Spying on Riley #1

A girl named Riley moved in next door. It was the beginning of spring, the northern hemisphere was getting ready for months of sunshine. Riley was a student, as was I, but she wouldn’t start the new academic year until after the summer break. In the meantime, she earned some money working in a bar downtown. I knew that from one of the few chats we had just after she had moved all her stuff from her parents’ house to the big city.

Riley had a lot of free time, and she spent a significant part of that time on the small balcony we shared. The first time I saw her enjoying the early spring sun, I was amazed by the shape of her body – it was perfect in every imaginable way. She wasn’t tall, and she must have weighed just over a hundred pounds, if not less. The countours followed a tight, hourglass-like figure, starting at her upper legs, towards her hips, getting thinner at her waist, before spreading out again as her upper body began. It wasn’t the pretentious workout kind of skinny, it was simply the way her genes had told her body to grow. Her chest contained a pair of breasts that weren’t to be called large, yet they did look bigger than one would expect to find on a slender girl like Riley. Her face wasn’t necessarily pretty, more like cute; ginger waves of hair hung down from her head, long enough to cover her chest if she wanted it to.

The first stares

I stared at her, that very first time. I stared for a long time, through the safety of the Venetian blinds that made it easy for me to peek outside, but near impossible for an outsider to look back. Riley was reading a book, and couldn’t possibly know she was being gazed upon. Her running shorts showed the first bit of skin that should have been hidden from sight – I knew right then and there it wouldn’t be the last.

The following weeks, Riley often appeared on the balcony to soak up the springy sun. Almost just as often, I sat by my window and looked at her. Sometimes, on particularly warm days, she would take off her top and let the sunrays reach all the way to her bra. Later in the year, when such days became more frequent, she would wear a colorful bikini.

It was on one of those days that I took my first photo of her. Riley was lying on a towel she had put all across the balcony floor. Her eyes were closed, as if she was asleep, but every now and then, she looked up to her phone and typed a quick message. As she laid back down again, I grabbed my phone and sat near the blinds. The results were grainy and the light was horrible, but I now had several pictures of an unaware girl, soaking up the sun wearing nothing but running shorts and a bra.