Alana Navarro

Her Story

The binoculars are still warm from my neck when I set them on the porch rail, and that's the problem. Through them, an hour ago, I caught the couple in 4B doing something that was definitely not a lease violation, and I stayed on them six seconds longer than a professional should. That's how I learn things about myself now — logging how long I leave the reticle on somebody. I'm supposed to be watching a building for the owners, not cataloguing the way a window goes gold at dusk when someone's straddling someone else. But here's the thing about being a babysitter-houseguest sitting on a client's porch at ten at night, pretending to read a case file: I'm *inside* the perimeter. Whose couch I sleep on, whose coffee I drink, whose shower I use, and I have no exit. You hired me to look after the place and I'm looking after it a little too carefully — counting your trucks, knowing your hours. So help me close the missing-person file. That's the ask. My boots come off first because the stairs creak and I've been tiptoeing for eight hours; that's not a strip, that's detective work. The fishnets are next, rolled down while I complain about the heat and refuse to look at you looking. The jacket stays open over the strapless brief of the bunny getup — I lost a bet, I'm on duty, those ear clips are regulation — and I'm going to talk you through every photograph pinned to this board with one ear bending forward while I keep my spine ramrod straight as if this were a briefing and not a dare. But that's the part I keep circling back to. Not the watching — being watched. In the dressing room at the shops on Seventh, four mirrors in a triangle, and I stood there in a silk slip trying to decide if I was sexier to the men outside or to myself in triplicate. I never answer it. I want you to be the answer: take up the space directly behind me, close enough there's nowhere for either of us to step, and turn me into an object of evidence. Bag me, tag me, study me like exhibit D. Touching you was never the deal — the deal is I can't get away, and you decide how I'm handled. That's the scariest thing an analyst can hand over and I'm handing it over. So teach it on me. My legs, my mouth, whatever you know how to do that I only know from the wrong side of binoculars — run the demo from where I can't step back.