Beca likes her new house.
No, that's not accurate.
She loves it.
It's hers. She's worked her ass off for a decade and she's a homeowner at twenty-eight. It's not the mansion some of her producing peers have, but it's respectable for a single twenty-something first-time homeowner, and she knows she'll get up into those Hollywood Hills eventually.
The neighborhood is nice, too. It's lined with other single-family homes similar in size and design to her own white house with its gray roof and black shutters. Green boulevards and oak trees that arched from both sides of the street to meet in the middle and it was super domestic and "adult," but she couldn't splash down the bachelorette pad cash yet.
She's standing in her yard - she has a yard now, that she's going to have to mow (or pay someone to mow) - supervising the movers unloading the truck that toted her entire life across Los Angeles from her studio apartment to her two-bedroom house when she sees her presumed new neighbor bounce down the front steps and down the walkway to the sidewalk where they wait for the movers to cross with Beca's couch. Beca can't help but watch, wondering what type of people live in the area and this particular neighbor is...well Beca's not blind; she has eyes. Her neighbor is pretty, at least from a distance, with wavy cinnamon-colored hair and a nice little figure that's being shown off with white short-shorts and a sleeveless teal blouse and flip-flops and -
"Hi!"
Beca blinks, not realizing this neighbor has walked right up to her until she's spoken. "Oh, hey."
"I'm Chloe," the woman says, flashing a brilliant smile as she offers her hand for shaking.
Beca shakes it and she has to look away because those eyes are going to bore a hole into her soul if she looks at them too long. "Beca."
"Moving in?"
She bites her tongue to stop the answer that probably would include the words 'Captain Obvious.' "Yep!"
"Awes! And your husband's unpacking?"
Beca's head nods with an internal laugh. "It's just me." She sees the other girl bite her lip for a second and she has to look away again, taking the moment to shout instructions to the movers with the boxes they're carrying labeled VINYLS.
"You have this whole big house to yourself?"
This Chloe sure likes to ask a lot of questions… "Yeah. I mean, it's not that big." She's two seconds from sharing too much personal information with this stranger and stops herself to redirect. "What about you? You got a husband over there?"
Chloe's laugh is high-pitched and delightful. "Oh my gosh, definitely not. I live with my roommate, Jessica."
Beca quirks a smile at that. She knows the cautionary lingo. She's had 'roommates' before. "Jessica?"
"Yeah! Been friends for years. I'd invite you over to meet her but she's at her boyfriend's this weekend."
Oh. Actual roommates. "That's cool. I'm busy with all this anyway." She gestures at the moving truck which looks to be nearly empty.
Chloe fidgeted for a few seconds and then bounced a little. This girl seemed very bouncy. "Well, I was just on my way to pick up a few things at the grocery store down the street. Nice day, so I'm walking. I'd be happy to show you around the neighborhood, or tell you where things are and how to avoid the school zones."
Beca finally offers a genuine smile. It's hard to play it stand-offish with this chick. "That'd be cool."
"Yay! Well I'll let you get back to it. Welcome to the neighborhood!" Chloe's hand touches her forearm for the briefest second and then she's gone and Beca turns to watch her walk away.
"Nice," she says, smiling to herself.
After a dinner consisting of pizza from the first place she can find on Yelp! that delivers, she's in her second floor bedroom with a beer that successfully traveled from her old place without breaking, for which she's grateful. It's the only room that is a major priority for her to unpack, since it contains most of her life, which will be redistributed to her new extra rooms when she gets around to it. So far, she's emptied three boxes and filled one with with the stuff to be relocated and she has the entire weekend to work so she calls it quits for the night.
She gets comfortable in bed, leaning against the headboard with the lights off, her headphones on, and her computer in her lap to spin through the track she's been tinkering with all week when a light coming on catches her eye.
She looks up to see the source is one of the windows on Chloe and Jessica's house. Her own window lacks any covering, and probably will for a while as hanging curtains or blinds is not something she feels very skilled in doing. But the window directly across from hers is covered, a thin, light-colored fabric that's letting plenty of light out but doing its job to maintain privacy, as Beca can't see anything but a square of yellow light.
Something compels her to watch anyway - maybe it's the fact that her neighbor is smokin' hot and who knows what she could see? She sees a shadow move through the room a moment later, in and out of the frame, and then in again to stop almost in the center of the window, and she must be standing kind of close to the curtain as her form is fairly clear and Beca can definitely make out the fact that Chloe's going through the motions of tying her hair into a ponytail.
It's followed by the very distinct motion of a shirt being lifted up and off and she gasps and drops down to lay flat in her bed so she can't see, because wow that was like...not okay.
She snaps her laptop closed and stares at the ceiling, heart racing and arguing with herself to sit up and see what else that silhouette is doing, but instead she sets her computer on the floor and forces herself to sleep.
Beca wishes she could say she was surprised when her doorbell rang the next afternoon and she opened the door to find Chloe on her step, a plate of brownies in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other.
"Sorry for just showing up," she says as Beca steps aside to let her in. "We didn't exchange numbers or I would have texted you. Kind of old school just dropping by with a housewarming gift like this." She holds up her offerings and Beca realizes she should relieve her of them.
"It's cool," she says, accepting her gifts. She's not knowledgeable enough about wine to know whether or not the bottle of red is considered 'good,' but wine is wine. "Should I open this now?"
"If you want." Chloe smiles and makes herself at home on the couch.
"Okay, I just have to find a corkscrew. And I think I packed my silverware...umm…" She looks around her kitchen and the half-dozen boxes waiting to be sliced open.
"I have one!" Chloe was up off the couch again and with her in the kitchen, tool in hand.
"You always carry a corkscrew?" She watches Chloe slice the foil off the bottle and work the coiled metal down through the cork with expert swiftness.
"No, but you just moved in and I brought it in case you weren't unpacked yet." She smiles as she pulls the cork free with a satisfying pop. "And I was right. Do you have glasses, or should I have brought those, too?"
"I have plastic cups," she answers, opening the box she remembers intentionally tossing in a partial sleeve of Solo cups into for when she would need a cup but not have her regular glasses unpacked yet. Like now.
"To new neighbors," Chloe prompts as they sit on the couch, turned to face one another. "I think we're going to be really fast friends."
Beca tilts her head a little at that added comment. It feels laced with something more than casual and she savors the anticipatory feeling it gives her. "Cheers."
Three weeks pass and Beca is mostly unpacked. Her walls are still bare, but she's finished living out of boxes.
She hasn't got around to buying blinds or curtains or something and while she's been hyper aware of the potential to witness something next door, she hasn't seen more than a shadow now and then. She goes about her business getting ready for bed every night without thinking much of anything.
That is, until tonight when she notices that the curtain to that mystery room is drawn for the first time that she's seen, and she can't help but stop and look because the light is on and it's dark out and it's made obvious that the room is a bedroom, a bed in plain sight which has clearly been slept in and hastily made, a few items of what she assumes are clothing strewn about it.
She sees Chloe a moment later, plopping down on the bed. She's dressed, thank God, but she's looking up talking to someone obscured by the curtain that impedes her line of sight just enough. Chloe's talking, that much she knows, but she's not a lip reader.
And then Chloe's crossing her arms at her waist and pulling her shirt up and off and Beca gasps loud enough that she covers her mouth as if Chloe can hear her.
Chloe has company.
Beca cracks her knuckles one by one with her thumb, debating doing the polite thing and ignoring it or...maybe watching.
It makes her feel like a perv but she can't look away, because Chloe's smiling up at someone and she's reaching behind her back and unhooking her bra and...and now she's seen her neighbor's breasts. And yeah, she knew Chloe was hot from Day One, but wow.
Chloe's arms are out, reaching for the shadow, and Beca holds her breath, waiting to see who the dude is. She immediately had a hundred questions - who is he, did they just meet, what's his name, what does he do, what does she see in him - and she sees hands lock with Chloe's and Chloe's lying back and her partner leans into view and the curtain of straight blonde hair and curves on the person who is definitely lacking all manner of clothing clue her into the fact that it is very much not a dude that is lying on top of her neighbor right now. She's flooded with a multitude of emotions, the most notable being shock, relief, and arousal.
Because, obviously, Chloe's straight. Or, was. Or she thought she was.
"Hot damn," she says to herself and immediately feels like an idiot, but she feels like maybe she has a chance with this for now and it feels even more wrong to be standing here watching...well she can't really see anything now that that chick's made herself at home on top of Chloe, but it feels even more wrong to watch because fast forward a day or a week or a month and if maybe they're dating, how weird will this moment have been?
Or maybe they would laugh about it.
"Okay, walk away. Just walk away." Her feet don't immediately comply with her command but when Chloe and her blonde hook-up roll and Chloe is straddling the girl with her back to the window she flees.
The thing about bearing witness to the events of Chloe's boudoir is that the visuals have lodged themselves in Beca's brain. She keeps replaying it.
The way Chloe sat down on the foot of her bed and how her assuredly silky red hair flowed over her shoulders, bouncing with the impact. How she smiled - not the bright smile Beca was used to, but something a little different. The way she looked removing her own shirt, and more so the way she looked removing her own bra, and more so than both of those, the way her breasts...were there. And the way she reached for her lover and pulled the woman down only to roll her over and take control and…
Chloe's light is off tonight, and her curtain is mostly closed, though Beca had seen the light on earlier when she wandered through her room to get ready for bed. Her own light is off now, too, and she lay in bed staring at the shadows the streetlights cast on her ceiling of tree branches. She's warm. Tingly. She shifts her legs a little, remembering what she's seen flooding back to her and refusing to leave her alone. It heats her up and despite the fact that her hand's already on its way, her conscience is waging a battle with itself because she knows it's going to be Chloe she thinks about while she does this, which is maybe kind of weird because she's Beca's neighbor...but she's Beca's hot neighbor who very clearly enjoys sleeping with women and she hasn't gotten laid since she moved and maybe it'd be fun to fantasize about the hot redheaded neighbor and...whoops she already is.
Weeks pass. No, they aren't dating. She's seen Chloe twice since she gained insight into Chloe's personal life, one encounter included meeting roommate Jessica who was a blonde but not the same blonde she had witnessed in Chloe's bedroom after Chloe invites her to join them for a movie and Chinese take-out.
The curtain has been closed most of the time, and part of Beca feels like Chloe somehow knows what Beca saw, which she knows is ridiculous and impossible.
Beca's own window has blinds now, and they didn't come easily. She had to ask the guy at Home Depot that sold them to her how to install them, read the instructions, and watch three instructional videos on YouTube and she still managed to get them crooked the first two tries, but she finally got them mostly level. The blinds help her forget that she can see her hot redheaded neighbor who may or may not be a lesbian but is at the very least not completely straight.
That weekend she reunites with a "roommate" of her own at a bar and brings her home.
She admittedly forgets about closing her blinds until there's a head between her legs and then she just doesn't give a fuck. Maybe enjoys it a little, the thought that Chloe might look over and witness her heels digging into this girl's back.
Beca has to do a double take the next night when she's at her window, ready to lower her blinds.
Chloe's curtain is completely drawn open, and Chloe's blonde friend is back. Beca knows this because the blonde friend's naked back is pressed up against the window. Hands pop in and out of view over the blonde's shoulders and around her back, once or twice dropping all the way down to squeeze the girl's ass and then they disappear. There are flashes of red that accompany the tilting of the blonde's head and then there are hands tangled in blonde hair to pull the girl down and Chloe's face is revealed, eyes closed as the girl sucks on her neck, and Beca can tell Chloe is, at the very least, topless.
Beca's fingers twist and untwist the cord that's been frozen in her hand for several minutes now. She's just standing and watching this happen in front of her, in the indoor version of broad daylight, both of their rooms lit up like Christmas. But Chloe is definitely distracted and Beca is growing increasingly distracted and she maybe allows her free hand to wander a little, rubbing back and forth across her stomach as it decides whether to move up or down in its journey.
It decides to move north and she's only half-conscious of the fact that her hand is under her shirt to feel herself up as she watches the scene play out in front of her.
She's jolted out of her peep show viewing when she realizes Chloe's eyes are open.
And she's looking right at Beca.
To be continued...