ST4.02 | "I Like to Watch"

FEBRUARY 2026
TAKE MY SHIRT OFF AND CHECK ME FOR A WIRE
It’s the coldest month outside, but STONE’S THROW is searching for heat on our skin. This month, we want stories of sweat and passion. Of lust gone bad. Of sex and sin. Give us unsavory couplings and horrific horniness, and show us what happens when people make real wrong decisions based on what feels so right. Make it erotic. Make it noir. Make it real hot and real bothered.

I LIKE TO WATCH

by Justin Eger

He paid me extra to make prints of the photographs.

Dozens of them. Eight by ten, full gloss, C-print. They needed to have that “magazine” look, he told me.

“Listen, buddy, that isn’t my thing. I do all digital work, now. You want what you’re talking about, go to JCPenney.”

Then he showed me the bankroll. A fat collection of hundreds as thick as my fist. “Half now, for the trouble,” he said, peeling off a healthy chunk of the roll, “then half on delivery.”

I’m still not entirely sure how he found me. Not that my work isn’t popular. Everybody has seen my best work.

Don’t think so? Remember that shot of the pop star scooting around behind her football player boyfriend’s back with the sweet, sensitive actor who costarred in her latest video?

No, not that one, the other one.

Yeah, that one.

Not the guy in the photo. The guy who took the photo. That was me.

It’s not like I sign my work, though. I dump truck a few hundred thousand shots a year, scratch off maybe a few dozen of those to the tabloid sites to keep the rent covered and the car gassed up. Every few months, I land a big enough sale to skate me through a few more months of the occasional expensive meal.

The pop star’s tryst was an extra big deal, though. The site that bought the picture paid me enough to cover me through spring. Yes, she’s that popular. Then her corporate machine bought the more salacious shots, and paid me enough that I probably won’t even have to hustle hard most of summer, either.

I’d never even considered a double dip like that before. Usually, when the damage is done, no one is worried about any more fallout, but the pop star’s People-with-a-capital-P had correctly surmised that I had plenty more shots from that particularly . . . athletic day, shall we call it? And they didn’t want those suddenly coming to light and making their damage control any harder.

Worked for me. Or, rather, no more work for me for a little while.

But then this dude catches up to me in a diner on Franklin, sits down at the table, and asks if he can hire me to take some pictures.

It’s not a new question, or even an interesting one anymore. People see the camera bag, they like to start asking. Some of them talk about taking pictures themselves, which is fine, and others like to ask what I charge. When I explain that I don’t do session work, that’s usually the end of it.

Not with this guy, though.

“I know,” he said simply, his voice flat. “I know exactly what you do. And I want to know if you’ll do it for me.”

He put a hundred on the counter next to me to show me he was serious, then started telling me his story.

Gus—his name was Gus—had found out a few months ago that his wife, Janey, was stepping out on him. Some guy she’d met online, he explained, some website or another that catered to lonely hearts. She’d left the website open by accident one night. Or maybe it wasn’t an accident at all, but I didn’t say that to Gus.

To his credit, Gus didn’t bitch about his wife being on a lonely-hearts site. She had her reasons, was all he’d say about it. Anyway, he’d been working up the guts to confront her about it, just get it all out in the open and let the chips fall, but he decided that he wanted proof before he did. He didn’t want her to be able to deny it.

“I just snap celebrities, man, not real people,” I told him. “You need a PI. Private investigator. This is the kind of thing they do.”

Gus shook his head. “I already did the legwork. I know where they meet, I know when they meet. I just . . . I just need to see it for myself.”

Maybe Gus really did just want proof. Maybe Gus had a kink for seeing some other guy fucking his wife. Whatever it was, it wasn’t my bag. I told him so and got up to leave, but he plopped another hundred on the counter and then doubled the stack, with one more, for good measure.

So, I gotta tell you, what I do? It’s pretty mercenary. Catching people in bad spots and then making good by selling the pictures? It’s some bleak shit, not for the faint of heart. And I’d like to say that my recent success had left me flush enough that I turned Gus down flat, but I’d been through some lean years since moving to LA with stars in my eyes and a gallery show in my dreams. Lean enough that I’d learned you don’t turn down cash without a damn good reason.

So I did some newspaper work for a while, and when that dried up, I shifted to tabloid trash. I still do good work, I think—most people who know about that kind of shit think the shot of the pop star and her boy toy is artistic stuff—but the work itself is a far cry from where I wanted to be.

Those lean years, though? They don’t let go so easy, and five hundred bucks—a down payment, Gus assured me—wasn’t an amount I didn’t think I could walk away from. Just in case.

So I took the money and I took the shots. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds.

Janey and her boyfriend made it easy. Just like Gus said, same motel on San Pedro, same time, every week, tumbling through the door in each other’s arms like clockwork. Hell, they didn’t even close the curtains most days. Like they wanted everyone to see.

That raised my hackles a little bit, made me wonder if I’d stepped into some weird shit that was going to follow me home. You work as a semi-legitimate celebrity stalker for a few years, you get a sense for it—the ones who want to get caught, the ones who are just looking for that little bit of bump on their brand. This didn’t feel like that, though. This felt real. Reckless, but real.

Either way, they put on a show.

I had more than enough shots from the first week to cover the tab for Gus, but I begged off meeting with him. Told him I wanted to try another week, see if I could get something better. “Lock in your proof,” I said.

But really, I just wanted to see how long Janey and her boy toy would be able to keep it up. Again, you watch enough people blow their lives up, you get a feel for benders, especially the sex ones. Usually, things peter out after a few weeks. The thrill is gone, reality sets in, and then they’re back to basics, a halfhearted fuck that finally drops the curtain on the whole torrid affair.

Not for Janey and her stud, though. I’m not shy, but they got up to stuff that made me blink. And every week, it was different. Lingerie, toys, makeshift bondage with belts and brassiere straps, once a cheerleader uniform Janey filled out memorably.

He spent enough time with his face between her legs that I’m pretty sure the dude could breathe through his ears, and she’d worked his cock in so many ways I bet she’d be able to pick it out of a lineup in a dark room.

Except none of it was ever torrid. There was always passion. Slow burns or races to the finish, the two of them looked exactly in sync every single time. Perfectly matched. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought they were on a honeymoon, except it was every week from noon to two.

So intense was the electricity between them, I could feel it even through the camera lens.

Which is why I kept watching.

Eventually, Gus pressed me, demanded to see what he was paying for, so I scoured my growing collection and lifted the best ones.

Janey’s expression of ecstasy as she straddled her man, her hand on his neck, fingernails biting into his skin. A shot of him with his face between her breasts, his fingers locked on her hip so tight there would be bruises tomorrow. Their mouths locked together, bodies entwined in half a dozen positions. A lingering and longing look back from her to him as he claimed her from behind.

Gus looked at them all on my little laptop screen without comment. His face remained blank the entire time, only offering the occasional nod when a particular picture—usually one of Janey’s face—struck home.

Which was when he asked for the prints.

It took me a week to track down a printer that wouldn’t balk at the lurid details in the pictures. Not like you can take this kind of thing to your local pay-and-print, after all, so I hooked up with an old art-school buddy who still had his gear and paid him my initial retainer to splash what had been only digital all over some high-quality photo paper.

In the meantime, I watched Janey and her beau’s love nest. Even though the job was in the bag, I still took more pictures. I couldn’t tell you why. I went even after I handed the prints over to Gus, and he handed me the remainder of the cash he owed me. Just a wad of bills. Neither of us counted it.

But I was at that motel the week after that. And the week after that.

I occasionally wondered if Gus had actually confronted Janey, or if he’d just let it all go. The affair showed no signs of stopping, and seemed to have only grown in intensity. Sweat soaked skin and stained sheets, mouths making sounds I couldn’t hear but could imagine nonetheless. Hands and lips on bodies, two becoming one.

A few weeks later, I arrived for our weekly tryst—I’m not sure when I started adding my voyeuristic self into the ménage, but I was part of it now—and set up my tripod. Today, oddly, the curtains were closed.

Janey and her man arrived soon after in their separate cars. They were lost in each other in an instant, all hands and lips and eyes only for each other as they crashed through the hotel room door without a care, just like every other time.

I waited, looking for any sign of life. The curtain bothered me, so rare was its use, and it had been entirely absent in the preceding weeks. But I set the camera up and settled in, my eye on the viewfinder.

A moment later, the curtains were thrown open. Gus was standing there, staring out across the lot at the spot where he must have known I waited. Even at this distance, it felt like our eyes met.

All around him were the prints he’d purchased from me. My work, stapled to the walls of the room, every surface imaginable.

Gus had come prepared.

And in his hands was a shotgun.

My finger graced the trigger on the camera, and the shutter purred. Half a dozen shots per second.

Twenty-seven shots later, it was over. Janey, her lover, and Gus, their blood splattered all over my weekly documentation of the affair. A clear story for the cops, when they got around to it.

I packed up my camera and picked up my cell phone, punching in a number.

“Mike? Yeah, it’s me,” I said. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. I was wondering if you still had the number for that guy who runs the true crime site? No, not him, the other one. The guy who posts the crime scene shots. Yeah? Good. I’ve got something he might want to buy.”

JUSTIN EGER (on Bluesky @fugitivecourier.bsky.social) is a writer, which means he has been a bookseller, community journalist, newspaper editor, and a federal consultant, among other things. He is the author of the Ethan Shaw thrillers and the John Ransom adventures, and is the creator of The Underground action/crime series. He lives just outside of Pittsburgh with his wife, Jess, as he looks for new opportunities and continues to invest time in his writing.