Ten to eight. Fai's husband would be home in twenty minutes. Standing in their little balcony kitchenette, surrounded by the noise of Bangkok, a mosquito feasting unnoticed on her ankle, she immersed her hands into the soapy water once again and continued her vigil of the room across the street. Through a gap in the curtain of the apartment opposite she could see a little slice of someone else's life, and how that someone else spent those precious hours when they believed themselves away from people's prying eyes.
Fai's gaze travelled over the expanse of creamy thigh, the jutting hip bone, the trailing fingers and watched, inscrutable, as the woman on the bed slid her knickers down to tangle around her ankles. Sensuously, as if they belonged to someone else, the woman caressed her thighs. She was teasing herself. Fai had seen this before. The woman liked to build up her own anticipation, work herself up to it. It was as if she was trying to submerge herself in her pleasure, each stroke of her skin erasing a little bit more of the outside world until the only thing that existed was her and her body in all its voluptuous glory. This was the fourth time this week, which Fai knew about anyway, and it was only Tuesday. Three times yesterday and once today. The woman was insatiable. And so was Fai's need to watch this nameless woman as she regressed, surrendering to her desire to fulfill her most base of instincts. In her kitchenette, obscured from view, Fai felt like a scientist in a lab, calmly recording her observations. She was an ethologist cataloguing behaviour.
The woman was massaging the insides of her thighs. Fai could see the tendons on the back of her hands stand out as she exercised all of the constraint she could muster to keep from giving into herself. It wouldn't be long before her forbearance would wear thin. Fai held her breath, it was witnessing this moment that she had begun to crave, that had driven her out onto the balcony to stand with her hands in the sink, pretending to do the washing up, for almost three months now. Even the nights when her husband was home and she couldn't find an excuse to go and stand outside getting eaten alive by mosquitoes she would picture it. That moment, the moment of surrender, played out in her mind's eye in glorious technicolour.