Текст книги "Cam Girl"

Автор книги: Leah Raeder

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

—7—

No sign of Blue for days. It bothered me more than I cared to admit.

I idled in my chat room, half-assing a striptease, waiting for him. These other guys with their monotonous, simplistic needs began to bore me. Show me your pussy. Pull the tie tighter. Moan my name when you pretend to come. So mundane. I felt like an animal in a cage being stared at by other animals, all of us anonymous, mindless, interchangeable.

I used to take comfort in the mindlessness. In switching my brain off and going to town. Now I zoned out, thinking of a boy who made me feel different. Who made me laugh and feel smart and sexy and irresistible. He wanted to fuck me, but he wanted my mind, too, in a way that was both unsettling and exhilarating. These other guys didn’t come close.

My viewer count dipped. They sensed my disinterest.

Finally I logged off and went downstairs. Ellis sat alone in the dining room, the pale blaze of her laptop painting only her face and hands, like some apparition reaching out of the darkness. I touched her and her knees banged the table.

“I need your help¸ spaz,” I said.

“With what?”

“Reconnaissance.”

She squinted. “Is this about Max?”

“Nothing gets past that big brain of yours. Come be lookout while I poke around.”

“Inside his house?”

“Objections?”

“He has a gun. You don’t break into the house of a gun owner.”

“He’s not going to shoot us. I’d bet my life on it.” I squeezed her shoulder. “Max is looking into those reports for a scapegoat. He doesn’t want it to be a suicide—he wants to blame someone else.”

And he knows, I thought. That I’m holding a secret.

But so was he. If I found his out first, maybe I could keep mine.

Elle’s brow creased.

“Just trust my gut on this,” I said.

In the skiff she tried to convince me to turn back. I rowed steadily, ignoring her protests. But a few hundred feet out, my right arm lit up like a live wire and I had to stop and grit my teeth and listen to Ellis count my breaths. In, hold. Out, hold. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from crying, filled my mouth with the sweet tang of pennies. Don’t see me like this, I thought. Don’t see me diminished.

Then we sat side by side and rowed in tandem. Somehow, it was perfect: my strength, her dexterity, our hands and hearts falling into one rhythm.

Peaks Island rose before us, a black skull protruding from vexed water. Whitecaps skittered over the surface like agitated thoughts, swelling, smashing, dissolving into sizzling foam. Off in the distance lighthouses trailed skeleton fingers across the sky. We dragged the skiff up the shore over seashells and glassy pebbles. Something bolted through the trees, a zipper of noise ripping through the underbrush and dying as abruptly as it began. We stared at each other, the whites of our eyes glowing palely.

“Just an animal,” I whispered.

In the woods she took my hand. The darkness had that hallucinatory Ernst quality where shadows swirled and twisted and everything became a face if you looked at it too closely. Elle’s hummingbird pulse fluttered against my palm.

We split up at the house. I called her phone and left the line open.

“There’s a light on.” I circled to the west. “First floor. Living room, I think. Try to look in from the porch.”

“Okay.”

“Car’s here. So’s the boat. He’s either inside or on foot.”

Scrapes and creaks from the phone. “Laptop in the living room. But I don’t see him now.”

“Stake it out. Maybe he went to the bathroom.”

“Okay.” Her voice was breathy, nervous.

Max’s forty-foot cruiser yacht stood parked on a trailer behind the garage. I climbed the stern ladder and monkey-walked down the gunwale till I reached the garage roof. Then I scrambled up the shingles, fingertips skidding over asphalt tiles. Below me the ceiling timber moaned. I crouched beneath a second-story window.

“Vada? You okay?”

“Yep. How’s the stakeout?”

“No sign of him yet.” She paused and I heard the frown in her voice. “There’s something weird about . . .”

I set the phone down on the windowsill, dug my nails beneath the frame, and heaved. Pain fired up my shoulder like a gunshot. Grimace. Breathe. Again.

“. . . sort of creepy. Maybe we should . . .”

Again. The frame screeched.

“Vada? Are you there?”

Finally the sash flew upward, rattling. I snatched my phone and slipped into the house. “Sorry. Putting you on speaker. Be quiet a sec.” I flicked on the flashlight app.

Before me was a teenage boy’s bedroom: captain’s bed with tartan quilt, a row of baseball caps on pegs, band posters—Queens of the Stone Age, alt-J. Wicker hamper frothing over with dirty clothes.

Going on eight months, and Max still hadn’t touched them.

I snapped pics, then went to the desk.

“Vada—”

“Shhh.” Ryan’s phone was nowhere to be seen. In a drawer I found a laptop with a sliver of charge left. I flipped it open but it asked for a password. Of course. Two accounts populated the log-in list: Ryan and Skylar. “Elle, can you get files off a hard drive if the laptop asks for a password?”

“Yes, probably. But listen, there’s something—”

Her voice was too loud in the stillness. I turned off speakerphone. “Hold on a second.”

Quick search of other drawers: no phone, no photos, nothing but school notebooks and assigned paperbacks. Max had already gone through it all.

“Can you hear me? Vada?”

“What’s up?”

“We have to go. Where are you?”

I tilted my head, listening. Feeling the darkness. Tasting it. Stagnant summer air, vibrating with suppressed energy, like the inside of a hive. “Second floor. Ryan’s room.”

“Get out. Get out of the house now.”

The skin on my back stretched canvas-tight. “Why?”

“His laptop. It’s showing webcam feeds. There are cams all over the house. He’s watching us.”

Through the floors, the buzzing air, I sensed the shift of weight. Of movement.

I tucked the laptop under my arm and ran for the window, floorboards squealing under my heels. Then I was outside and sliding down the shingles, kicking tiles loose, chips flying, skin grating off my ankles and knees. At the roof’s edge I leaped, blind, onto the boat below. I struck the hull and buckled and rolled over the prow, hitting the ground hard, but kept rolling, absorbing the shock. The laptop spun across the dirt. Hands gripped my shoulders and I clawed at them wildly.

“It’s me, it’s me.”

Elle hauled me to my feet. I fetched the laptop and kept running for the trees.

We crashed through the brush and froze, stumbling together. Ellis put her hands on me. Shadows stirred around us, black dye swirling in darkest violet.

“Did he see us come to the house?” I said.

“I don’t know. What did you take?”

“A laptop.”

“Great. Grand larceny.”

“Worry about it later.” Below my knees I felt a crawling, festering heat, abrasions meeting air. “We need to get out of here.”

This time she took my hand and led me through the woods. When I stumbled she caught me, braced an arm around my waist. We skirted lit houses. At the shore she pushed the skiff out solo and made me get in to avoid the salt. Then she shucked her button-up shirt and tossed it to me.

“Clean those cuts. I’ll row for a bit. The current’s with us.”

“Ellis—”

“Come on. While I’ve still got adrenaline.”

She made good on her word, taking us out swiftly. She rowed till her arms trembled, her hair and tank top pasted to her skin, gluey with sweat. Red strands trickled over her temple like blood. Once we cleared Peaks she let the oars collapse. For a while we drifted, the water enameled with starlight and hurling itself at the hull before shattering like ornaments, jet and chrome disintegrating into glitter.

I joined her for the final leg, and when we finally reached the shore of Chebeague we were both exhausted and silent. We glanced at the beach house, shook our heads. Staggered through the trees to the big oak. In her kitchen she boiled water and I let her clean me up because looking at the peppery flecks of asphalt ground into my skin made me dizzy. Memories surged to the surface like kicked-up sediment. The reek of gasoline and tequila. Headlights splintering the rearview. Glass and bone sticking through human meat.

“Vada,” Elle said, “stop looking. Drink this.”

Vodka, crisp and icy as glacier runoff. I gulped it down and felt like I’d swallowed a frozen sword. It soothed me.

The abrasions weren’t that bad. I was being a baby. It was just tough to look at my own blood. I kept thinking, What will I lose this time?

Ellis dropped sopping crimson towels in the sink without batting an eyelash, like some wartime nurse.

“You’re sort of a badass,” I murmured.

“You’re sort of crazy. But brave.”

“Recklessness isn’t brave.”

“Recklessness makes you act. Bravery is following through.”

We eyed each other a moment, thinking of other things. Other times I hadn’t been brave.

She left to fetch supplies from the beach house. I drank more vodka and thought about how a man with a gun scared me less than telling my mother I’d fallen for my best friend.

Ellis returned with clean clothes, spare hard drives, and a plan.

“I’m going to clone the data from Ryan’s laptop. Then we’re putting it back. Well, I’m putting it back. While he’s out of the house. You have a different role.”

“What’s my role?”

She eyed me grimly. “You’re the decoy.”

I stayed the night at Elle’s. By tacit agreement—I glanced at the couch; she pulled some pillows down from her loft bed—I curled up and let her work in the kitchen while I dozed, fuzzy-brained and lead-limbed with vodka. Sometime in the wee hours my phone pinged with an email.

thinking of you. like i do every night.

you and your friend.

i’m jealous of her.

of anyone who sees you off cam.

anyone who touches you.

i think about your skin. obsessively.

i want to be inside it, like your ink.

and deeper.

i want to feel you. i want to fill you.

are you thinking of me, morgan?

–blue.

of fucking course I am, I began, then realized sending it from my phone would reveal my IP, my geolocation, and I trashed it.

I peeked over the couch. Ellis sat on a kitchen stool, shoulders hunched, working on the laptop. Candleglow bled through her seersucker shirt as if she wore a fairy wing, turned the flyaway wisps of her hair into little filaments of electric light. Guilt churned in my gut, hot and queasy.

Here I was, thinking filthy thoughts about my Internet crush, while Prince Ellis, my real friend and maybe-whatever, sat ten feet away, fixing my mistakes.

Vada Emery Bergen, scumbaggiest friend ever.

In the morning I found Elle sprawled across the counter, sleeping. I tucked her in on the couch. She struggled to speak through yawns.

“Max is meeting me for lunch,” I said. “You’ve got time. Go back to sleep.”

Most of my abrasions were superficial and already scabbed over, ruby filigree lacing my skin. The worst I’d suffered was a plum-black bruise on one thigh. In the kink camworld, bruises and scabs were commonplace.

I sat beside Ellis and brushed her hair from her eyes. “Poor tired thing.”

She mumbled something unintelligible.

In another lifetime, I’d have grabbed my notebook and pencils and sketched her. The sleeping prince in her forest cottage. Now I could only trace her bones with my fingers, etch the lines in memory.

Recuerdo, el corazón.

I kissed her forehead and left.

Max had responded to my text with a time and place in the Old Port. I took the ferry to the mainland. On the way over, I watched the waves.

Ellis explained to me once how light is both a particle and a wave. Think of what happens if you drop pebbles in water, she said. Their ripples overlap. Some cancel out, some double up. Colliding ripples create an interference pattern, a dizzying web. But light was both the pebble and the wave. It was a point and also a probability. The same way she was both a friend and more than a friend and when we collided, we made an interference pattern.

The Old Port on a late-summer morning: fishing boats thronging the wharf, nets full of sun-sequined bass and traps swarming with lobsters, all those feelers and claws writhing, insectile. Cooks haggled with fisherfolk and threw live animals into trucks. The air was so wet and briny it seemed obscene. Like if I dabbed at it with my tongue, it’d be a lewd act. I loved Portland like this: rough hands dredging up shellfish and clams and all the weird pale meat of the ocean, that bizarre underworld spilling into the hard sun. Tourists flooding on and off ferries, the water a perfect Yves Klein blue. I sat on an iron stanchion and watched the catch come in, listened to the thud and slap of meaty tails on the dock.

Capturing this used to be my life. All those nights I’d stayed up while my hand cramped, my shoulder a ball of agony, feverishly drawing because a vision was in me and would not forfeit possession of my body till it had emptied every last demon ounce of itself through my fingers—gone. Now all I could do was take a photo, flat and hyperreal, devoid of imperfection, of guts and pain and nerve. Of me.

I got to the café early and chose a corner seat.

Max arrived soon after, and while he stood in a hot white bar of sun at the door, I stared. He wore a tailored summer suit sans tie. His tan turned his eyes searing blue.

“Vada,” he said warmly. “You look beautiful. May I?”

I nodded, not trusting my voice. He sat and ordered two beers, smiling the whole time.

“It’s funny,” he said, rolling up his shirt cuffs. “I was about to ask you to dinner. You beat me to the punch.”

“This isn’t a date.”

“Date?” His smile turned patronizing. “You’re a bit young for me.”

“I wasn’t too young the other night.”

He held my gaze. “I’m sorry about that. I crossed a line.”

“What line?”

“We’re friends. I’d like to keep it that way.”

“Friends don’t secretly record each other, Max.”

“Friends don’t break into each other’s houses, either.”

Well, shit.

The waitress set two sweating amber bottles on the table. Max raised a toast.

“To a beautiful day, and a beautiful woman with her whole life ahead of her.”

The bottle shook in my hand. I put it down without sipping.

Max watched me as he drank, his eyes glimmering like the sea refracting sun. I waited till the waitress took our orders before I began.

“Look. I thought we were actually friends, Max. I opened up to you. Trusted you. Was this whole thing some sick game? How long have you been recording me?”

“A few months.”

Nausea twisted in my belly. “Why?”

“First, it’s a home security system. I have a lot of valuable assets on my property.”

“Why were you recording me?”

He reached across the table. When his hand covered mine I was so shocked I let him. Light touch, but enveloping.

“This may sound strange, and I don’t expect you to understand. But when you’re around, I feel like a parent again, in some ways. As if my life isn’t so pointless.”

“Parents don’t record their kids for jerk-off material.”

His hand lifted. “It’s nothing like that. All I wanted was to hear your voice.” His eyes drifted past me. “It’s good to hear a familiar voice sometimes. The house is so quiet now.”

Our food arrived. I felt too unsettled to eat, but made myself take a bite of the lobster roll. Tangy lemon butter, sweet meat breaking on my tongue. Memories flooded back. When we first came to Maine, Elle and I had gone on a lobster roll rampage, trying them at every diner we could find. She made a chart and graded them. Such a nerd. I teased her, and sketched her in ballpoint on napkins stained with Saturn rings of ale. She saved the napkins. She saved every sketch I ever did of her.

“Are you that vain?” I said, mocking.

“I’m fascinated by the way you see me.”

“How is that, pajarito?”

She spun the napkin around. “Look.”

It was a quick thumbnail sketch, the shadows hatched with tiny crosses. Her head turned in profile, her short hair and sharp jaw making her boyish.

“When you draw me, your hand sees this. But your eyes see something different.”

“What does that mean?” I said, but she took the napkin and pressed it into her notebook, leaving me in the booth, bewildered.

(—Bergen, Vada. Nighthawks in Maine. Ink on paper.)

Max sipped his beer and said, “You stole Ryan’s laptop.”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

By the time he got home, it’d be back as if we’d never touched it.

“I won’t press charges. Maybe Ellis can crack the password.” He smiled. “I’m not good with technology. I’m a mechanical guy. I understand moving parts.”

“I really don’t have the slightest idea what—”

“You’ve always been candid, Vada. I admire that.” He sloshed the beer in his bottle. “Don’t put on a show for me.”

Those words. Those words didn’t belong in his mouth.

“Listen,” I said, “I came here to tell you I’m not okay with this shit. I don’t care what you do to me, just leave Ellis alone. She doesn’t remember the accident. If you have questions, you ask me. But my answers aren’t going to change.”

“I don’t want to question you. I want to protect you.”

“Huh?”

“I was in your shoes once. Someone lied to me about something very important. It destroyed my world.”

“What are you talking about?”

Max reclined in his chair, sighing. “Vada, ask yourself why you’re defending a liar.”

I blinked.

“Tell me your girlfriend’s full name.”

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” I said automatically.

“Okay, ‘friend.’ What’s her full name? Humor me, please.”

“Ellis Morgan Carraway. Why are you—”

“ ‘Ellis Morgan Carraway’ didn’t exist until five years ago. There isn’t a single record of her.”

Heat rose in me. “Now you’re digging into her records?”

He crossed his arms. A whiff of cologne drifted toward me, cedars and sawdust. “If you were in my position, you would, too. You’d want to know everything about the last moments of your son’s life.”

“Her personal records have nothing to do with it.”

“They have something to do with you, Vada. And the danger you’re in.”

“What danger? Are you going to sue us?”

“No one said anything about that. But listen to yourself.” He cocked his head. “You instinctively defend her, instead of asking about the name. You’re blind to it.”

“To what?” I spit.

“Who she really is.”

“This is ridiculous. Five years ago she was a minor. Of course there are no records.”

“Not even a birth certificate.”

“That means nothing. Her parents are religious zealots. They could’ve—”

“Who are her parents? Their full names.”

I shifted in my chair. “Why are you asking me? This is all on Google.”

“You don’t know. You’ve never actually searched it, have you? You took her word.” He spread his hands. “I hired an investigator in Chicago. Her father is Klaus Zoeller, her mother is Katherine Brennan. She has no blood relations named Carraway.”

Adrenaline coursed through me, the cold tingle in my hands and feet making me feel invincible. Like I could tear the wooden table apart. “You hired someone to go after Elle. In what reality did you think I’d be okay with this?”

“I saw the signs. I knew you were blind to it, so I entertained a hunch. And I was right.”

“This is betrayal, Max. You betrayed me. I’ll fight tooth and nail before I let you touch her.”

“Listen to yourself.”

“You have nothing.” I gripped the table’s edge, feeling no pain in my right arm, for once. “You can’t pin anything on her. You’ll have to go through me first.”

And I still had cards up my sleeve. Including the ace. My last resort.

“I’m not the threat, Vada,” Max said softly. “Look at the big picture. Really look.”

Again I thought of Elle spinning that sketch around, saying, Look.

“Occam’s razor,” she said once, “isn’t exactly what people think. It doesn’t say that the simplest solution is the correct one. It says that when you’re making a guess about something, make the fewest assumptions possible.”

Her favorite book was The Great Gatsby. For her eighteenth birthday she went to New York, to see where Nick Carraway and his friends had lived. To the libraries and museums, because she was a nerd. The Morgan was her favorite—it looked like something out of Harry Potter. And of course she went to Ellis Island, because obviously.

Obviously.

She’d made her name up.

“What’s her real name?” I said.

“Why don’t you ask her? And while you’re at it, ask why she had a DUI charge under that name.”

My mouth dropped.

We’d told each other everything. Every stupid little story, every pixel that made up the whole portrait. I felt it in my bones. I knew her, heart and soul.

Except the name she was born with, and this.

I fumbled a bill out of my wallet, slapped it on the table. “I have to go.”

Max caught my elbow as I stood. Firm, but not painful.

“Think about what I said, Vada. I care about you. I don’t want you to fall prey to a danger you refuse to see.”

I dug my nails into his forearm. “Think about what I said. No one touches her. Not while I’m still breathing.”

I left him there and stormed onto the street.

The house on the promenade was dark, all the windows onyx mirrors, like laptop screens. Weeds knotted the lawn and the roses hedging the porch had grown feral and fangy, vaguely carnivorous. I got out of the cab and stared up at the second floor, hit hard with vertigo.

This used to be ours. Mine and hers.

meeting’s over, I texted Ellis, and turned off my ringer.

The mailbox was stuffed with assorted spam and, for a Mr. Brandt Zoeller: a bill from a hospital in Naperville, Illinois; a letter from a Chicago law firm; a hunting magazine; gun and fishing catalogs.

Who the hell was Brandt Zoeller? Same last name as Elle’s dad.

Was Brandt her brother? Cousin?

Why hadn’t she told me about him?

My phone vibrated. I ignored it and padded down the porch steps and into the gangway.

“Occam’s razor,” I echoed. “That reminds me of Picasso’s bulls. This series of sketches he drew. The first ones are very detailed, heavily shaded. You can see the strain of muscle in the bull’s flanks, the hairs in its hide, the folds of fat. So much weight, so much palpability. Then the sketches become more abstract. Shadows dissolve. Three dimensions flatten to two. It becomes a cartoon bull, comical. And he keeps abstracting it further, to one dimension. To a wire skeleton. Just a few curves, a broad back and horns. And the crazy thing is, it still looks like a bull. It actually looks even more like a bull than the original because it’s the essence of bullness. It’s not a particular bull anymore but all of them. A symbol. A word in a brand-new language.”

Simplify what you see until it’s only bones, essence, soul. That’s the only way to understand what something really is.

I climbed up the back porch, stepping rabbit-soft, and peeked in a window.

Hanging industrial lights, Expressionist lithographs, wire-frame chairs. My touches. All still here. But now there was an army of beer bottles besieging the trash, a battered pair of men’s running shoes. Crumbs dusting the table.

And in the hall, cutting against the periwinkle ocean haze, the silhouette of a man leaning out, gazing straight at me.

I froze dead.

“Emily?” he called in a deep voice.

Then he moved toward the door.

I stood there, mind racing. Meet him. Ask him: Who are you? Who is she? Go behind her back on this, shatter the fragile chrysalis of trust we’d begun to rebuild.

Or let her tell me, on her own terms.

My phone buzzed. I jerked around and vaulted over the railing.

I ran madly through the yard, hopped the neighbor’s fence, and scrambled through their garden to the alley. No backward glance to see if the man gave chase. On the brick paving I broke into a sprint and didn’t stop till I was five blocks away.

Phone still buzzing.

“Hey.”

“Finally.” Elle sounded irked. “I’ve been calling forever. I’m at the ferry. Where are you?”

“Almost there. Sorry.”

“Why are you out of breath?”

“Went for a run.”

“Okay. Weird, but okay.” Puzzlement, that lilting tone she took when she was trying to figure something out. “I’ll wait for you.”

I walked the last few blocks to cool down. Found her sitting on the pier, her hair ruffling in the hot breeze. I came up from behind and stood there a moment, watching her.

Who are you? I thought. Who is this stranger with my best friend’s face?

I sat down, dizzy.

“There you are,” Ellis said. “I was worried. Are you all right?”

“Fine. How’d your mission go?”

“Complete success. I jammed the cameras and put the laptop back. We’ve got a cloned drive, and he can’t prove we stole it.” She frowned. “You’re quiet. Did something happen with Max?”

“No.”

“Get any new info?”

You lied about your name. There’s a strange man in your house.

“Nothing.”

She tugged at a shoelace. Then she said, “Vada, were you on the promenade?”

“I ran by our old place.”

She said nothing.

“Still renting it?”

“I sublet to someone.” Her brow clouded. “You went to look, instead of asking me. You don’t trust me.”

My fists balled on the concrete. I couldn’t hold it in. “You want to talk about trust? Okay. Why didn’t you tell me about your DUI as a minor?”

Her eyes widened. “How do you know about that?”

“That is probably something you should’ve told me, Ellis.”

Or should I say Emily? Emily Zoeller. Emily Brennan.

Whoever you are.

“It’s not what you think. It was so stupid. God.” She seemed about to cry. “I was like, sixteen. I drank one of those mini bottles of schnapps at a party. Then I drove someone home. Our taillight was out. I got pulled over and my friend made a scene, so the cop tested us both. I blew 0.01. But Illinois has a zero-tolerance policy for minors, so it counted as a DUI.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.” She eyed me sidelong. “How did you know?”

“Max told me. He’s obsessed with us. He wants to know every little detail of our lives.”

“Those records were sealed. How did he find out?”

“Online, probably. All it takes is one idiot blabbing on social media.” And knowing your real name.

Ellis clutched her fists in her lap. “Maybe it’s better that he knows. That all the truth comes out.”

“What truth?”

“About that night.”

“Don’t get crazy ideas about confessing. You don’t even remember it.”

“But you do. You could tell him, Vada. I know I got behind the wheel.”

I looked out at the water. “Why are you so eager to come clean? It’s like there’s something else on your conscience.”

“Why are you so eager to protect me? It’s like you’re hiding something from both of us.”

Clever little bird.

“Ellis.” I turned my head. “We have to be honest with each other. About everything.”

Sunlight flashed on the water like a blade slicing the tops off waves, bleeding liquid silver. Her pupils shrank and left only clear moss green. Her freckles were sun-dark, fetching. I knew her face so well. I’d never seen anything in it but sweetness, wonder, purity.

Now there was something else. When I looked at her through an artist’s eyes, impartially, I saw it.

Fear.

“Remember saying you could trust me with anything? That you knew I’d never turn my back on you, no matter what?”

She nodded.

“Do you still trust me like that, Elle?”

She nodded again, slower.

“I trust you like that, too. There’s nothing I’d keep from you.” I breathed in, salt sharp in my throat. “There are some things I’m still trying to process. Things I haven’t accepted myself. I can’t talk about them yet. But there’s no one I’d tell before you.”

Her eyes skittered away from mine. “I have stuff like that, too.”

“Promise me again. Promise we’ll never turn our backs on each other.”

“I promise, Vada.”

“Ditto, Ellis.”

No matter how many times I said her name, she didn’t break.

I wondered what would happen if I said Emily.

The ferry coasted up to the dock and we joined the people streaming on. We went to the top deck and stood against the rail, against the infinite blueness of sea and sky. The wind tore at our faces like fingers trying to pull away masks.

I put my hand on hers on the rail. Then she leaned into me, and I wrapped an arm around her, and we faced the salt spray and ruthless wind all the way home.

Ellis said it’d take a while to crack into the cloned drive. Time to kill.

I’d flaked out of work so much this week that one of my regulars sent a “breakup” email. The camworld is fickle, intense, and brutal. One day they love you; the next you’re a “cum-guzzling gutterslut” who doesn’t know the first thing about customer service and is “probably a dyke irl.”

Do you ever wonder if porn creates a sense of entitlement in a certain type of person?

I don’t wonder.

I had a tie in either hand, debating which color I should strangle myself with tonight—aubergine or pomegranate?—when my email pinged.

A thousand bucks.

Him.

“Hi, Blue.”

I flopped onto a cloud of goose-down pillows. For the first time ever, I was camming from my real bed. Beside me the dormer window looked over the ocean and the spinning pulsar of a lighthouse, the firefly flares of ship signals. I’d slid the window open and a breeze flicked in, cool and ozonic, that smell of sparks that presaged rain.

SoBlue: hi, you.

SoBlue: this is somewhere new.

SoBlue: where are you?

“My room. The part viewers don’t see.” I smiled cryptically. “You’re the first.”

SoBlue: i’m a lucky boy.

SoBlue: so this is where you sleep.

SoBlue: gazing up at the night sky.

“It’s like a planetarium.” I tilted the screen to give him a better view, careful to avoid the photos on the wall. I’d tested lines of sight. I knew the safe zones. “The sky is so clear here, the stars looked etched in. Have you ever seen scratchboard art? It’s cardstock that’s been coated with black India ink and engraved with a stylus, so the drawing is all sharp white lines, like a woodcut. That’s how it looks tonight. Etched.” I stared through my reflection, the gold buds of Christmas lights in the rafters. “Is it nighttime where you are?”

SoBlue: yes.

“So you’re in the Western hemisphere.”

SoBlue: uh oh.

SoBlue: she’s getting warmer.

SoBlue: soon there’ll be a knock at my door.

“I’ll show up prepared. Tie you up and torture you the way you’ve been torturing me.”

SoBlue: by being winningly sincere and unbearably charming?

“And a total cock tease.”

SoBlue: here’s the fault in your plan:

SoBlue: i would greatly enjoy being tortured by you.

“I bet you would.”

SoBlue: morgan.

SoBlue: hey.

SoBlue: you look sad tonight.

SoBlue: something’s upset you.

I stared at the vacant rectangle of his cam as if it were human, a shadowed face, an extreme close-up of a pupil. As if at any second it would come alive and the vague thumbnail in my head—a blur of fingers, eyes glazed with cyan light—would become detailed, whole. Picasso’s bull in reverse.