Текст книги "Cam Girl"

Автор книги: Leah Raeder

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

In a real private show I’d have my pussy up to the lens, anatomy on display in absurd HD. In this show you couldn’t even see it, just my hand delving into shadow.

And it was more erotic than any show I’d ever done.

SoBlue: inside.

I was so wet it happened almost before I realized I was doing it. My finger slipped inside and I groaned, a real one, no porn star fakery but an animal sound from low in my gut, full of agony and resentment because this felt so goddamn good and I didn’t want it to end and also didn’t want to endure it.

SoBlue: show me how she fucked you.

Everything in me stilled. “What?”

SoBlue: don’t stop.

SoBlue: fuck your finger.

SoBlue: and show me how she fucked you.

SoBlue: the object of your obsession.

SoBlue: red.

Shock is an incredible sexual tool. It intensifies arousal. Blue knew what he was doing.

“Like this.” I brought the other hand to my clit, carefully. It was hard to get off with both hands since the accident. One too gentle, one too fierce. “With her fingers. Inside me.” My words unraveled into a gasp. Part of me was picturing Blue’s hands, a stiff finger between my legs and his cock in the other fist, pumping slowly, matching pace with the way he fucked me. But part of me was picturing her. Holding me in our bed, kissing me sweetly, delicately, while she fucked me with two fingers, so tender we kept pausing to touch each other’s faces, constantly stunned.

Cognitive fucking dissonance.

“It was intense, Blue.” Slow down, slow down. Lightly. I took my finger deep and held still, teeth gritting at the tightness. Tension unrelieved by friction. “She used to do this. Drive me crazy till I wanted to hurt her for not letting me come. I’d wrap my hands around her throat and squeeze. Till we were both right at the edge, and everything became so clear. Clearer than when you actually come. Clearer than reality. It’s like looking into the sun. You can’t take very much of it. I’d beg her to finish and she’d say, ‘You’re so pretty when you come,’ and I felt it, I felt beautiful in a way I haven’t with anyone else. Deeper than my skin. My blood or marrow. She saw through all that like no one else does.”

SoBlue: you see her the same way.

“I wish I didn’t.”

SoBlue: why?

“Because what does that make me?” My face lowered as I withdrew my finger, felt the stark loss, the need to be filled again, fucked, and I closed my eyes and shut Ellis out and thought of Blue. Slim straight hips, jeans unzipped. His cock hard and hot to the touch. “I’m bi, but I prefer guys.” I penetrated myself again but in my head it was him, my back to a wall and my knees hooked around his waist. “I’ve been with girls before, but never seriously. Not like her.” Broad shoulders, dense bone. His dick driving into me and filling me with heat. “Guys are different. The way you think, the way your mind works . . . that’s what I fall for. That’s what thrills me. With girls it’s just sex. No romance, no fantasy. Not for me.”

“I love you,” I’d told her, “but this isn’t my future, Elle. This isn’t what I dreamed of.”

“What did you dream of?”

“She’s the only exception. And that’s not how I see myself. Not as some—whatever. I’m not like that.”

“Me in my mother’s wedding dress. A cathedral full of sunlight. My family in a front pew, his family in the other.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

I heard the incoming message pings from Blue, but I was lost in myself, in the fantasy of fucking him. The fantasy of riding his cock and feeling completely enveloped, his arms around me and his muscle and masculinity something solid, steadfast. Something normal.

“And you next to me, Ellis. As my maid of honor.”

“Go to hell.”

“Sometimes I wish I’d never met her.”

SoBlue: you’re close.

SoBlue: hold it back.

SoBlue: get a tie.

I stopped, though it almost made me scream. Dug into a drawer beside the bed and found a knotted argyle tie. Slung it hastily around my neck and tugged it snug.

Strangulation was a relief, a valve slowing my thoughts. But still the memory leaked through.

“I’d rather die than be your maid of honor.”

“Stop being dramatic.”

“We’re perfect for each other. But you can’t get over this stupid idea of a plastic bride and groom on your perfect vanilla cake at your perfect straight wedding.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, Elle. Sorry my dreams are so fucking heteronormative. Sorry my skin is brown and I deal with enough shit for it and the idea of becoming even more marginalized exhausts me.”

“That’s not an excuse. You think my life has been easy?”

“You’re a rich little white girl, so yeah. Doesn’t really compare.”

She turned to go and I made some sound of fury, wordless, raw, and hurled myself at her. We slammed into the wall. I put my hands around her neck.

“Do it,” she spit in my face. “Tighter, baby. Come on. Like when you fuck me. Because this is the only way you’re okay with us being together. When it hurts me the way it’s hurting you.”

(—Bergen, Vada. How to Break a Heart. Watercolor on paper.)

SoBlue: are you thinking about her?

“No.” I grimaced. “Yes. Fuck. Stop talking about her.”

SoBlue: i can’t help it.

SoBlue: i’m becoming obsessed, too.

SoBlue: she’s the one who gets to see you.

SoBlue: to touch you.

SoBlue: to make you wet.

“I wish it was you instead.”

I wanted to yank the words back as soon as I spoke, but they were out, irretrievable.

SoBlue: selfish.

SoBlue: all that matters to you is you.

“That’s right. Now tell me how you’d fuck me.”

SoBlue: with this long, thick cock, morgan.

SoBlue: that i’m holding for you.

SoBlue: stroking.

SoBlue: do you want it?

“Fuck yes.”

SoBlue: good.

SoBlue: because i’m going to give it to you.

SoBlue: i’m going to bury it deep.

SoBlue: make you take it all and hold it inside.

SoBlue: make you feel me pushing into the core of you.

“God, Blue.”

SoBlue: pull the tie tighter.

SoBlue: fuck your hand.

SoBlue: and feel me inside you.

SoBlue: until you ache with fullness.

SoBlue: until you don’t remember ever feeling empty.

I rode two fingers and held the tie in my weak fist, trying not to let the pain come before I did.

SoBlue: i’m going to hold you up against a wall and fuck you.

SoBlue: make you take every inch of me.

SoBlue: make you ride me because there’s nothing to hold on to but my body.

SoBlue: all you can do is take it.

SoBlue: feel it, morgan. feel my hips meeting yours.

SoBlue: feel me pushing inside.

SoBlue: into your tightness.

SoBlue: into your sweet wet cunt.

SoBlue: you can’t stop this now.

SoBlue: me and you.

SoBlue: all you can do is get fucked.

SoBlue: take my dick over and over.

SoBlue: feel it go all the way in.

SoBlue: feel me touch the core of you.

SoBlue: the deepest, sweetest part.

SoBlue: you’re so full it almost hurts but you like it that way.

SoBlue: you like riding the edge of pain.

SoBlue: you like knowing i’m so close to hurting you.

SoBlue: but not knowing if i will.

SoBlue: god, you’re so tight.

SoBlue: so sweet.

SoBlue: i’m going to come.

SoBlue: i’m going to come inside you.

SoBlue: show me your face.

SoBlue: look at me.

I looked dead into the lens, my body tense, combustible, waiting for the spark to set it off, and he gave it to me.

SoBlue: good girl.

SoBlue: take me deep.

SoBlue: tighter, baby.

SoBlue: you’re so fucking pretty when you come.

Holy shit.

I pulled the tie to prolong my climax, catching the explosion at its peak and drawing it out into a plateau, a flatline at the height of sensation, a still frame paused at the moment of the biggest firework bursting. In reality it was just deoxygenated blood and CO₂, but it made me feel superhuman, like I could tear myself apart, or punch through the window and pluck the stars out of the sky. A moment of pure power.

Then I blacked out.

It wasn’t a full-on faint, because the next thing I knew my palms were mashing the keys, spewing gibberish onto the screen, as Blue typed:

SoBlue: morgan.

SoBlue: can you read this?

I sat up, clawing the tie away from my neck. Afterward I always hated the feel of the ligature. It was a binding now, a trap, not the key to freedom.

I nodded groggily and slipped my tank back on.

SoBlue: you scared me for a minute there.

“I scared myself.”

SoBlue: are you all right?

“I’m fine. Really. That was just . . . intense.”

SoBlue: yeah.

SoBlue: wow.

For some reason, it was hard to look at the camera. “Do you need to, like, clean up?”

SoBlue: yes.

SoBlue: be right back.

SoBlue: don’t go.

Those two small words—don’t go—struck me as ineffably sad. A lifeline between us, across a vast digital ocean. A thin shining thread spanning the darkness.

I thought of Ellis alone in the cabin. Blue using her words to get me off.

And how I liked him because he was like her, with one key difference: he was a real boy.

What a selfish piece of shit I was.

I almost closed the chat out of guilt but he came back before I grew a pair.

SoBlue: morgan.

“Yeah?”

He didn’t type for a full minute, and somehow I sensed him staring at the screen, at the pixels that made up my eyes. The way you’d look into the eyes of someone you’d just made come so hard they lost a little slice of reality.

SoBlue: i wish i could hold you right now.

My lungs felt waterlogged. As if I’d been under without realizing. As if, in the place where there should be clean air and filtered blood, there was just a sunken wrecked thing, a shattered prow, trapped air bubbles in a small space velvety with sea moss.

“Good night, Blue.”

I shut everything down and lay in bed, clutching a pillow to my ribs. Tighter, and tighter, and tighter, as if I could crush it into myself, into the watery hollow between my lungs that ached to be filled with another person’s heartbeat.

—FALL—

—9—

Firelight flickered over the sand. They’d dug a pit for the clambake and the smell still lingered, seaweed and lobster and steamers, mixing with woodsmoke and the cold salty air. I held Elle’s hand as we picked our way around beach chairs and steel pails, vapor whispering off the melting ice, a stray sun hat floating in a tide pool as if someone had dived in and shattered into a hundred starfish.

End of summer was different out here. The beach was effaced with fog, the earth sighing out its ghosts. A breeze flicked over the ocean and sank neat and sharp through my skin like a switchblade. I shivered and Ellis drew closer, slinking her arm around my waist. In Chicago it’d still be warm and muggy but here it felt closer to the end of all things. Wind whistled over the stony, jagged shore where islands snapped off and drifted and would, someday, go fully under. A disintegrating beauty, slowly sinking into haze and abyss.

Up on the hill Max’s house glowed like a golden coal. He’d invited us to the Labor Day clambake. We’d gone but skulked in the shadows, watching. He made friendly noises at his neighbors, drank, went home alone. Under cover of darkness, we followed.

Ellis stopped just shy of the road, fussing with the Bluetooth mic pinned inside my blouse.

“It’s fine,” I said, brushing her hands away. “He won’t see it.”

“I don’t want to give him any cause to shoot you.”

“He’s not going to shoot me. Relax.”

“We can still renege.”

“Nope. Once I commit, I’m like a cat. I sink my claws in and don’t let go till I shred everything.”

Ellis sighed. “Come back to me in one piece.”

On impulse I leaned in¸ kissed her cheek. Trailed my fingers along her jaw.

“You look beautiful,” she said. “For a dork.”

“So do you. For a nerd.”

As I walked to the house I wondered if Max was watching me on cam. I wore a midthigh skirt and a blouse with a deep neckline, subtle makeup. On the ferry ride I’d felt Elle staring, so I’d leaned up against the railing and let the wind have a field day with me. She’d blushed, but hadn’t looked away.

It was strange. Part of what made camming bearable was that I loved being looked at by men. I loved the quiet, tigerish way their eyes followed me, as if just waiting for the bars to be lifted, the cage opened, so they could pounce. The intricacies of beauty were wasted on them. They never noticed uneven eyebrows or uncoordinated shoes. A tiger doesn’t care what shoes you’re wearing when it eats you. Dolling myself up had never been about impressing men—I did it for myself, and for other women. To make Frankie look at me and say, “Damn. I’d go gay for that.” To make Ellis stare at me in a way that made a flame start low in my belly.

With Elle it was somewhere in between. She noticed the intricacies, but she was a tiger, too.

Like Blue.

My pulse quickened as I walked up the front steps. Max had a gun and I was wearing a wire, sort of. But he’d invited me. He wanted to talk.

I punched the bell.

When the door opened he was still in beach clothes: dress shirt, cuffed twill trousers, boating shoes. His oxford was halfway unbuttoned, revealing light chest hair. It took a second for my eyes to travel to his face.

“Good evening,” he said, smiling.

“Hi.”

“Come in. Please.”

I hesitated on the threshold. “Are you filming this?”

“The cameras are off, Vada.”

We’d have that on record, if he lied.

Inside I walked slowly, observing. The first time I’d been in here I was flustered, hyped on emotion. This time I was ready.

The house was cozy, if cliché New England—lots of bare timber and whitewashed planks and striped fabrics—with industrial touches: drafting table and stool, steel swing-arm lamps. On the mantel and in the halls were family photos: Max and Ryan and a blond woman, then later, just the boys.

“What did you want to talk about?” I said.

“Anything. I’ve missed your company.”

Right. “You want something.”

He drew up beside me, the smile still in his eyes. “I know you don’t believe it, but I worry about you. It’s the paternal instinct in me. You said it wouldn’t go away, and you were right.”

I fought the urge to touch the mic, ensure it was hidden.

“Can I get you something to drink?” Max said.

“Okay.”

He poured cognac into snifters at the bar in the dining room. I reclined against the table, watching.

“How’s Ellis?” he said.

“Fine.”

“Did you ask her about what I told you?”

I sipped, savored the licorice burn in my throat. “Yes.”

“No, you didn’t. Do you know how I know?”

I stared into my glass, considered bailing. Elle could hear every word we said right now.

“It’s in your eyes, Vada. That flicker of doubt.”

“Leave her out of this.”

“Can she hear us?”

I made my face blank. “What?”

“Is she listening in? I want you both to know I have no intention of pursuing legal action against you. Put your minds at rest, please.”

Despite myself, tension uncoiled in my shoulders. “Not like you could do shit to her, but okay.”

“We can stop here.” Max looked at me over his glass. “You let go, and I’ll let go.”

“Let go of what?”

He glanced at the neck of my blouse. Then he touched his chest, the same place my mic was hidden.

It took a second for me to parse what he meant:

He didn’t want Elle to hear.

I shivered. Wanted to blurt, Why? But instinct guided me.

“You’re creeping me out, Max,” I said aloud, pulling out my phone.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

I sent him a text:

write it down, but keep talking out loud

“You two missed a great clambake,” he said, tapping his phone as he rambled about the steamers.

MAX: She hurt you before and she’s doing it again.

MAX: It pains me to watch this happen to you.

VADA: how is she hurting me?

MAX: You see it, but you won’t accept it until it’s too late.

MAX: Don’t make the same mistake I did.

VADA: what the hell does that mean?

But instead of replying, he put his phone away.

“Did you crack the laptop password?” he said.

Thin ice. Careful. “We found some stuff, if that’s what you’re asking. Photos.”

Against Elle’s advice, I’d filed for a copy of the autopsy, too. Autopsies were public records in Maine. Ellis thought it gruesome—“We saw how bad it was, why do you want more?”—but the more details we uncovered about Ryan, the more I wanted to know. The more something seemed so obviously wrong, right in my face.

And Max kept trying to make this about Elle. Deflecting.

So I said, “I saw the pics. The ones where Ryan was beaten till he was nearly unrecognizable.”

He drained the snifter in one gulp.

“Who did that to him, Max?”

He filled his glass again, guzzled. I set mine down and moved closer.

“Was he gay? Is that what this is about?”

He laughed, brief and humorless. “You’re loyal to the people you love. Even when they lie to you.”

“Stop changing the subject.”

“Walk away, Vada. We’ll all be happier.”

“Did you hurt him?”

His glass tumbled to the floor, cracking. His hand shot out and clamped onto my shoulder. I grabbed his wrist but he was stronger and held on, grinding my bones.

“I never hurt him,” Max rasped. “Never.”

His hand sprang away. I massaged my right arm, glaring.

“Stop this. Please. Let me keep my memories, at least.”

This was exactly where I wanted him: vulnerable, unstable. Prone to spitting out truth.

Prone to hurting me.

“You went after my friend, Max. You started this.”

“I was worried. I care about you. But I can’t save you from it. It’s going to tear you up, like it did to me. I’m sorry.”

I bared my teeth and mouthed, Leave. Her. Alone.

He stared at my mic.

This cryptic shit was getting me nowhere. I moved closer again, undaunted, peering up into his face.

“I don’t want to hurt you, or your memories, or anything. But I need answers. I can’t move on otherwise. Give me something. Why did the cops take the gun?”

“They found it in the Jeep.”

My eyes widened. “Was Ryan going after someone? Whoever beat him?”

“He’d never hurt a soul. That was Skylar, not him.”

His lips curled at the name.

Bingo.

“Tell me what she did.” I leaned nearer, pressed a hand to his arm. His heart boomed so hard it rang in my bones. “Tell me what was going through Ryan’s mind that night. We both want the same thing, Max. Closure. And we can give it to each other, if you just help me understand.”

His eyes gleamed, the color intensified like wet paint. So blue.

“There’s no closure,” he said hoarsely. “It’s a lie. You keep yourself distracted, pretend you’re making progress, but the wound never closes, Vada. It will never close.”

He sounded like Ellis. The deeper I dug, the more reluctant they both grew. Max had pried into her past and she’d pried into Ryan’s. Now both of them wanted to drop it with no explanation, no resolution. Just vague warnings about each other.

As if they were rivals.

Max stepped away from me.

Instinctively I lunged after him, caught his arm. Ran my hands down to his palm and turned it toward the light.

The back of his hand was a rich gold tan, but the inside was pale. I expected roughness from boat work yet the skin looked smooth. He jerked free before I could memorize it, compare it to the photo I’d saved. The hand that held those wooden carvings.

“Leave now. Please.”

“Max—”

“I want to be alone.”

Goddammit.

In a final act of defiance I drank the rest of my cognac, slowly. He stood with his back to me, shoulders hunched as if expecting a blow.

He didn’t turn or move. Barely seemed to breathe. My eyes played over his body, and I wished with a gutting desperation that I could draw because drawing was how I remembered things, and I wanted to remember this. I wanted to hold those images side by side.

At last I left him and stalked out into the night.

The constellation of Christmas lights in the rafters filled the attic with a soft radiance. Ellis sat in the dormer window with her laptop as I paced, nursing a beer.

“Got another bite,” she said.

I flopped onto the bed beside her.

We’d made fake social media accounts using the names and pics of kids from Ryan’s graduating class. Then we messaged his old classmates. This is Meg. I forgot my password so I made a new profile. Can you friend me again, please?

Amazingly, it worked. If you even remotely impersonated someone, people often filled in the blanks themselves. You’re always forgetting shit, Meg. I told Steph & Kat to re-friend you too. Each act of trust gave us more names, pics, info.

“This is phishing,” Ellis said. “If we’re caught, we could go to jail.”

“We’re not stealing their credit cards. We’re just socially engineering them to tell us stuff so we can solve a hate crime.”

She pushed her glasses up, frowning. “We don’t know that there was a hate crime.”

“Trust me, Watson. I have a nose for these things.”

“ ‘There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.’ ”

“What’s that from?”

“Really?” She sighed. “You’re more Katie Holmes than Sherlock.”

I pinched her bare thigh, and she kicked me away.

Once we breached the outer circles of Ryan’s senior class, we scanned through pics and comments for mentions of him. He’d been a popular jock before senior year, when the gay rumors started.

Ryan is so fine.

Too bad he likes D in his A.

Just like you, ho.

Suspicion confirmed: Ryan was closeted, acting straight. At his winter formal, three days before he died, something big happened.

I CAN’T BELIEVE MY FUCKING EYES

[image removed]

Is this a prank? Is it for real?

omfg #eyebleach #cannotunsee

LOLOLOL EPIC TROLL

OMG is that RYAN???

But we still had no idea what.

Something shocking. Disturbing. Epic.

What could he have done in front of everyone? Kissed a boy?

Rumors flew that kids who talked about the incident got suspended, their college plans threatened. Discussion was driven underground, into private messages and invite-only groups.

Now we were trying to breach those inner circles and find Skylar.

I rolled onto my back, musing at the ceiling. “What if she was Ryan’s beard, and got sick of playing his fake girlfriend? Maybe she outed him at the dance.”

Ellis twirled a lock of hair, agitated.

“What?” I said.

“This feels cruel. They’re so easy to manipulate.”

“Because they’re dumb.” I snorted at our new “friend’s” profile. “I could send her a pic of Beyoncé and she’d believe I’m her. If she goes through life this gullible, something way worse will happen someday. Better to learn this lesson early.”

“She wouldn’t believe you’re a celebrity. She believes you’re her friend because she trusts her friend.”

“Maybe she trusts her friends too much.”

Our eyes locked, and something electric crackled between us. I was so close to asking about her name again.

“How much trust is too much?” Elle said.

“When they can hurt you with it.” I didn’t break eye contact. “Good thing we’re not hurting anyone, right?”

“Right.”

It’s going to tear you up, like it did to me.

What the hell had Max meant? Maybe I already knew this story: gay son, homophobe dad. It would explain why Ellis was loath to dig deeper, scared of reliving her own past. And why Max wanted to believe she was at fault in the crash. Blame the deviant.

Except he knew I wasn’t exactly straight, either. He’d assumed Elle was my girlfriend from the start, and never called our relationship unhealthy, like Mamá. But maybe I’d made my case for being more-straight-than-not too well. Constantly dissociating myself. Reflexively denying it.

Like the coward I was.

I got up and cracked open another beer.

“Guess I’ll go,” Ellis said. “So you can talk to Blue.”

No bitterness in her tone, only resignation. Blue was my nightly routine now. A thousand bucks, a soul-searching dialogue that made me laugh and think. Then we got off. Every night the tension built, our flirting intensifying, growing luminous, incandescent, imploding. I put the tie around my neck. He came all over his fist. Sometimes we kept talking after. In my head I ran my fingers through his hair, his legs twining with mine. The thought of his hard slender body, his deft hands, his self-deprecating humor and intoxicatingly gentle maleness got me wet again. Sometimes we’d go for round two.

He was the perfect guy. Almost ridiculously so.

Night after night I lay awake, staring up at these fake glass stars.

What’s wrong with me? I thought. Why am I obsessing over him when Elle is right here, flesh and blood, real? What do I really know about him beyond what he wants me to believe? Her, at least, I know. Why couldn’t I love her the way she loved me?

It was the same love. I knew that.

Ellis packed up her laptop and headed for the door and then stopped, came back, and pulled something from her bag. “These are for you.”

Gourmet gummy bears.

Way to make this impossible, Elle.

“Well,” I said, “now you have to stay the night.”

“Why?”

“To help me eat them.”

I was rewarded with the deepest blush ever.

Ellis wouldn’t touch beer, so we raided the kitchen and found horchata in the back of the fridge, which I mixed with rum. Half an hour later we were lying on my bed with a pile of gummy bears spread on the quilt between us. Elle half-assedly played World of Warcraft on her laptop.

“What exactly are we looking for?” she said, shooting arrows at a lumbering ogre.

“Her.” I sorted bears into a color wheel, red to blue. “You heard Max. ‘He’d never hurt a soul. That was Skylar.’ ”

“We don’t know if Skylar did anything.”

“Maybe she put the gun in Ryan’s car.”

Ellis frowned. “You’re making a lot of assumptions about this person.”

“You have to make some assumptions about people, Elle. Otherwise you’ll never get anywhere.”

“You won’t get anywhere by assuming too much.”

Fucking Occam.

“So you think Skylar has nothing to do with it?” I said. “They just beat Ryan up for being gay? Is that still a huge deal here, in Maine?”

“It’s still a huge deal everywhere. My own parents didn’t see me as human. I was an aberration. Sinful. Defective.”

I touched her arm, silently.

If we’d known each other as kids, it would’ve been different. I never would’ve let them hurt her. Sometimes I fantasized about it: packing our bags and running away, teen urchins living in the city. Broke but free. Happy.

“And it’s not just homophobia.” She unleashed a barrage of arrows, mowing the ogre down. “Some things go deeper. Like gender. Pink for girls, blue for boys. It’s the very first category we’re put into as babies, before we even know who we are. Messing with that is sacrilege. It goes against everything they assume to be true about people.”

“Obviously I agree, but what’s your point?”

“Some people get violent when you challenge their deepest beliefs. Like their religion, or their binary definitions of people. Maybe Ryan made them question those things. Things they assumed were universal truths.”

The deceptively obvious.

Could he have been bi, like me and Dane? Could that have been worse, the refusal to be pigeonholed into Us or Them? From personal experience I knew people dealt poorly with shades of gray. When I was with Elle they saw me as gay. When I was with Raoul I was straight. Neither was true.

Sometimes I bought into the black-or-white mentality, too. It was easier, picking a side. Not fighting to be recognized as a fluid, nuanced individual, but simply accepting a premade label, a prefab identity.

I’d only felt like my real self with a handful of people in this world. Ellis was one.

Blue was another.

He was unlike any guy I knew. Other men might call him weak, beta, soft, but to me his tenderness only made his masculinity stronger. He wasn’t afraid to feel. Men who express emotion have more balls than those who fake toughness. His softer masculinity fit my harder femininity. We fit each other.

When I’d looked at Max’s hand, I could have been looking at the hand that made me come each night. The hand that carved the wooden animal figurines now sitting on my desk: cat, bird, snake. Blue sent them using a mail forwarding service. I didn’t know the origin and he didn’t know the destination—something came from nothing, arrived at nothing. Ex nihilo.

If Ellis wasn’t here, I’d touch them. These things that Blue had touched. Made for me.

If Max was Blue, how the hell would I deal with that?

It frightened me. Exhilarated me. Made me a little sick.

“I need to kill something,” I said. “Let me play.”

She sighed and slid me the laptop.

I went to the log-in screen to choose a character. “Oh my god, you nerd. All your characters are blood elves.”

“Shut up.” She tried to grab it back but I fended her off.

“Will you relax? Smoke a jay or something.” I scrolled through the list. “Holy shit, you have one of every class at max level.”

“So I play a lot. That’s not a crime.”

“No, it’s a sickness. I bet these names are all lore-appropriate, too.”

“Don’t pretend you know what that means.”

“Believe it or not, I actually listen when you geek out on me. But thanks for the vote of confidence.” I frowned. “All your characters are guys? No girls?”

“Girls get harassed.”

“But they don’t know if you’re actually a girl in real life.”

“Doesn’t matter.” She sifted through the gummy bears, finishing my sorting. “People treat you the way you present. One of the ‘girls’ in my guild is a guy in real life. People send her gifts all the time. They kill monsters for her, give her the best loot drops. But they expect attention in return. If she neglects them, they get mad. She got kicked from her last guild for starting ‘drama’ between two guys who had crushes on her. All she ever did was talk to them. There was nothing unsavory going on.”

“ ‘Unsavory.’ Cute. It’s like you haven’t been grossly corrupted by a cam girl the past couple months.”

“You do the same thing, cam girl. You play a role.”

I clicked on an elf in shining armor. “Everything is a role. Right now I’m role-playing a blood elf paladin. When are we ever our real selves?”

“I’m real with you.”

I looked at her across the bed. “Ditto, nerd.”

Ellis picked up a blue bear and pinched it till its head swelled. “You’re real with him.”

“Can’t it be both? You each see different sides of me.”

“What if I want all of you? What if I gave you an ultimatum, like he did? No one else. Only me. You wouldn’t do it.”

Would I?

Elle stared at the bear and abruptly bit its head off.

I laughed. “You are being so Freudian right now.”

For a while I putzed around in the game, killing drunken ogres. I looted a rare item and the tooltip said it’d sell for a ton.

“Elle, how are you on money?”

“Rolling in it. I have this system worked out for gaming the auction house—”

“I mean in real life.”

She fidgeted. “Oh. I’m fine.”

“That means you’re not.”

“Don’t, Vada. Brandt’s family is helping me with bills.”

“You have that nice big house on the promenade and you’d rather live in a tree. You are an elf.”