Mercifully, when it finally happened—-when Kurt Clark, Senior, finally left—-he went alone.
Casey kept spying, though. At first, just on his mother. He was afraid she was going to leave, too. That fear eased when Rick came along, but watching the two of them together was so titillating that he couldn’t stop. Finally, Rick caught him peeking through a crack in the door one night when he and Mom were in bed together. Casey didn’t let on that he’d been watching them and pretended he wasn’t feeling well. They bought it. But they began locking their bedroom door after that.
There were ways around that for a precocious kid like Casey. When they still lived in the city, he’d crawl out the fire escape outside the bedroom he shared with his brother and peek through the window into the room next door. His parents never bothered to close the blinds; the apartment faced an alley and an unbroken concrete wall.
When they moved to the house in Westchester, the master bedroom was on the ground floor, making it even easier for him to spy from outside. But as time went on, he rarely caught his mother and Rick naked in each other’s arms. Most nights, they were just sleeping.
That was okay. By then he’d discovered Rowan.
He wasn’t much interested in her when they first met. She was just a mom, hugely pregnant.
But one day, soon after she had the baby, she bared her breast to nurse him right there in front of Casey. He was mesmerized, watching the baby suckling, his tiny fingers toying with his mother’s long red hair. Mesmerized, and insanely, irrationally jealous.
From that moment on, he watched Rowan Mundy every chance he got and pleasured himself to fantasies that involved her.
From the tree house, he could see over the fence into the yard next door. Sometimes, at night when the lights were on, he could see directly into her house from his own. Having spent so much time inside the house during the day, he knew the layout of the rooms, well aware which windows belonged to the master bedroom and which to the bathroom. The curtains were always closed at night, so he never glimpsed anything more erotic than Rowan nursing her baby, but his imagination conjured plenty of tantalizing scenarios that were undoubtedly unfolding across the way. He longed to glimpse her showering or disrobing or making love with her husband . . .
It didn’t happen.
Something else did.
Always a stickler for details, for numbers, Casey remembered the date clearly. November thirtieth.
That was the day his stepfather finally did what Casey had long fantasized about doing to Rowan. Naturally, he was spying on them from the next room. In the throes of adolescence, hormones raging, he didn’t blame Rick for finding her irresistible. Nor did he resent the woman in the arms of his mother’s husband.
Not at first.
But that day was the turning point. Afterward, everything changed. She changed.
Until November thirtieth, Rowan was always so open, so affectionate—-not just with Rick, but with Casey. To be fair, she was that way with everyone: Casey’s younger brother Derek, his half brother Liam, and his sister Erin, too. But overnight, she went from loving and warm to ice cold.
Not long after, a For Sale sign went up, and she was gone.
Eavesdropping on his mother and Rick’s argument after the Mundys had moved away, Casey felt torn. He loved his mother more than anything in the world, and he didn’t want her to be unhappy. But he loved Rick, too, almost as much. Rick was his hero. He’d saved Casey from being the kid with the loser dad, or the kid with no dad at all. He’d made everything okay.