Jim lived in the city.
He lived in a high rise apartment which he could barely afford and which left him very little extra income at the end of the month to actually enjoy the advantages the city had to offer. As time passed, he began his hobby of watching. Call him a voyeur, he did not mind. He saved his pennies and purchased first a good set of high range binoculars. Then, when he became bored with them, he invested in a fine telescope. And he became a watcher.
Over time, he developed his own habits. Yes, you could call it an obsession. He did not mind. He kept a notebook by his window to record the daily comings and goings of his favorite subjects. He tracked what time they left in the morning and what time they returned. He liked to find variances and tried to imagine what had kept them half an hour late from returning home. It was the variety that intrigued him.
One of his favorite subjects was a lovely woman he called Jenny. He had no way of knowing her real name nor did he know her actual address, only that she lived in one of the high rise buildings between 50th and 52nd street, between Park and East. He could undoubtedly pin down her exact location if he tried but he was an observer, not a stalker, so he was sufficiently happy to have this much data on her.
Her routine was very regular; she left for work between 5:35 and 5:45 every morning and returned between 6:25 and 6:35 every evening. There were of course variances in her return if she stopped off for shopping (as would be evident by her returning home with filled shopping bags) or if she met friends or the like after work.
When she did return straight home, her routine was very regular as she would open the door, shut and bolt it tightly behind her, call her cat (whom he called cat for simplicity sake), drop her keys and purse on the small table by the door, bend down to pet cat, remove her coat if she was wearing one, hang it in the small closet by the door and step through the kitchen to the bath that Jim could not see from his window. He assumed it was a bath. He could see parts of her kitchen and all of her living room and bedroom from his window. The bathroom was ostensibly next to the kitchen and across the hall from the bedroom. The bedroom and living room shared one long wall between them.
Both opened into a small hallway. The kitchen was a short step to the right from the bedroom and the left from the living room. There was a small wall in the kitchen which provided another blind spot for Jim where she had a table and chairs to eat upon or so he assumed. He doubted she stood to eat.
On Friday nights, she always brought home take-out Chinese. On the occasional weeknight, she might order a pizza delivered from Pizza Roma's. She rarely had out of town guests but when she did she apparently enjoyed taking them to the theatre. She worked in an office that required her to dress rather sedately but on the weekends she enjoyed jeans and a casual shirt. She did not jog nor did she apparently exercise regularly. However, she did go to church every Sunday morning.
