“I think I can see the line of his dick this time! Have mercy! Simon! He’s back. Come quick!” Jared’s voice echoed through the two-story Seattle suburb home.
Casey heard Simon’s footsteps on the reclaimed wood floor as he made his way through the house to wherever Jared was yelling from.
“Well, hello there, Mr. Gray Sweatpants,” Jared cooed.
Casey’s brows pinched while she stared at herself in the bathroom mirror and brushed her teeth.
What on earth were they talking about?
More like, who were they talking about?
She spat, rinsed and wiped her mouth, then descended the staircase to find her surrogate brother and his husband—standing by the front living-room window wearing swoony faces.
“What are you looking at?” she asked, nearly tripping over Trevor, their cat, as she joined them in the living room.
“Well, if you didn’t work so damn much and were home once in a while, you’d know that we have a new neighbor,” Jared said, tossing his floppy-on-top-shaved-on-the-sides blond hair. “And he is delicious.”
Simon rolled his blue eyes. “You can look, but you can’t—”
“Touch, yes, I know.” Jared turned and planted a kiss on Simon’s cheek. “You’re the only one I want to touch.” Then he turned to Casey and mouthed, “Not really.”
Casey snorted as she tilted her head to look where they were looking and holy flying crap, Batman!
“See?” Jared said, elbowing her. “Mr. Gray Sweatpants, meet Casey, our workaholic sister.”
“If only,” Casey muttered, unable to take her eyes off the man who was wandering around the front yard of the house across the cul-de-sac and wearing nothing but scrumptious-looking gray sweatpants that left little to the imagination—and nothing else. No socks, no slippers, no shirt. Yes, it was summer, so there was no begrudging the man his attire, but still. Was he trying to give Casey’s brothers—and anybody else who had eyeballs—a heart attack?
“You should go over and introduce yourself,” Jared said. “Say, Hello, my name is Casey. I work too much, have no time for friends, and haven’t gotten laid in—” He lifted his brows toward her. “How long has it been?”
Nine months, but she wasn’t about to divulge that.
Jared shrugged when she didn’t respond and just kept talking, his green eyes glittering. “And I haven’t gotten laid in forever. Won’t you be my neighbor with benefits?”
Simon snorted and elbowed Jared. “Leave her alone.”
“But she’s so much fun to tease.”
The two of them wandered away from the window and into the kitchen, but Casey’s feet were full of concrete and her eyes appeared to have undergone some kind of paralysis where they were unable to move from the man’s torso. He looked like he’d been carved out of damn marble.
Mr. Gray Sweatpants was carrying a handmade ceramic mug, and as he sat down on the porch swing next to the front door and propped his big feet on the railing, he took a sip from the mug as he scrolled through his phone with his other hand.
Casey’s insides clenched at just how disgustingly jealous she suddenly was of that mug and the fact that Mr. Gray Sweatpants had his mouth on that mug and not a part of Casey’s body.
Sigh.
It really had been a long time since she’d been with a man. And it wasn’t just about the sex. She loved kissing. She loved cuddling. She loved laughing at ridiculously stupid shit with someone until her sides hurt, then they spontaneously kissed her.
“You want some oatmeal, Case?” Simon called from the kitchen.
Taking one last glance at the god in the gray sweats, she sighed again, then took off to the kitchen, but not before nearly tripping over Trevor again.
“Dear God, Trev, watch it!”
He meowed and glanced up at her with his yellow-brown eyes.
Her expression softened, of course, because she actually loved this cat so freaking much, despite his asshole tendencies. Casey scooped up the moody feline and pressed a kiss to the top of his head. “And where have you been all night, Mister? Off gallivanting, I’m sure.” She glanced at the cat door in their front door and it was still swinging from where Trev had just wandered in from a night on the town. She kissed him again and was about to put him down when she noticed something attached to his collar. It was a small plastic tube of sorts.
Holding onto a squirming Trevor, she removed the tube. Inside was a rolled-up piece of paper.
She patted Trevor’s head, then set him down on the ground before heading to the kitchen, unfurling it as she went.
It read:
Hello,
It would appear your cat is two-timing you.
He/She/They come over here several times a day and meow at my door for food.
I’ve only given them a treat or two, as they seem well fed and taken care of. But I just wanted you to know that your cat is cheating on you. If I was being cheated on, I would want to know.
Sincerely,
Your cat’s hot side-piece aka The Mistress
Casey snorted and reread it a couple of times before passing it to Simon and Jared, who were giving her curious looks.
“Why that two-timing little bastard,” Simon said with a grin.
“I like how progressive the note is. Very cool,” Jared added.
“I’m going to reply,” Casey said, tearing a piece of paper off the notepad on the rolltop desk she’d refurbished for the guys.
She quickly scrawled a note.
Hello Mistress,
Why that wily little bastard. I wondered where he was taking off to. Telling me he had to stay late at work when all the while he’s been out trolling for strange. I will have a word with him. I appreciate you coming forward and the fact that you haven’t been overfeeding his cheating ass.
Much obliged,
Trevor’s pissed-off owner aka The Cuckold
She rolled her note up, then went on the hunt for her two-timing feline. As was to be expected, since he’d probably been off gallivanting all night, he was curled up in a ray of sun streaming through the living-room window. She scratched behind his ears a couple of times as she refastened the tube to his collar. “Stepping out on me, Trev? Tsk tsk. I hope whoever it is, they’re worth it.” She kissed his head, then went to find breakfast, but not before taking one more long look out the window at Mr. Gray Sweatpants.
Leo wiped the drywall dust from his hands onto his carpenter pants.
That was it for the day.
The place would be here tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day.
Normally, he loved his construction job, but when you lived where you worked, it was hard to quit at five o’clock and call it a day when the wall that needed spackling was staring at you as you ate dinner or watched television.
Which was why it was now eight o’clock on a Wednesday night in the middle of June, his stomach was trying to devour him from the inside out, and he knew his fridge would be as empty now as it was this morning.
A meow at the back door brought him out of his exhaustion fog.
The cat!
Wiping his hands for a second time, he went and opened the sliding door. “Good evening, you fuzzy-faced bastard. Back to rip more of my screens?”
The black cat with white paws and a white tip on its tail sauntered in like it owned the place, rubbing his tail against the front of Leo’s dusty pants and meowing again.
“Yeah, yeah, hold on.”
He went to the counter and grabbed the bag of treats he’d purchased and shook it a couple of times. The cat paused, sat down and stared at him. That’s when Leo went in for the little plastic tube he’d fastened to the cat’s collar two weeks ago. He could not express how happy he was that Trevor’s owner not only found the note but wrote back. And now Leo and his anonymous mystery friend aka The Cuckold were engaged in a friendly, anonymous, carrier-cat pen-pal correspondence.
Since the majority of his friends from high school were too busy, had families or had moved away, he didn’t have a ton of friends in Seattle after moving back. He found a bizarre sense of comfort in his interactions with the cat’s owner. Probably a neighbor somewhere. He dropped a treat on the floor, and Trevor gobbled it up while Leo unfurled the rolled-up strip of yellow lined paper.
He snorted at his nickname. He had no idea if the person he was corresponding with was male or female, and he’d given no indication as to his sex or gender either. It all just added to the mystery.
Hello Mistress,
That little motherfucker! FUCK! I am so sorry. You need to let me pay to replace your screen door. Please! I would love to include cash in my next note, but I fear Trevor would just dick off with the money and spend it on strange pussy and blow. Let me know if you have a PO Box or something I can send money to. Or we could do it Shawshank Redemption style where I leave you cash in a tin box under a slate rock at the base of an old tree. I did what you suggested and pureed up some caramelized onions. They added a lot of flavor depth to my soup. Before you say it’s too hot for soup, I disagree and will so until the day I die. It’s always soup season.
Take care.
-The Cuckold
So far, Leo and this mystery person had talked about all kinds of things. Their favorite movies, music, and recipes. He’d gotten to know them quite well in a short amount of time but still had no idea of their gender or their age.
He couldn’t assume that the person was male even though they called themselves a Cuckold. He was allowing himself to be called Mistress. Truthfully, it all just added to the mystery and fun of it.
He grinned at their mention of it always being soup season.
He had to agree. It was never too hot for soup.
Normally, Leo loved to cook. It was one of his few creative outlets. That and his guitar. But since he was determined to finish renovating his late grandmother’s house in order to put it on the market, he hadn’t had much time for anything—let alone a creative outlet.
He wanted to get this place on the market before the end of the year so that he and his sisters could get their inheritance and he could put his portion into starting his own construction company. He was tired of working for someone else—which was why at the moment he was jobless and only working for himself.
He wrote back to the Cuckold, declining the offer of payment for the screen, attached it to Trevor’s collar, fed the cat one more time, then booted him outside.
After a quick shower to remove the remainder of the drywall dust from his hair and skin, he tossed on a pair of denim shorts and a loose white T-shirt.
It was hot as fuck outside, and if he could, he’d have wandered around topless—like he did all day in the house as he renovated. But he planned to eat inside an establishment, and they tended to frown on their patrons arriving half-naked. This wasn’t Venice Beach.
He jumped in his white GMC pickup and backed out of his driveway, narrowly missing Trevor as he darted across the street, a shadow among all the shadows.
“Fucking cat,” he muttered, his attention now focused on the house three doors up and on the other side of the cul-de-sac.
A hottie lived there.
A hottie with a dirty-blonde bob, an ass that wouldn’t quit, and very toned arms.
Since he moved in almost two months ago, he’d been watching her—not in a creepy way—but she was hot, and when she was home, he took notice. He was pretty sure she hadn’t noticed him. She was gone by eight thirty in the morning, often sooner, arrived home just after five, then was gone again by quarter to six. He was in bed when she arrived home again.
She seemed to have Sundays off though. But she was rarely home even on Sundays.
She also lived with two guys.
Were they a thrupple?
Their ages weren’t too far apart. The guys looked like they were in their late twenties—like Leo—while she looked early to mid-twenties.
He hadn’t met any of them—hadn’t met any of the neighbors—though he was sure they all knew his grandmother and also probably knew that she had died six months ago.
Was it just not that friendly of a neighborhood?
He came to the stop sign at the end of the street, cast one final glance at the house where the hottie lived, then headed out into traffic.
His gut told him to eat, but his dick told him to get back in the game.
He’d been on the bench licking his wounds long enough.
It was time he did some calf stretches and played the field again. Not every woman was going to throw the ball at his heart and send him to the ground in agony, right?
Not every woman.