Neighbors from Back When

DJ Gaspar had barely been home long enough to take his jacket off when the doorbell rang. The clock in the living room read 11:30, and he'd been planning on going straight to bed. It had been a long day, and as an extrovert it had been doubly long. Still, the time and the timing of the doorbell suggested it was something important. He opened the door, and standing there on his doorstep was the least likely person he could have conceived.

The hot little redhead girl from this afternoon.

"Uh..." he managed impressively.

"Hi! You're DJ Gaspar, right?" She was grinning ear to ear. As friendly as she looked, it was nonetheless disconcerting.

"Yeah, that's right... sorry, I forgot..."

"Tabitha, but I go by Tabby now. Hooper. From next door? You know, not actually, but kind of."

"That's it, yes, of course. Um... what can I do for you Tabby?"

She giggled, and though he'd spent all of twenty minutes of his life in her company, it was a jarring sound. Her whole aesthetic was pure goth. Or at least, it had been when they'd met this afternoon. That wine red hair streaked with purple on skin that looked to have never seen the sun; black t-shirt and black jeans over black boots, fingernails (and probably toes) painted black to match. It had struck him as a bit cliché, even somewhat anachronistic for a modern teenage girl.

Presently, she was still in all black, only the baggy t-shirt she'd been wearing was now form-fitting, encasing a pair of prominent breasts. DJ barely noticed that, however, once he realized she was wearing a pair of Daisy Duke style jean cut-offs, only these were black denim - like she'd been wearing this afternoon, only about two and a half feet shorter. Or, more aptly put, about six inches long. Her bared legs were two rivers of cream pouring out of those shorts.

"Can I come in?" she asked in response.

Warning bells reverberated around his skull. Her attractiveness had been noticeable when he'd met her and her family that afternoon; now, she was the very vision of a piece of gothy jailbait. "I'm actually just on my way to bed," the man said guardedly. He could envision little good coming from a man in his thirties inviting a strange eighteen-year-old girl into his home with no witnesses. "Maybe you could just tell me what you're doing here?"

"Oh, don't let me stop you from going to bed!" She looked around, then spoke in a soft tone. "Do you want me to come with? You could, like, play with my titties!"

He blinked. "OK, I don't know what kind of weird prank you're pulling or who put you up to it, but it's late, and I'm tired, so good night."

Eerily, her smile didn't fade as he closed the door in her face. "OK, so like, you want me to just wait here then?"

"Sure. do that." DJ locked the door and retreated into his apartment. "Kids these days," he grumbled as he went around closing the blinds and, just to make sure, double-checked the window locks.

What a weird girl. What was her game? Was she a thief? A hooker? Was she just off her meds or something? How had she even found him? Considering how quickly she'd rang the doorbell after his arrival, DJ wondered if she'd followed him home. What the hell?

As he slipped out of his clothes and into hisbed, DJ tried to make sense of it. Today, he and his parents had gone to spend some time with their neighbors, the Whitleys, from when he'd been a kid. The two families had been really close, and now that Mom and Dad were retired and had moved back to the area, they'd decided to reconnect.

It had been surreal, seeing the old neighborhood, the house DJ had grown up in. The family the Gaspars had sold the house to had since resold it, so the they didn't even have that flimsy pretext to knock on the door and peek inside at their old home. The Whitleys still lived right where they had since before DJ was born. The elderly couple had gone out of their way to introduce his parents to the family on the other side of his childhood home, as they had some common interests with his parents.

That was where he'd met that girl. Tabby, he thought she'd said. Or Tabitha? She'd said something weird about her name, he was pretty sure, but he was tired and had been too surprised to take it in. Regardless, she'd been the bored teen who looked annoyed at the intrusion on her facebook-browsing, and had probably said three words to the Gaspars and Whitleys in their brief visit.

Then they'd gone back to the Whitleys, had dinner and drinks, and finally he'd come home. That girl hadn't been a blip on his radar, and if she'd crossed his path more casually, he doubted if he would have even recognized her.

So why had she followed him home? Why had she said... that?

"Good morning, DJ!"

"GHAAAAAAA, FUCK!" he screamed in a much higher pitch than he would like to admit to, dropping his briefcase and quite nearly jumping out of his skin. It was 7:30 the next morning, and there she was again! (Still?)

"I'm sorry, did I scare you?"

"Ya think?" he groused, picking up his briefcase. Still, DJ decided; she was wearing the same goth-skanky outfit. "What on earth are you doing here?"

"I wanted to, you know, talk to you. Could we... in private?" Her sparkling eyes darted to his front door.

"Look, be straight with me. Are you trying to rob me or something? Case my house?"

She giggled, and again it sounded strange. This girl did not look like a giggler. "No, of course not!"

DJ waited for her to offer more, but she didn't. "Look, don't you have, I dunno, school or something?"

She nodded. "Yeah. I'm a senior at JFK."

"Go Panthers," he said half-heartedly. "You better hurry up. Doesn't school start soon?"

"I'll go if you want me to," she said gamely. "Could you give me a ride?"

He gritted his teeth. It would make him late to drop her off, but he was honestly too curious to pass up. It wasn't the titties. Erm, breasts. It wasn't those. "Fine. But we need to hurry. You're OK going to school in... that?" he said, gesturing to her outfit. It definitely would have violated the hell out of the dress code back when he went to JFK.

"Why wouldn't I?" she said with another giggle, giving a slow twirl for his benefit. Holyshit those things were cut short in the back. This girl had one hell of an hourglass figure, and that ample behind of hers was spilling out the bottom enough that he could see the bottom of her cheeks. "Don't you think I look sexy?"

What the hell was her game? "Look, let's just go, OK?"

She clapped her hands giddily and skipped - literally skipped - along behind him to his car, sliding into the front seat. He couldn't be sure if she crossed her legs like that just to better show off her thigh or if it was just habit.

"So, you got me all to yourself. Mind telling me what in the hell is going on? Why you followed me to my home? And did you sleep on my front doorstep, by the way?"

"Oh, I slept in my car," she said, pointing to a little black sedan parked just down the street. My foot was moving toward the brakes to throw her ass out when she went on. "And I was just coming over to serve you, Master."

DJ impressed himself just then by not careening through the intersection and killing them both. "What the hell did you just say?"

She laughed. "I said I slept in my car, and I came over to serve you, Master."

He took a few deep breaths before proceeding across the stop sign. "What do you mean, 'Master'? Are you... are you all right?"

"I'm great, Master! Better than ever, in fact. Before you, I was so angry and sad, but now I know what I'm meant to do with my life. Yaaay!" She clapped her hands giddily.

"Before me? We just met yesterday - barely! Why are you... just why?"

She shrugged, weighty breasts bouncing in her skintight top. "I dunno. I just heard your name, and then I realized... you're the man I'm meant to give myself to." Her voice took on a dreamy quality. "My heart belongs to DJ Gaspar. My mind belongs to DJ Gaspar. My body belongs to DJ Gaspar."

He drove in silence for a few blocks. Those words... why did they sound...

"Why did you wait until we were in the car to say something? Why didn't you say anything last night?"

"When we are in private, DJ Gaspar is my master. I... I guess I thought maybe you didn't want me to serve you out in the open."

"What do you mean by serve? You don't mean, like...serve serve, do you?"

"Of course, Master! What else would I mean?" She giggled, but then her voice went back into that dreamy, rote tone. "I serve my master with my hands. I serve my master with my mouth. I serve my master with my cunt. I serve my master with my titties. I serve my master with my ass. I serve my master with my heart and my soul."

Dammit, why did that sound so familiar?! But they couldn't be. Those words were... they were crazy.

Then she started repeating them. On loop.

Frankly, it disintegrated his will to continue the interrogation. He drove toward his old high school, mesmerized by this teenage girl repeating in detail which parts of her belonged to him. Which, it seemed, was any of them he might conceivably want to make use of, and a couple he hadn't even considered.

Soon - too soon - he pulled into the JFK High School parking lot. "You're sure you want me to go to school? I'd be happy to go with you to work, or wherever you're going. I could kneel under your desk and suck your nummy ummy cock all day. Or you could take me back home and I could lube up my cute little titties and you could titty-fuck me and come all over my face and my tiny titties and-"

When the light bulb suddenly went off, his foot slammed on the brakes so hard she nearly hit her head on the dashboard, and the car behind him very nearly rear-ended him. "Sorry, sorry - are you OK?"

"I'm fine, Master - just surprised is all. Are you OK?"

"I... we're going to your house. OK?"

She smiled. "OK. Mom and Dad will already be at work, so we'll have the whole thing to ourselves. I can't wait to see how you use my hot slutty body, Master!"

The mismatched pair left JFK High School at a race. Succumbing to the temptation, he told her to remind him how she serves her master, and with a broad grin she dove right back into it. The girl was still repeating it when they pulled up in her driveway, right next door to his childhood home. "Oh goody, we're here! Would you like me to change into something more pleasing to you, Master? Or to strip naked, show you my itty bitty suckable titties?"

DJ couldn't help looking over her nubile young body, then made himself get out of the car without another word. It had been, in fact, her references to how small her boobs were that had jogged his memory. Those boobs of hers were probably DD's. No reasonable person would call them little, or tiny, or itty-bitty, or whatever else she had. DJ had realized... she wasn't describing her boobs at all.

She was describing Brianne Levett's.

Tabby skipped along behind him as he made his way to one of her house's side windows. Behind him, across a few dozen feet of lawn and behind a tree that had done far less to obscure is view twenty-some years ago when he had lived there, was the bedroom window he'd had as a boy. Now it was someone else's, just like the one in front of him.

As the waters of this river of nostalgia threatened to pull him under, he let those dusty memories guide his hands. There, underneath the window, a loose panel of siding that, with a little jiggling, popped right off. Underneath was a layer of particle board, but there was a small piece only held on by friction, cut away from the main board when the window had been installed, apparently. Behind that, a layer of insulation, and when he pulled that out...

"You've got to be kidding me," DJ said to himself.

As a boy, he had always been into techie stuff. He'd flown rockets in 4H, built simple robots for science competitions, gone to state for Science Olympiad. Decades passed and he'd turned his hobby into a job working for an industrial lab and had normaled out socially. But back then, he'd been a geek to the core. Like most geeks, he had only two things on his mind: his subgenre of geekdom, and girls.

There, still fastened to the back of the drywall was an old mp3 player. The recharging plug ran a short ways to where he'd long ago spliced it into the house's electrical system. The screen still showed the sound file it was playing:brianneismine.mp3, and an icon showed it was still on loop.

"Um, what's that?" Tabby asked behind him, her breasts pressed against the back of his arm as she peered over his shoulder.

"It's... nevermind, probably better you don't know." Was that ever an understatement. He'd read something about subliminal messages in eighth grade, and hatched this insane, perverted scheme. It was the exact kind of blunt-force tactic a pubescent 13-year-old would apply. A half hour's worth of subliminal commands, several of which he'd just heard Tabby repeating on the way over.

It was a little bit clever, at least. One week while the Levetts were on vacation, he'd patched the thing into Brianne's speakers, which were built into the walls. DJ was now pretty sure those speakers had been left behind when Brianne's family moved away, shortly before his own had done the same, during freshman year. He'd disabled the speakers' ability to power off, and made it so whenever they were in the off position, they played his mp3 on loop at a level too quiet to make out. He remembered his own tests, and with his ear pressed against it, he could just barely hear it.

Nothing had ever come of it. Young DJ had been a mixture of terrified that the Levetts would find it and he'd get in huge trouble and tell everyone at school, and hopeful that one day Brianne would knock on his bedroom door and... well, say exactly what Tabby had been saying. Instead, it went nowhere. He figured he'd messed it up somewhere, or that the science behind the subliminal programming was bogus. Before long, he'd forgotten all about it and moved on, content that he couldn't use such simplistic tactics to create the perfect woman out of his pretty next-door neighbor.

At least, perfect as he'd imagined it when he'd been 13. When Brianne Levett and her tiny titties had appeared nightly in his dreams.

Tabby smiled at his dismissal. "You're soooo right. Boys are so much smarter than girls." She giggled again. Ugh, there was some nice misogyny to go with the enslavement. He winced.

"This is your bedroom, I take it?"

She nodded. "Yeah. Wanna see? I got a nice big bed."

"Have you ever... had problems with the speakers?"

She made a face. "Speakers? Those things were, like, glued into these little holes in the wall when I moved in. I use ear buds for music, so they just kind of sit there. I think my dad said the people who used to live here had promised to remove them and patch the walls, but they didn't. He was mad."

"Of all the... Tell me, Tabby. What's your cup size?"

"Double D," she said, smile brightening. She was obviously happy he was finally beginning to show interest in her offers.

"And what do you call these?" DJ pointed at her chest.

"My mini-titties! Wanna see?" Tabby grabbed the hem of her shirt and readied to lift it.

"Not yet. So tell me, whymini titties? They're not exactly mini."

She shrugged, letting go of her shirt. "I dunno. That's just how I think of them. My cute little tiny titties."

DJ stroked his chin. What the hell else had he put in that sound file? How many ways might he have broken this girl's brain?

"Brrr, it's chilly out here. Can you see how hard my nipples are?"

Like that, he was fully back in the present. He could indeed see Tabby's nipples. Just barely, he could see in her bedroom window to that big bed she had mentioned. That bright hopeful smile on her face, just waiting for him to take advantage of her teenage body.

Not ten feet from where he was standing, he could see her bed through the slats of the blinds. A bed in which, he was utterly confident, this walking talking set of T&A would give herself to him in any way he could imagine, and after what her brain had been through, she could probably come up with a few ways he couldn't. This, right here, what his adolescent self had dreamed of from Brianne Levett, he could fuck, now, and whenever he wanted. Only wherever she was, Brianne Levett was his age, while this girl was only an adult by a matter of what, months? She was ditching school, abusing her mom and dad's trust, giggling adorably... Technically of age or no, this was a bridge too far.

"I... I have to go."

Tabby nodded. "Cool! Where would you like to go, M... Mr. Gaspar?" Her programming must be prohibiting her from calling him "Master" out in the open like this. Because she thought of herself as his sex slave. His nubile, curvy fuck toy. His warm, wet, willing place to shove his cock. The stream of gutter-talk he'd programmed into that mp3 were coming back to him.

He shook himself out of it.

"I'm going to work. You... we can't do this. Don't come after me again, understand?"

She frowned. "So, like, wait here then?"

But DJ was already running back to his car. As he started the engine, he could hear her calling out to him. "OK then! Look forward to seeing you soon!"

"Hello, is this DJ Gaspar?" a strange woman's voice asked on a drizzly evening two days later.

"This is. May I ask who's calling?" He didn't usually answer unknown numbers, but it was the local area code, and he was always nervous he'd accidentally ignore an emergency.

"This is Susan Hooper."

DJ nearly dropped the phone. Hooper.

Tabby's mother.

"Oh. Err, hello Mrs. Hooper. How are you this evening?"

"I'm fine," she said coolly. "I was hoping you'd be willing to meet me to discuss... well, just to meet with me. I'd prefer to talk face to face, if that's all right." Her tone conveyed that he would soon be meeting her face to face, like it or not.

"Oh. Can I, ah, ask what this is in regards to?"

"My daughter." She said nothing further. He got the impression she wouldn't even if he asked.

No sense playing stupid, he thought. "I see."

"So, can I meet you?"

"Yes, I suppose I could. When is a good time for you? I'm free-"

"I can meet you right now, if that's all right. I'd really rather address this sooner rather than later."

"Oh. Um..." DJ racked his brain for an excuse, taking so long to do so that she had to have realized that's exactly what was happening. "Sure, I guess. Where should we-"

"My daughter told me your address. I can just come there."

"But wouldn't you rather..." She'd hung up. "Well shit."

He ran through the downstairs on a cleaning rampage. Not that a tidy living room was apt to make Mrs. Hooper feel better about having a brainwashed sex slave of a daughter. If that was why she was coming. It could be... or, um...

He refocused on cleaning, still at it when the doorbell rang. He knew how long that drive was; Mrs. Hooper must have come straightaway to have arrived so soon. He set down the throw blanket he'd been folding and went to the door, mentally preparing himself for the most awkward conversation of his life. And wondering if any of his friends could recommend a good lawyer.

He ushered Tabby's mother in immediately once he saw she was standing out in the rain, her overcoat nearly soaked just from the short walk from her car. "Thank you," she said, shaking her umbrella and leaning it on the wall near the door.

"Let's have a seat, and - can I take your coat?"

"Again, thank you," she said, shedding her trenchcoat and handing it over. DJ almost dropped it in the transfer. He'd noticed she was a fairly attractive woman when they'd first met, but then she'd been wearing loose-fitting jeans and an old sweatshirt. And she'd been sitting next to her husband, which had precluded him from internalizing it.