A Speculative Science Fiction Erotica Short Story By Cindy Johnson
Margette Thompson was standing in the motivational speaking section of the Barnes and Noble store wearing a blue shirt and white pants with dark blue flats. Her curly blond hair was in a ponytail and her large sunglasses hung from the neck of her shirt as she clutched her black purse over one shoulder. She leaned forward and perused the books on each shelf, not seeing the one she had been told by her friend to buy.
It was a strange feeling: that of being watched, but there wasn't anyone immediately around the area. She dropped low and scanned the books on the bottom shelf. The carpet gave a weak strain, and she turned around to see a young man with brown hair in his early twenties standing behind her. He looked to be staring intently at the books on the shelf, but he clutched his phone in his hand. Occasionally, he would glance at the phone and mouth something as though he were trying to find something specific. She ignored him and continued looking through the selection of self-help books.
After a minute or so, she couldn't shake the feeling that he was watching her. He stepped forward and crouched to look at something, but his phone was turned toward her. Margette cocked a brow and walked off, shaking her head.
The man who had been standing beside her was named Jordan Parks. He was likely the biggest pervert in the world, and he had a chronic addiction to filming women in what he called 'the wild'. He had a lengthy code to this twisted side hobby, and one of them was to clear the area if he realized that he'd been caught. Optimally, he liked to get his candid footage discretely without being noticed. The less of a presence he could be the more natural his targets were.
Jordan did this everywhere he went. He spent hours after work and on his days off patrolling retail, grocery, and department stores. His favorite thing to do was to go to the town-square in Southlake, Texas, and get prime footage of the young women from the upper class who were none-the-wiser to his personal attention. He would fill up every gig of data in his phone and then hurry home to upload the videos to his computer. There were thousands of videos: a terabyte and a half so far, and he had only started this about six months prior.
For Jordan, to see a beautiful woman-someone who took time to get ready to go out, spent a deliberate amount of time preparing her outfit, and who wore something that was sexy by all definitions-and not having a keepsake for her efforts, was the biggest crime he could imagine. He knew women felt differently. The times they had figured what he was doing they always became uncomfortable. It was a reaction that he understood and wanted to avoid, and yet the reasons were a mystery to him. If a woman wears specifically tight pants, doesn't that mean they want someone to look? If a woman wears a low-cut shirt, doesn't that mean they want someone to see that they have ample breasts? This wasn't a justification for rape or something ridiculous like that, but to Jordan, a woman in her prime looked the best she would ever look to him. He just wanted a momento, something to remember the occasion by.
His rules were rather interesting. He never ventured into the ladies room, or peered through the changing rooms. He had no interest in seeing a woman naked. It was their clothes and how they viewed themselves to themselves that fascinated Jordan. He wanted them for how they prepared themselves in public. He never followed a woman away from a location. He never interacted with one of the women he was following unless it was to ease an overwhelming discomfort during their encounter. If the woman was with a man, he still followed but took specific precautions to make their crossing of paths shorter than usual.
It was only a few weeks after that event that he acquired one of the most useful tools he had ever imagined. It was his favorite device of all the devices he had gotten and did something that nothing else could do: eased the discomfort that women felt when he followed. Having a phone with a camera in hand always made women uncomfortable. Even if they didn't know and suspected, it ruined the entire experience and made his own nerves fire at an extreme rate. Jordan had received his long awaited wristwatch camera. It was a Cube brand, and looked like a classic timepiece with a tiny camera hidden just above the logo. The camera took horizontal 1080P HD video footage, so when he had it positioned next to someone, the footage was upright. It stored 64 gigs of data-not a lot for what he wanted to do, but it did enough.
Jordan's life became dedicated to using the wristwatch day in and day out. If he didn't have it on him, he dropped whatever he was doing to go home and get it again because it was such a useful item to have. After awhile, he left his routine in Southlake to move to Austin where some of the most naturally beautiful women in the world congregated. He would walk down Guadalupe street alongside young women from UT, his watch trained on them like a hawk watching a mouse. People almost never noticed. A few were a little suspicious of why he followed them and kept his left to them at all times, but no one was the wiser.
His prize was a young mom at the grocery store wearing tight blue jeans and a white shirt. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Jordan actually reached across in front of her to grab some spices so that he could get a full frontal, keeping the watch facing her as he imitated browsing for the perfect selection. He was growing more adept in his maneuvers. Once he got enough of what he needed, he dropped the spice by the front and left his hand-basket full of groceries by the door. If anyone asked why, he would tell them that he forgot his wallet at home. A good technique, but it left him without an excuse next time for that location in the event that someone did ask. Every place where he followed someone, he had to be cautious and leave for a week or so before returning.
Jordan had a long list of places he visited each weekend: all three Half-Priced Books locations in Austin, the Target to the north and south, the Central Market off Lamar Street where some of the most gorgeous ladies he had ever witnessed liked to spend their Saturday afternoons. He loved to visit the mall, but there were so many police officers everywhere that considered him guilty before he had a chance to do anything that it was hard to go there too often. He was always alone, walking through the corridors for no apparent reason and he didn't buy anything. He only wanted to view the wildlife.
Giant events became his favorite. Christmas and St. Patrick's Day parades where beautiful women gathered with their attention on the street while Jordan moved behind them, catching their every movement, their every excited bounce and expression. No one ever suspected him of any voyeuristic activity during these events, and if anyone asked him what he was looking for, he told them that he had a group of friends waiting for him at the end of the block.
After years of this, Jordan had hundreds of thousands of videos. He deleted the ones that didn't come out well and saved his prized videos in a special folder. He had started working at a bank where moms came in with their kids and leaned over the counter to fill out credit contracts. He spent time staring at the computer, telling them that he was waiting for the program to catch up while capturing them one after the other.
His life revolved around this hobby. Sometimes he told himself that he was going to quit, that it had taken too much control over his mind, and that he couldn't have a regular conversation with a woman without the unbelievable urge to caress her with his eyes. This had become a problem, but any time he thought about quitting a situation occurred where he told himself later: "It was such a perfect moment, how could I not film her?" It was a crime to pass up that moment in the bank when the woman with the tight blue pants leaned on one leg with her middle finger in her back pocket as she signed the back of her paycheck.
Years of this passed. He continued gathering and storing video files onto ever growing numbers of external hard drives. He finally set aside his hobby and settled down with a woman named Jenny White. They were married, and the night before his wedding day, Jordan stood on the edge of a bridge by their apartment and heaved the watch-camera into the river below. He often regretted it, but he was in his thirties now, and couldn't be following young women around without being noticed. Sometimes that part of his mind got the best of him and he still whipped out his camera phone and snagged the perfect video before storing the video on a hidden dropbox account. These videos were never as good of quality as the Cube watch but he couldn't resist. He was a man, and he was weak.
When Jenny was 34, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was as though his karma had decided to cash in early. She spent three long years battling the decay of her cells before she died at the age of 36. Technology had developed cures for cancer in the last ten years, but they were so expensive that she didn't want to leave Jordan with that kind of debt to take care of all on his own. At this point, he had his own business of buying and selling parts for airplanes. It was a good job but he still couldn't afford to pay for her treatment. He spent the next two years mourning the death of his spouse.
