By Hunter Perez

John was a handsome 30-year-old who lived in a small Connecticut town near the Massachusetts border. He resided in a large Victorian home where he was raised. His parents passed away a few years earlier, and he had no immediate family.

John worked as a police officer in another small town several miles from where he lived. He enjoyed his work and had no problems dealing with public – in fact, he was uncommonly kind and holistic when helping people facing all sorts of tumult. But he took no aspect of the job home with him – not the stress of a police officer’s daily routine, nor the camaraderie of being part of a police force. He was cordial with his co-workers but not familiar – he politely declined their invitations to socialize once he was off duty.

John preferred to live alone and keep to himself in his private time. By choice, he had no close friends, nor did he rue his solitude. He savored his time away from others, to the point that he created his own home gym so he wouldn’t have to be bothered with people while he sought to keep himself in shape.

But he was not a bitter or sad personality. He was happy in his home, doing repairs where they were needed and tending to front lawn and backyard in his free time. He loved gardening, and in the warmer weather he spent many hours tending to the small vegetable patch he cultivated and to the various bushes and shrubs he planted around the property. In the summer when his tomatoes were ripe, he would share them with the elderly neighbors who lived on the cul-de-sac that was capped by his property, and in the winter he would volunteer to clear the snow from their driveways. His neighbors were appreciative, and he enjoyed that they accepted his goodwill without trying to become too close to him.

When John had time off from his job and felt the need for company, he would drive to distant cities – sometimes to New Haven, on occasion to Boston or New York – and secure a hotel room before cruising the local bars. If he was lucky, he would bring a man back to his room for no-strings fun. Often, his pick-up demanded more information about him and ask to keep in touch with John, but he would lie to them about his world – at various times, he claimed to be a lawyer, a dentist, a marine biologist and a gas station attendant – and he would give them an email account that he never monitored. If he could not land a Mr. Right Now at a bar, he would check out the local escort websites and hire a stud who could make himself available for the night.

While John turned to the Internet to satisfy his occasional carnal hunger and to occasionally watch videos to expand his insights on gardening, he mostly maintained a Luddite passion for what is now described as snail mail. He subscribed to multiple magazines and newspapers, and he voluntarily put his name on the mailing lists of an endless number of charities seeking direct mail inquiries. He gladly spent his mealtimes eating alone while reading through the bounty of printed materials that came in the mail – he would even dutifully examine the various informational letters enclosed with his bills. He also sought out several book catalogs and ordered titles from them. He always approached his mailbox with the same level of happiness that he viewed his gardening effort come into full bloom and fruition.

One day shortly after the Fourth of July, John scooped out the heavy contents of his mailbox and found something he wasn’t expecting. It was a business envelope in lemon yellow hue, and it featured a garish postage stamp with a multicolored abstract painting made by an artist whom John did not recognize. The envelope had no return address and was addressed to “Mr. Cop” at John’s street address – the envelope carried an ornate cursive script and John wasn’t certain if it was handwritten or computer generated.

John took his mail inside and sat at his kitchen table. He opened the lemon yellow envelope to find stationery of the same color. The enclosed letter was printed in an Arial font.

“Dear Mr. Cop,” the letter began. “Forgive me, Sir, for intruding on your privacy, but I wanted to take a minute to thank you for endless happiness that you have provided to me. Perhaps you didn’t realize that you were doing this for me, but I am grateful to be an audience to your greatness.”

John put down the letter in confusion. “What the hell was this?” he wondered to himself before resuming his reading.

“I love watching you leave and return to your home in your police car,” the letter continued. “You are an extraordinarily attractive man in your uniform. I don’t know if the uniform is custom tailored, but it fits you perfectly. I love to see your biceps barely contained in your sleeves and your broad shoulders barely confined in your shirt. You must make everyone excited with lust whenever you emerge from your police car to take charge of a situation.”

John threw the letter down again. “What the fuck?” he muttered to himself before picking up the letter to resume where he left off.

“Sometimes, Sir, I wish I had the courage to break the law in your jurisdiction,” the letter said. “I can imagine myself having you pull me over, force me out of my car, and then cuff and stuff me into the backseat of your patrol car. You would then drive me to some out-of-the-way spot behind an abandoned property and force me to pleasure you in exchange for my freedom. I would do anything if you could cuff me behind my back and let me dry hump your leg and then suck your dick for my freedom, only for you to jerk off into my face and haul me off into jail. That would make me the happiest man in the world.”

John threw the letter on his kitchen table and got up, pacing the room. He had been on the receiving end of sloppy flirtation by drunk drivers, but never in such graphic detail. He was angry that someone would incorporate his police work into their sexual fantasies.

When he returned to the letter, he found that it also said, “Beyond seeing you dressed for work, I take great pleasure watching you work in your garden. As much as I desire the vision of your uniform, I also salivate seeing you in your shorts and a t-shirt – and, hopefully someday, without a shirt – while you are working on your lawn and your bushes. I confess that one day I sneaked behind your house and admired your vegetable garden. I hoped you would arrive home while I was still there and punish me for trespassing, but you didn’t come home that night.”

John didn’t know how to respond. Part of him wanted to grab the letter’s writer by the collar and shake him, but there was also a part of him that was curious about who would be so brazen as to sneak on his property to spy on his backyard.

“Please, Mr. Cop,” the letter concluded. “Don’t be angry with me. Or if you must be angry with me, then please take me as your prisoner and throw away the keys to my confinement. Nothing would make me happier than knowing I would be in your custody forever.”

John dropped the letter on his table, got up, walked out of the kitchen and opened the front door to look up his street. He wondered who could have written such a letter. He wondered if any of his co-workers on his police force were pulling a prank, but he realized it was unlikely since he never discussed his passion for gardening for them. Besides, he lived at the end of a cul-de-sac and he was aware of the vehicular traffic that ventured down his road – there were never any unfamiliar cars, so the likelihood that any of his co-workers came by and sneaked peeks at him was nil.

He also ruled out his elderly neighbors – the letter’s verbiage didn’t sound like anything that they would have concocted. But then John remembered something he overlooked – three doors down and diagonal from his residence was a shabby brown house where a younger man moved in at the start of the spring. He was tall and thin with an unruly shock of blond hair and dark-rimmed eyeglasses. John recalled seeing him two or three times on the house’s porch in the late afternoon, sitting in a folding chair while reading a thick hardcover book. But he never gave any thought to him before. “Did he write that letter?” John thought.

John went to his mailbox and pretended to examine it while searching up the street for that mysterious neighbor. He spotted him, but he was too far away to see him clearly. John hurried back into his house, raced up the stairs to his bedroom, found a pair of binoculars and focused them out the window to the blond neighbor up the street. He stood back from the window into his bedroom, hoping that he would not be noticed from street level.

John’s binoculars gave him an excellent view of the neighbor. He appeared to be in his early twenties, with finely chiseled features. He wore a tight black t-shirt that clung to a lean but tightly muscled pale body. He didn’t look up from the book, which he silently examined through large eyeglasses that covered much of his face.

John started to get hard in his pants as he viewed his neighbor. He had a fondness for tall and lean young men, and his target’s interest in reading matched John’s love for books.

“I wouldn’t mind keeping him as my prisoner – I could fix up the basement as a cell for him,” he thought to himself as he spent too much of the afternoon spying on the unsuspecting neighbor. By the time the young man closed his book and went inside, John dropped on his bed and spent too much time happily wondering how he could introduce himself to his neighbor.

End of Part 1