're into bondage or... like..." Liz struggled to think of another example.
"Bestiality?" I offered
"Yeah, something like that," she said. "You're not into anything like that are you?"
"No, of course not," I said, laughing. Under normal circumstances I would have been very uncomfortable with this conversation, but I was so relieved that Liz didn't know about my episodes with Anne, that everything else seemed tame in comparison.
"So, just voyeurism then?"
"Yes, I don't know why, I just like watching girls masturbate I guess." I tried to concentrate on the watching girls masturbating part rather than the spying bit as it seemed less creepy.
