The Terraces
As an Australian living in the UK, I've always found the whole terraced house thing a little bizarre - a row of houses, all connected to each other, sharing a dividing wall, their gardens separated by a fence at best.
I grew up in a moderately sized detached house on a big block on Sydney's northern beaches. The houses were all far enough apart that you had to make a bit of an effort to go and see your neighbour.
These days, I live with my wife, Rachel, in a terrace house in a city in southern England. We're both in our mid-thirties and have been in the house, which is in a quiet cul-de-sac, for about five years.
Here, I can walk out into my backyard and find myself face to face with the guy next door. When I walk down the street in the evening and I see a ground-floor window with a light on, I instinctively look in - and then have to quickly avert my eyes as a startled neighbour looks back at me. In short, it's a style of living where it's very difficult not to peer directly into other people's lives.
However, in the five years we've been in the house, I've slowly become used to not "seeing" the neighbours - to maintaining this weird, slightly uptight British facade whereby we can go about our business in our backyards without acknowledging each other's presence. Indeed, I've started to find it quite off-putting when people hail me from a few gardens away. "Don't you know how this works?" I think to myself.
Several months ago, the couple directly across the road from us sold up and moved back to Ireland. The place was vacant for a while, then a middle-aged couple bought it, spent a few weeks freshening it up and then put it up for rent. When the real estate agent held open-house viewings, I would stand in the upstairs bedroom that overlooks the street in our place - which we've turned into my study - and surreptitiously check out the potential tenants.
On the third such viewing, I spotted a moderately attractive woman - in her early forties at a guess - approaching the house. Her lustrous shoulder-length copper-coloured hair shone in the morning sunlight and her low-cut dress gave me an excellent view of her extensive pale cleavage. I waited in the room, pretending to be working, while stealing glances at the front door opposite and was eventually rewarded with one more eyeful of those beautiful breasts as she left.
Naturally, I spent the next few weeks replaying those sublime cleavage views whenever I had a quiet moment, all the while constructing elaborate fantasies in which the woman moved into the house, we became friends and, well, one thing led to another and I got to see so much more than just a flash of cleavage.
Then, one day, as I was on my way back from walking our dog, I noticed some traffic cones set up in front of the empty house. Nearby, a sign on a telegraph pole announced that parking was prohibited as a moving van was due the next day.
Of course, I spent the following day sitting in my office working, and sure enough, just after 11am, a big green moving truck pulled up to the opposite kerb. A couple of burly blokes hopped out and began opening up the back of the truck as an unfamiliar car pulled up behind. The driver's side door opened and there she was. The sun was just high enough to cast light into the street between the two rows of houses and as she walked to join the movers, the woman's hair sparkled like it was on fire. And yes, that delicious cleavage was once more on display.
Although all of the houses in the street - Victorian terraces built to house workers on the nearby railway line - have the same basic two-up-two-down layout, they've all had work done on them over the years, so now no two are the same. Upstairs, however, there's generally only two choices for the master bedroom: either facing the street or facing the garden at the back.
Our street is really narrow - there's a footpath on one side and parking on the other, and that's it - so the houses are particularly close together. Hence most people keep the curtains drawn in their upstairs windows, to avoid the possibility of making awkward eye contact across the street or revealing more of their lives (and bodies) than they feel comfortable with.
As I mentioned, we use the street-facing upstairs room for my office (I'm a freelance writer and editor). Our new neighbour, on the other hand, chose to use that room for her bedroom. After she had moved in, I would very occasionally see her opening the curtains to let some light into the room in the morning or pulling them closed in the evening to get some privacy, but of course I studiously looked away to avoid making that awkward eye contact.
We were soon passing each other regularly in the street. Much to my delight, she favoured low-cut tops and more often than not, displayed a significant acreage of luscious cleavage. Every so often, we would stop to chat - her name was Claire, I discovered - and it was all I could do to keep my eyes away from her chest.
Well, actually, I regularly failed to do so. If she looked away while she was talking, my eyes would quickly flick down and steal a glance at those wonderful tits without her noticing. Well, again, I wasn't always successful at that last part either, but she seemed to take my lecherous looks with good humour, crinkling her luminous green eyes, a wry smile on her lips.
As you may have guessed, I am, without question, a boob man. A nice pair will turn my brain to jelly and my cock to steel. In fact, I consider myself to be something of a breast connoisseur. I have a Tumblr blog dedicated to nice-looking breasts and spend far too many hours scrolling through other people's tit-based Tumblrs looking for breasts that fit my aesthetic requirements - big but not too big (I find really big breasts kinda grotesque - I just find myself feeling a bit sorry for the women who have to carry them around; they must do terrible things to their backs), a bit of hang, nice and pale. Rachel's tits are truly lovely, a large B-cup and wonderfully soft, but I just had a feeling that Claire's were a step up. They were certainly a bit larger - more like a generous C-cup.
During our brief chats and even sometimes when we passed on the street, I would catch a waft of Claire's perfume - always the same one: J'adore by Dior if I'm not mistaken.
One night, after dinner, I climbed the stairs and went into my office to get a book. When I walked in, I instantly spotted Claire in the room opposite. She had her arms raised, about to close the curtains, and was looking directly at me. Our eyes locked and held. I didn't know what to do, so I froze and just stared back at her. She, too, stayed motionless, but she somehow seemed much more relaxed about the situation than I was. After a few moments that felt like a few minutes, she smiled and then drew the curtains tightly shut. I quickly grabbed my book and went back downstairs.
About a week later, it happened again. Once again, we locked eyes, but this time, she smiled straight away, before slowly taking a step back, her eyes still locked onto mine. She raised a finger to her lips, gave me a playful look and then dropped her finger from her lips and began to unbutton her shirt, her eyes still locked to mine, her lips still curled in a playful smile.
