Sundays are for Yardwork
I squat to inspect one of the heads of my in-ground sprinkler system that’s not spraying like it’s supposed to. What the fuck? Two years ago, I paid forty-seven hundred dollars for this system so it would water my yard like clockwork while I’m at work. It’s on a timer and everything. So why the hell is this head acting up? I push my black-rimmed glasses up my nose and squint.
It’s jammed.
I pull my knife from my gym shorts pocket and flip it open. Something brown is hardened on one side. I pick and pick at it until I see bright pink underneath.
No fucking way.
A growl rumbles through me as I whittle away at the gunk. Gum. It’s gum on my goddamned sprinkler head. As if on cue, music blasts from the house next door and I cringe.
Lilith Hamilton.
Instead of a homewrecker, she’s a neighborhood wrecker. I swear the value of my house dropped at least fifteen grand the moment she pulled up in her cherry-red convertible Mustang with her oversized sunglasses perched on the end of her upturned nose. I remember the day—a year ago—when she climbed out of her sporty car, blew a big pink bubble, and trampled all over my fire and ice hostas to introduce herself. I’d bitched her out for ruining my plants and that is how it’s been ever since.
Her ruining the neighborhood and me trying to do damage control.
Fury bubbles up inside me as I scrape her gum from the sprinkler head. As I listen to Tupac’s “California Love” blaring from her backyard, I want to turn the knife on myself and carve out my eardrums.
I can’t take this anymore.
I’ve done everything including resorting to calling the cops.
She just charms them with her big, flirtatious grins. Shows a little cleavage and gets her way. With them. I am immune to her bullshit. My tolerance level for her obnoxious behavior is low and nearly every day I’m going off on her for some reason or another.
I want her gone.
And fuck how I’ve tried.
You’d think being the president of the Sprawling Oaks Neighborhood Homeowner’s Association would give me some pull. Nope. She’s not doing anything illegal and she pays her dues, so I can’t exactly issue a lien on her property or call the city on her. I’m out of ideas and it’s pissing me off. With a huff, I scoop up the hardened remains of her gum and stalk through my yard around the side of my house. I reach her gate and bang on the wood.
“Lilith!” I yell.
The song on the radio changes to “Big Poppa” by The Notorious B.I.G. and I lose it. She doesn’t even have good taste in music. It’s fucking maddening. I yank her gate open and storm into her backyard.
“Hey, Willy!” she chirps and raises her glass to me.
My gaze, against my will, rakes across her body as she bakes in the sun. Her tits are divine in a bright orange two-piece bikini that leaves little to the imagination and makes her skin more golden than usual. It’s distracting sometimes that she’s hot. Really fucking distracting.
“Bloody Mary, neighbor?” She grins at me and my blood boils. Her messy dark brown hair is piled up in a wild bun that fits her personality. Those lips—fuck, those lips—are painted a brilliant crimson that have dirty thoughts running through my mind at rapid speed.
Focus, Will, goddammit.
“This,” I bark as I charge over to her and hold my fist out. “You left this in my sprinkler head.” My tone drips with sarcasm.
Her nose scrunches up and she lifts her sunglasses to inspect what’s in my palm. “Ew, sick. Keep your dirt in your flowerbeds. I don’t want to see that.”
“It’s your gum,” I snap.
She lets out a laugh that has her full tits jiggling with the movement. Again, fucking distracting. “Oops.”
I glower at her, but she’s nonplussed. “Keep your gum out of my yard. And do something about your weigela. It’s overgrown and an eyesore.”
She jerks her head down and inspects between her thighs, which makes me inspect between her thighs.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
“There is nothing wrong with my weigela,” she shrieks. “It’s maintained quite nicely, I can assure you.” She stares up at me and points at my face. “Keep your dirty mouth and your dirty hands in your dirty yard, Wonka.”
Apparently she thinks it’s cute calling me some variation of Willy Wonka from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—since my name is William—because she does it all the damn time. It’s not cute. It’s annoying.
I blink at her in shock. Has she gone fucking mad? “Your what? Jesus, Lilith, I’m talking about the big, overgrown flowering shrub that’s slowly creeping into my yard.”
“Oh! Well, why are you calling it fancy names for a vagina then?” Her brows are furled together as if she’s mad at me.
Are you kidding me right now?
This woman is going to give me a heart attack.
Grandma will have to bury her only family left because my nutty neighbor drove me to the grave at the early age of thirty-three.
I’ll move. That’s the only solution. I’ll find someplace else where I don’t have to deal with uncaring neighbors who blast nineties rap and drink alcohol on Sunday mornings and bring down neighborhood value with their unkempt yard and inconsideration of others.
“Your eye is twitching,” she says as she adjusts her top. Her nipples are peaked and hard. It’s not the only thing that’s hard.
With a clenched jaw, I toss her gum remains onto the concrete beside her and storm over to her radio. I flip the channel to WXOJ because at least they play good music. Nirvana’s “All Apologies” blares as I stride out of her backyard.
“What an asshole!”
I smirk, knowing I got to her by changing the station. I’ve barely made it into my own yard before “No Diggity” blasts from the speakers. But somehow, I feel as though I won this round. It’s hard to rile her up. She’s so laissez-faire. Unfuckingcaring about anything but her stupid car and her stupid rap music.
My phone vibrates in my pocket and I answer harshly, “What?”
“Someone needs a Snickers.” Grandma chuckles on the other line.
I groan, knowing I was rude to the woman I love most in this world.
“Sorry about that,” I mutter. “I was dealing with a complicated matter.”
She baby talks to her dog, Skippy, before chirping, “Complicated female matters?”
As a matter of fact, yes.
But I’m not telling Grandma that. She’ll be over here in fifteen minutes flat with a wedding planner and a list of possible names for her future great-grandchildren. I thought Grandma was going to disown me when Presley and I broke up two years ago. My longtime girlfriend and I were on the path to marriage. Three years of dating. Two seemingly compatible people. And I even helped her pick out a puppy. Our five-year plan was underway. But three years in, she tossed in the towel. Just up and quit on me. Said I was too rigid and it wasn’t working out.
Me.
Rigid.
I am not fucking rigid.
“It’s a female,” Grandma says knowingly. “What’s her name?”
I clomp up my steps on my porch and walk inside, seeking the cold blast of my AC. My eyes scan my immaculate living room and pride swells inside of me. The white chenille blanket lies just the way I’d left it and my charcoal-gray cat Björk sits on top. Everything looks perfect. Straight from a magazine. Presley liked to use that decorative blanket when she stayed over. Curl up in it and complain about the temperature. It used to grate on my nerves like you would not believe. And worse yet, she always wore a smirk that said, “I know you don’t like this, but I’m doing it anyway.”
It’s a decorative blanket and not to be used.
Ever.
Except by Björk, of course.
“William Grant. What’s gotten into you?”
I let out a heavy sigh and sit in my leather recliner, relishing in the way it cools my sweaty back. “I’m just pissed at the neighbor. Her gum was stuck in the head of my—”
“Oooh,” she coos, “the gorgeous bombshell neighbor?”
“Yes, I mean, no, she’s not a bombshell, Grandma.” I huff. “She’s a bomb.”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, hon. She is a bombshell. Back in my day, I had curves like her and your grandfather used to—”
“Grandma!”
“My point is, you’re blind if you don’t notice the gorgeous woman who lives next door to you.” She sighs dreamily and I roll my eyes. “She’s much prettier than that Presley you were seeing.”
I tense at the reminder. It’s true. Lilith is all curves and color and practically drips sex. Presley was pastels and country club weekends and I-don’t-give-blowjobs-because-that’s-what-prostitutes-do. They’re about as opposite as opposite can be. And despite Presley up and leaving me, she is my type.
Not irresponsible, loud, mouthy, messy hurricane types.
Those types do my head in.
I used to look forward to the weekends where I could unwind and do some yardwork. Sundays are for yardwork, after all. But now, I count down the minutes until Monday, where I can sit in my ten-by-ten-foot office and flip through mountains of documentation as I make sense of numbers. I hunt for holes and errors and fraud. I’m the senior internal bank auditor at Huffington Bank and Trust, which is Morristown, New Jersey’s largest and most profitable local bank.
“You’re too tense, hon,” Grandma says, jerking me from my mental vacation. “Come over and have dinner with me. I made your favorite.”
I scrub my palm over my sweaty face. “I’d love to, but can I get a raincheck? I have some things to do around here and I wasted all morning fixing my sprinkler head.”
“Fine,” she concedes. “But I want to see you this week. You need to relax. Maybe do some yoga.”
Yoga.
My neck still hurts from the last time I tried to do Grandma’s yoga. She made me go to her yoga class filled with a bunch of giggling old ladies months ago and she’s been trying to get me to go back ever since. The yoga instructor, Lupe, was gay and made eyes at me the entire time. It was awkward. Really fucking awkward.
“I’ll do some yoga,” I agree just to get her off my back.
“I’ll have Lupe email you some how-to videos,” she assures me.
“Grandma, don’t give him my email—”
“Love you!”
Click.
I toss my phone on the coffee table and rise from my chair. I’m full of pent-up energy because my neighbor drives me insane. Maybe I should do some yoga.
Or get laid.
I can’t even remember the last time I had sex. Maybe six months ago? I’d gone out with some guys from work and ended up screwing one of their sisters. One too many shots and I woke up with a mountain of regrets. The sex was mediocre at best and I had to spend the next six months avoiding Tom at the office.
That is why I don’t drink often.
Those moments are few and far between, a far cry from my carefully and normally defined life.
A hot shower and a hand job will calm me the hell down. I peel off my shirt and saunter through the house. Once upstairs, I pass by the windows that overlook both our backyards and stop dead in my tracks. Lilith has turned onto her stomach to sun her back. Her very naked back. The tiny scrap of her bikini top is tossed on the concrete nearby.
My cock jerks in my shorts and I groan.
Why does she have to be so fucking hot?
An annoyed grumble escapes me as I try to peel my gaze away from her round ass. Her orange swimsuit bottoms have ridden up the crack of her ass and show off her toned glutes. If I didn’t hate her so much, I’d ask her how she stays so in shape. Her thighs are muscular and her calves are like fists of muscle hidden behind her tanned flesh.
I close my eyes and let my mind imagine what all her curves look like without her swimsuit. My cock aches and I refrain from rubbing one out while creepily thinking about my hot-ass neighbor. It takes an incredible amount of strength, but I manage to pry myself away from the window and all but run to the shower.
As the spray of the water runs through my hair, I grip my cock and allow myself one dirty selfish moment. A moment where I imagine Lilith’s bright red lips wrapped around my dick. I fuck her face and she likes it. But then my mind tries to blend my fantasy with my nightmare. My cock grows soft as I think about her stupid pink gum stuck in my pubes.
Goddamn you, Lilith, you’re even ruining my masturbation time.
I can’t get away from this girl.
Something has to change.
Fuck.