Текст книги "Cam Girl"

Автор книги: Leah Raeder

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

None of this made sense.

Skylar showed the photos to Max. Then Ryan died, and they disappeared.

Who deleted them?

We’d looked through every single pic. All selfies, landscapes, macro shots. No Skylar.

Unless Ellis hadn’t shown me all the photos she recovered.

Like she hadn’t shown me the autopsy. Like she’d lied about Ryan’s ex.

“Max,” I said, my body tense. “Why did you warn me about Ellis? What is she hiding from me?”

He looked at me a long time. I didn’t think he would answer.

Then he said, simply, “Her.”

Nothing moved in the woods but me. Chebeague was even more desolate than Peaks, quieter, lonelier. On a winter night there was only the soft rush of snow, the sky whispering sparkling white ellipses, words unheard. I walked carefully but my boots crunched, too loud in this deep stillness.

Our footprints had been erased on the log steps. I climbed up balancing on the railless edge, nearly falling.

Inside, small piles of snow collected in corners like pillars of salt. I went straight to the hollow rectangle traced in the paint and flicked on my phone’s flashlight. Found the loose board and pressed my weight into it.

The envelope was gone.

“You’re freezing. Did you walk here? Why didn’t you call?”

Ellis was waiting in my room at the beach house. Candles lit, incense burning. Mug of tea on my desk. It all smelled like her now—my clothes, bedsheets, skin. Part of me, permeating everything. I couldn’t look her in the eyes. She’d read me immediately.

How do you outwit someone who’s so much smarter than you?

Think of her like a man. Prey on his weaknesses.

I flung my coat off, began to undress.

“Vada?” She followed me to the clothes rack. “What did Max say?”

“He was drunk. He didn’t make a lot of sense.”

“Did he want something?”

I glanced at her. “Me.”

Her eyes widened. “What happened? Are you okay?”

“Nothing happened.” I pulled my shirt off. Stood there in my bra, my hands lingering on my chilled skin. “I’m fine.”

When I shivered Ellis moved close, circling my waist. “Are you sure? You’re so cold.”

I took a shaky breath.

“Did he touch you?”

“It was nothing.”

Instantly she went rigid, pulling me against her. “If he did something to you, I’ll—”

“It was nothing. I stopped him before anything happened, I promise.” I bit my lip. “But it made me feel weird.”

“In a bad way or a good way?”

“Both.”

She let go and I turned around. No expression on her face, but she watched me sharply, gears turning.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“No. I’m glad you did.” Her eyes danced back and forth. “How did it really make you feel, being touched by a man?”

Time to push. “Like a woman.”

She stared a beat longer, not reacting, then walked toward her belongings on the other side of the room.

“Ellis, where are you going?”

“Home.”

“It’s late. The ferry isn’t running.”

“I’ll call Brandt.”

“It’s snowing. It’s not safe. Don’t be like this, baby.”

When I touched her shoulder she spun, seizing mine. “Is there something going on with you and Max?”

I laughed, disbelieving. “Seriously?”

“Is there?”

“Are you going to have a meltdown every time I so much as glance at a guy?” I wrenched away from her. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you.”

“I’m not overreacting. You still haven’t let Blue go.”

“I just want to know who he is. And there’s a good chance he could be Max.”

“Is that what you want? Do you feel something for Max?”

I sneered. “Please. I’ve always been faithful to you. Your paranoia is not my fault.”

“You’re a cam girl. You seduce men for a living. Sorry that it makes me paranoid.”

“Well, I wasn’t seducing him.”

“Then why did he touch you?”

I threw my hands in the air. “Who fucking knows? He was barely lucid. He kept talking about Skylar.”

If I hadn’t been watching for it—if I didn’t know her so well—I wouldn’t have noticed the way her eyes flashed, the pique of alarm. She smothered it quickly with a frown. “What did he say, exactly?”

“Random shit. About the photos, and the autopsy. He actually met Skylar. They knew each other. I mentioned Ryan’s ex, but Max had no idea who I was talking about.”

“Why did you mention him?”

“Is there a reason I shouldn’t have?”

“Because we should save our leverage until we need it?”

A perfectly reasonable thing to say.

Always my voice of reason, warning me back from the edge.

“You’re right. I fucked up.” I pretended to muse. “Now that I think about it, they never sent us that autopsy, did they?”

She looked at me for a long moment. “No. Must’ve gotten lost.”

I headed toward the clothes rack. “I’m going to request it again. And I’m going back to Bar Harbor, to see that guy. Something doesn’t add up.”

“Vada.” Ellis slid behind me, laid a hand on my bare back. Her fingertips glided down to the dip above my ass. Unsettling and arousing, both at once. “I think it’s time we left this to Max. Let him deal with it now. It’s not our business.”

“Max doesn’t want to deal with anything. He wants to bury it.” I steadied my voice. “Sometimes it seems like you do, too.”

Her hand moved to the clasp of my bra. “I want to let it go. I don’t want to be haunted anymore.”

“By who? Ellis, by who?”

But she didn’t answer. She touched me until I stopped asking.

I let her open my bra, cup my breasts in her palms. My tension was palpable and she felt it, too. She pinched my nipples, bit my neck when she kissed it. We didn’t make it to my bed. Instead she drove me up against the wall, one hand inside my jeans, the other around my throat. Her teeth shone in the candlelight, clenched. Aggressive. Masculine. Something primal in me responded. I pulled her toward the cam lights, the nightstand. Took a tie from the drawer and looped it around my neck. Put a silicone cock in her hand. “Do it like this,” I said. “Fuck me like a cam girl.” And she did, my legs around her waist, my spine to the wall. I looked at my fingers kinked against the wood, clawing for something to hold. There was nothing. Nothing but her.

In the morning I woke before Ellis, showered and dressed and left the house undetected. Sent her a text—running errands, nos vemos esta tarde, Christmas tree emoji—and got on the Portland ferry.

No gifts for me, she wrote back. I already have everything I want. I’ll miss you.

It went in like a knife.

For a second I wanted to reply: What are you hiding? Why? But I thought of Blue, slipping away like quicksilver when I tried to catch him, hold him. I knew she’d be the same.

Not again. Not this time.

I’ll miss you too, pajarito, I wrote, and turned my phone off.

All the way over on the ferry, I felt every swell and smash of the waves inside my ribs.

On the wharf the scent of raw fish and wet hemp hit me hard. I’d fallen in love with this city, too. Sometimes love for a person and a place get a little jumbled, and you can’t feel one without the other. No matter what happened, Portland would always be Ellis. I’d never take that lion’s head down. Brass doesn’t rust. Max told me they used it on ships because it was one of the few things that could withstand the harsh salt sea. It would hang there while everything else burned slowly, disintegrating into red smoke.

I rang the doorbell.

“Vada,” Brandt said, smiling. “What a nice surprise. Come in.”

“Can’t stay long.” I kicked my boots off at the door. “Ellis sent me to pick stuff up.”

Brandt was still in PJs, lounge pants and an undershirt. Bedhead and bare feet gave him a boyish air.

“Something warm to drink?” he offered.

“I’m good.”

He eyed me a moment, still smiling. I couldn’t tell if he read emotions as well as Ellis. “Come on.”

Upstairs, we’d stacked all her boxes in the empty corner bedroom. Not our old room—Let’s be new, I’d said. Half the boxes were open, clothes and books spilling over the floor.

“I’m helping,” Brandt said.

“Uh-huh. You snoop.”

“Takes one to know one.”

Ellis had painstakingly labeled each box—COMICS; FIGURINES; STUFF VADA SHOULDN’T LOOK AT BEFORE XMAS—and something in my chest went tight at that last. She bought me gifts, after telling me a million times not to get her anything.

I waded through the mess till I found BACKUP STORAGE. Still sealed.

“Got something sharp?” I said.

Brandt snorted, as if the question were absurd. He grabbed a folding knife off the bureau and sliced through the tape.

“She sent you for hard drives?” he said.

“Yeah. You know, those bugs with the site. Guess she needs some backed-up file.” Was I overexplaining? Shit. Which drive was it? These all looked the same. “On second thought, I think I will take a cup of tea.”

“We’re out of tea.”

“Coffee?”

Brandt leaned on the bureau. He started to cross his arms and then braced on a palm instead. His right arm wouldn’t bend far enough. “Let’s get breakfast together.”

Ellis swore her cousin had zero romantic interest in me, but he always seemed to be insinuating something. And only when she wasn’t present.

“Brandt.” I picked the external drive labeled R/S. Had to be this one. “You know that we’re, like, serious. Me and Ellis. We’re together.”

“I’m inviting you to breakfast, Vada, not my bed.”

Despite myself, I blushed. This guy unnerved me. I couldn’t figure him out.

“Got what I need,” I said, standing. “Thanks.”

He stepped away from the bureau, and as I followed him out of the room, my eyes fell on the knife he’d left behind.

A large Buck knife with gold caps and a woodgrain handle.

I stopped moving. Brandt didn’t notice for a few seconds. By the time he came back, I’d taken the knife and returned to the boxes.

“Forget something?” he said.

I smiled, the sultry smile I used on Ellis to get her to do what I wanted.

I cut into a random box and pretended to set the knife aside. It slid into my coat pocket.

My mouth was saying something about a favorite hoodie, mocking Ellis and her creature comforts, but my mind was playing a memory of wood shavings in the recycling bin downstairs.

I stood too fast, tried to brush past Brandt, but he caught my elbow.

I looked at the hand on me, his long, slender fingers. Thinner than Max’s. Refined, elegant bones. Almost feminine, like Ellis’s.

His eyes followed mine. Then our gazes rose, locked.

“Is everything okay?” he said.

where did you go?

is everything okay?

I slapped a big fake smile on my face like I did every day, as a cam girl, as a barista, as anything, because women are taught to smile, that smiling means men are less likely to hurt us.

“Everything’s fine, Brandt.”

I shrugged him off and walked to the stairs. As soon as I passed him my hand dipped into my pocket, gripping the knife.

He was slower than me. Bad knee. I’d pulled my boots on by the time he caught up.

someone i know used to be a star athlete.

golden boy. bright future.

“Leaving already?”

“Don’t want to keep Ellis waiting.”

“We’re still having Christmas here, right?”

He said it in such an unassuming tone that I paused to glance at him. “Sure. Why wouldn’t we?”

“No reason. I’m really looking forward to it.”

He sounded utterly sincere.

Like Blue had.

“I’ll see you later,” I said.

I dashed down the steps and was nearly out of sight when instinct struck like lightning.

I turned around. Climbed silently back up the steps, avoiding the boards that creaked. Pressed my face to the door pane.

He stood in the hall, thumbing his phone.

My finger was pressing the bell before I realized what I was doing.

Brandt opened the door, eyebrows raised. “Forget something again?”

“I’m such an idiot. I didn’t charge my phone last night.” I gave him that seductive smile. “Can I borrow yours a sec?”

I was taking it from his hand before he could agree.

I flicked rapidly through the recently used apps. The last thing he’d done was send a text to Ellis.

She was here. She knows.

I opened the dialer and tapped Ellis’s number, still smiling at Brandt. He watched me, not blinking.

“What did you tell her?”

The first words out of Ellis’s mouth.

I pulled the phone away from my face and hit END CALL.

“Voice mail,” I said.

My heart was beating so hard I could swear the air shook. I handed Brandt’s phone back.

“Vada—”

“Talk soon,” I said, whirling around. “See you.”

As soon as I was out of sight of the house, I ran.

I couldn’t sit still on the ferry. I paced the top deck, melting a trail of slush through the snow. My mind couldn’t settle on a thought, either. Images flickered, unprocessed. The knife in his hand. His cold green eyes. His mangled arm, scarred face.

this will change things between us.

So afraid of meeting me. Of showing me his face, his body.

I called Frankie on my very well charged phone. She was waiting to pick me up at the landing.

“Want to tell me what’s going on?” she said when I slid into the passenger seat of her SUV.

“Is Ellis at the house?”

“She went out.” Frankie frowned. “I need to chat, but she won’t answer her phone. What’s wrong?”

A fleece of snow layered the windshield between wiper strokes, a constant erasure and redrawing of the world.

“Frankie, I need to ask you a favor.”

She glanced at me over her sunglasses. “Yeah?”

“Can you trace some IPs from a certain client?”

“Is this about the bug?”

“No,” I said, then turned to her and said, slower, “Wait, what about the bug?”

“Do you think you’ve been compromised?”

“Compromised how?”

“Security-wise.”

“I’m not sure. What exactly does the bug do?”

She tsked, like my mother. “Didn’t Ellis tell you?”

Of course not.

“It opened some loopholes in our security protocols. Some cammer safety settings were temporarily disabled.”

Even though I knew, I said, “Like region bans?”

“Mm-hmm. It’s fixed now. But I can pull IP logs for you. Has someone been harassing you?”

I looked out the window, into the snow.

“Morgan?”

“No. It’s fine.” I smiled. “Probably just being paranoid.”

At the house I went straight to my room. Blood throbbed in my head as I kicked open my door, half expecting to see her. But the attic was empty.

I threw my bag onto the bed and flipped open my laptop. Plugged the external drive in.

it’ll change things.

You were right, Blue.

Ellis had partitioned the drive into two volumes: RYAN and SKYLAR. I clicked the latter.

It was copied verbatim from the original. I navigated through system folders, looking for something personal.

PICTURES.

My heart hung in my throat. There was a chance these photos would be Ellis. Some weird connection, some—

Folder after folder, all filled with the same girl: blond, skinny, pretty. I clicked through them rapidly.

Skylar was just some girl. Some random girl.

Why hide her? Why did it matter?

I scanned them again, sharper. High-res photos. Professional DSLR. I recognized these places. The forest and the shore. His wood-paneled bedroom, the band posters. Peaks Island. Ryan had taken these.

Your hand sees this. But your eyes see something different.

Stop seeing with your eyes, Vada.

Skylar was pretty, though she wore heavy makeup. Extremely skinny. Skirts, combat boots, beanies. Studded chokers and bracelets. Ryan wasn’t in any of the pics with her.

Something made me go back to a certain photo.

Her arms were bare. Light fell at just the right angle to reveal dozens of hash mark scars.

there’s a bomb inside me, waiting to explode

“Oh my god,” I said aloud.

I stood up. Walked from one end of the room to the other in a gray haze.

Took out my phone.

Ellis wouldn’t answer.

I kept moving, touching things, trying to distill order from the chaos in me. I could never do it without her. She grounded me, centered me. My anchor. My everything.

I walked to the clothes rack, slowly.

On the shelf above the bar, I’d tucked the box of animals beneath a pile of old T-shirts.

But now, like the missing envelope, the box was gone, too.

One pair of footprints led up the snowy steps to the old oak tree house.

I followed them, stepping inside the soles. The cabin was dusky blue, the afternoon light already dying. Snow swirled in when I opened the door.

She sat hunched on the floor against the wall, knees up, head down, facing the light.

“Ellis,” I whispered.

Her head lifted partway, hair tumbling into her eyes.

I shut the door. Walked to the wall across from her and leaned on it. Hands behind my back, my tailbone holding them down. Lest I do something unkind with them.

“You’re angry,” she said, her voice hoarse.

“Yes. About so many things.”

“Do you want to hurt me?” She finally looked up. Red-eyed, her lips swollen. “I’ll let you.”

“I don’t want to touch you.”

Ellis flinched as if I’d struck her.

I took a step forward. “Give me the autopsy.”

She reached into her coat, held the envelope out.

Ryan Francis Vandermeer.

I scanned through a litany of horrific injuries. Blunt force cranial trauma. Contusions, abrasions, bone fractures. I’d seen these words on my charts last year. Amazing, all the ways you could break a body and glue it back together, stronger than ever.

But not this one.

Scarring of the arms and legs, unrelated to cause of death.

Medications: spironolactone, estradiol, progesterone (for treatment of gender identity disorder).

Sex: F (transitioning from M).

The paper trembled in my hand, matching my pulse.

“Ryan was Skylar,” I said. “Skylar was transgender.”

Ellis didn’t say anything.

It all clicked.

Rejected by the military because they didn’t allow trans people to enlist. Beaten for going to winter formal in a dress. Cutting and drinking to deal with the pain. Max clinging to memories of a son. Let me keep my memories, at least.

How inexpressibly sad that the name on the autopsy was masculine. She didn’t even get to die as herself. Skylar hadn’t officially changed her name.

Like Ellis.

I knelt beside her, not quite looking at her face. Set the paper to one side and reached into my coat pocket. When Ellis saw the knife she startled, pulled away, but I seized her arm and wrenched her palm toward me.

“Give me the box,” I said.

My voice was guttural, unfamiliar.

She withdrew it from her coat. I knocked the lid off. Pressed the wooden figurines into her hand, the knife into the other. I gripped her wrists, shaking so hard she trembled, too.

These were the hands that fit. The photo, the bruises in my heart. The same hands I’d drawn a thousand times yet had somehow not recognized when I thought they were a man’s. Blue’s hands.

We looked at each other.

“Fuck you,” I said.

I rocked back on my heels, jumped to my feet. I meant to walk right out the door but when I reached it my knuckles hit a glass pane and went straight through. I pulled out and tried again, but all I did was smash another.

“Please stop,” Ellis said.

My hand burned, tingling, dripping blood. I smeared it on my coat.

Red and Blue.

The same person.

In the ancient past, there was no separate word for blue. It was just an inflection of red.

I closed my eyes for a moment. Heat built there, an inferno, but of water. “Why, Ellis. Why did you do it.”

“Because it’s who I am.”

I turned partway, feeling nastiness twist across my face. “You’re some imaginary fucking guy who catfished me?”

“I think I’m like Skylar.”

My entire body cringed.

“What the fuck are you saying?”

“I don’t know a clearer way to say it.”

“You’re not this fucking man you were pretending to be.”

“I wasn’t pretending. I am him. I am Blue.”

“You asshole.” My hand was raw. I wrapped the fist in my sleeve. “All this time. Gaslighting me. Pretending to be jealous of yourself. What the fuck, Ellis?”

Her head lowered, half cowering. She was crying. “I don’t know. I felt like two different people sometimes.”

“You planted that bug in the code. That’s how Max got through. You planted it to give yourself full access to me.” I laughed. “Sergio never existed, did he? God, that night you walked in on my chat with ‘Blue,’ tricking me into thinking it couldn’t be you. How’d you do it?”

“It was a macro. I knew how you’d react when I walked in.”

“Where’d the money come from?”

“My mother.”

“You devious little bitch.” Another flinch. “You never needed the job, you just needed access to me. You are so fucked-up, Ellis. You talked about getting hard. About your fucking dick. About coming in your fist and imagining it was me.” Now I couldn’t look at her. I stared at the red dots spattering my boots. “I believed you. I fantasized about you as a man. You messed with my head. This is so fucked-up.”

“It wasn’t like that. It was real to me.”

I laughed again, viciously. “News flash. In real life, I’m a girl. I never lied about it. But in real life, you’re not a man. You don’t have a fucking dick.”

“That’s what makes someone a man?”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this. This is the most insane conversation. Anatomically, yeah, that makes you a man.”

“No, that makes you male. How you feel inside is what makes you a man. Your body doesn’t define you. If your hand doesn’t work anymore, you’re still an artist. If I’m born with two X chromosomes, I’m still not a girl.”

“Stop with the fucking gender politics. The point is you catfished me. Nothing was real.”

“It felt real to me. It felt real to you, too.”

“Want to know what real is?” I lunged at her, dropped to my knees. Shoved my lacerated hand at her chest. “This. Flesh and blood. Not online bullshit. Not catfishing, fucking with my head. Not inventing a person who does not fucking exist.”

“He does exist. I’m right in front of you, Vada.”

I shoved her away, pushing myself back at the same time. And then sat there on the floor, crying.

God, fuck. This was happening.

“You liar,” I said.

“I’m sorry.”

“You broke my fucking heart, Blue. And you’re breaking it again right now.”

“Vada, I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to tell you. I was scared.”

I spoke to the space beside her, unable to face her full-on. “You were scared? You? The one hiding behind a keyboard, spinning out fucking fairy tales? I bared my heart to you. I built my life around you. And the whole time you’ve been lying to me, hiding who you really are.”

“You could barely stand me as a girl. Can you blame me for hiding it?” She sniffled. “I tried to show you, in Bar Harbor. To see how you’d react to me as . . . a guy. I wasn’t trying to hurt you, I was just afraid. Vada, will you look at me, please? I didn’t change into some monster. It’s me. Ellis.”

The little wooden figures had fallen to the floor. Me, and her, and him.

I wanted to go somewhere and curl into a very small ball and cry till the world disappeared.

“I don’t know who you are,” I said hollowly. “And I don’t think I want to anymore.”

Ellis gave a miserable cry and covered her mouth, muffling it.

I had to get the fuck out of here before I lost my mind. I yanked the knife away from her, looked at the little figures.

“Don’t go,” she said.

don’t go, Blue had said.

I could not process this.

Ellis called my name. The door banged. Cold and snow in my face, soothing. The sting of air in open wounds. My teeth ached. I was grimacing, grinding them as hard as I could. I wished I could break my head open and let the cold inside me. Quench this feverish despair. Like Skylar.

How could Ellis have done this to me? How could she?

She? Was that even the right word?

My mind was on fire.

I stumbled down into the woods, heading toward the shore.

There was only one person who had any idea what this felt like. And I needed to tell him something.

Something I’d been trying to tell him—and myself—for a long time.