In malls, Pedro had long ago noticed, the food and drink stores were almost always on the first floor and the specialty fashion stores on the second or third. He thought maybe this was psychological. Maybe store designers subconsciously tended to lower the eateries since eating was more basic, more elemental, than shopping for your image.
Here at Almeida mall, where Pedro worked as head janitor, females outnumbered men by a large margin, because of what was happening. The mall was a real woolfest, in fact; tool sections in the Sears and Roebuck's were hard to find these days, while fashion outlets like the Papayas proliferated.
An exception to the rule about fashion shops, the Papayas was not only on the first floor but next to the spare corridor that led to the janitor's closet and, beyond it, the loading dock. Despite its less than ideal location, the Papayas was popular and as Pedro made his frequent trips to the closet, he saw a steady stream of maidenly striplings who passed in and out of the Papayas all day long.
When he got in one of his moods Pedro loved more than anything to stand around the Papayas and stalk the dewy debutantes who shopped there. Transfixed with lust and curiosity, he made up a daughter one day and stepped in, pretending to be shopping for her birthday. The girls were aware of him, wearing sunglasses indoors, staring at their backsides as he stood behind them around the circular racks of clothes. But nothing happened. There were no consequences.
Emboldened, he started doing it regularly, for hours sometimes, particularly when it was summer as it was now and the Papayas blossomed with maidenly young flesh, girls in scanty outfits that left most of their smooth and sunbronzed skin bare.
He loved standing around in the Papayas.
He acted casual and took his stray chances to eyeball the spritely nieces and cousins as they ranged through the store's selection, plainly thinking of this as their domain and oblivious that a man might be watching them even as he stood in plain sight. They did girlish things as though at a slumber party. They held bras over their chests coyly and giggled, or one might lift a pair of shorts up to another's lap and study it, shaking her head disapprovingly. Sometimes they would notice him. They would glare angrily and clam up or even gather their things and leave, grossed out.
He wondered when the clerks would wise up and ban him but they never did. In fact, it struck him one day that they actually seemed oddly languid, never smiling and bright like the clerks at other stores but sour, almost frowning, with the vacant demeanor he associated with haughty fashion models. He'd once idly imagined a dirty sci-fi movie that might've had characters like the Papaya girls in it. "The Stepford Co-Eds," it would be called.
The clerks didn't seem to mind even when, deranged with lust, Pedro started sneaking into the dressing rooms, brazenly picking through the leftover clothes where he sometimes found little nuggets—a powderpuff-white liquid bra, for instance, that he'd stolen away with, back to his trailer. A cute blonde, never noticing she was being followed, had tried it on, found it not to her liking, and left it in the changing room.
When Pedro got the bra home he smelled it carefully: mostly its odor was of new clothes and showrooms but he could tease out a shade of female flesh, the salty scent of the blonde's jiggling biscuits. When he masturbated into the bra he used a condom and a surgical glove; he wanted to save that smell as long as he could.
From then on, on his Papayas panty raids, he went through the motions of being sneaky. Waiting until no one was looking to steal into a dressing room; peeking past the lip of the door before he left to avoid being seen. But sometimes—and this was incredible to him—the clerks would catch him anyway. They'd look right at him, stepping out of a changing room for girls, and just make him blankly and look away.
This made Pedro even more uneasy than if they'd just busted him. It also steeled him, though. The next night, brave with lust, he used his janitor's key to plant a camera in the Papayas's inside dressing room. He was good at that sort of thing. Its signal went out over the store's wireless Internet, which left Pedro at some risk of getting caught, but there was no other way to fuse the uplink. Anyway, he wasn't that concerned. If someone at the company's IT department noticed the bandwidth the uplink was consuming—the camera got a good, clear image—they still wouldn't know anything unless they somehow deduced the URL and password Pedro'd set up. Anyone with that kind of information could turn him in. Of course, they could also use their browser to watch the goings on when the luscious twenty-something lassies stripped. So even if his spying rig were ever discovered, maybe, if that seduced them, his secret would stay safe.
Pedro mostly peeped on his delicate gooselings from his trailer in the mall parking lot now, because this allowed him to fantasize more fully. This time of year he liked turning up the window AC and checking out the HD picture on his 42-inch, as the girls shopped for shorts and panties in lighter fabric to keep their punky asscracks and sapling fruitpies free from perspiration even on sweaty days in August. He liked how they played with belts of plastic seashells looped through frilled denim miniskirts. But mostly, he liked Desiree.
Today Pedro had once again snuck into the Papayas dressing room. He was looking at his portable, battery-operated monitor past the thin wall into the next room. Through the camera mounted there he watched Desiree, his obsession, try on clothes as he slowly masturbated into a pair of bikini bottoms she'd just tried on. He thought about the girl he'd seen discard them. Desiree. He'd seen her duck into the changing area with them and leave without them, and stole after her to retrieve them. She had come back to find her previous room was now occupied and took the other, allowing Pedro to supervise her as he pleasured himself on her discarded underthings in the next room. If perverted onanist voyeurism were an Olympic event, this feat would have been a difficulty of perfect ten. Yet here they were.
And there she was even now, just aligning into place a scooped red underwire bra and a demislip of a brief with a broad waistband logoed "Super Star." He'd seen the outfit in one of the many hundreds of Elizabeth's Riddle catalogs he had hoarded back at the trailer.
He frigged himself slowly but deliberately, wanting to wait, to ride this wave of perverted pleasure even as its intensity threatened to overwhelm him. He was standing, the screen inches from his eyes on a tiny corner shelf at shoulder level for laying aside keys and other pocket goodies as one changed. Desiree's room had a shelf too. She'd put her piffling drugstore purse on it. Pedro looked at the crisp image of the purse on the screen and just a moment later a jangling ringtone sounded. She fished her cellphone out.
Had he known that was coming?
"'Lo?"
A pause. He could only hear half the conversation. She turned about, presenting her luscious ass in her Super Star panties. They made her look like a savory sample of buttercake.
"Yes, I remember that," said she, into the phone. The camera had no sound connection but he could hear through the thin-wooded dressing room walls. "I'm in your store right now."
