Fifteen
ESSIE
I don’t miss being blond.
The first time I dyed my hair, I was eighteen, two weeks into my first semester at Georgetown, and a month into camming. In between enrolling for classes and shoving myself into packed dorm rooms for pregames that affirmed my decision not to drink, I ran scripts on camming pages and porn sites and figured out what would increase my revenue: big tits, a juicy butt, and blond hair.
My tits were (are) great, maybe even big for my frame, but there wasn’t much I could do to make them bigger. The butt? Same story. Blond I could do though.
“ You don’t look like Mom anymore ,” my father had said during one of his sporadic calls. I was nineteen at the time, and he caught me between classes. “ Mom was always so dignified .”
And he was right; my mother had been dignified—even more so when chemo took her long, dark hair. But Mom wouldn’t have cared about my hair—or camming.
My mother lives cozily in my brain most days, usually in the memory of her wry smile and gentle voice reassuring me I’m completely fine, and al mal paso, darle prisa . She came to the US from Mexico with my abuelos when she was nineteen—too late to figure out college, but early enough to know she wanted to work. She was happily waiting tables (although dreaming of days when she’d have more ) when she met Dad, a college student who came into the café whenever she had a shift.
Dad was middle class, which seemed fabulously wealthy to Mom, and he wanted more too—a book deal or something. Still, Mom said he was thrilled when I showed up as two unplanned pink lines on a pregnancy test, and he promised he’d take care of her and their daughter—once he got an agent.
Over the years, Dad’s office job was consistently mediocre, and Mom stayed home with the four of us—Christian, Tommy, Luis, and me. Our days were colorful, filled with new boxes of crayons and colored pencils that left rainbow shavings in my pencil sharpener. Later, Abuela revealed how mom did evening nannying jobs after we went to sleep to pay for them.
Dad spent most nights writing at the kitchen table, and six months after mom died, he swapped the kitchen for Lisbon, Portugal. While he was in Lisbon (and later Paris and Barcelona), Dad left broken promises and four children behind. Abuela was beside herself, unfit for the role of caretaker, and so at fourteen, I learned to support a family.
Indignity was scattering my mother’s old clothes across the country via eBay. Indignity was offering to bring my schoolmates’ trays to the trashcan so I could slip uneaten food into my backpack for the boys. Indignity wasn’t dying my hair and parting my legs for a guy named Curtis who paid me two hundred dollars for my first private session.
I went brunette again when I found out Dad was marrying Alyssa. As much as I love her, I needed to keep Mom close. I’d already taken her last name when I turned eighteen, but I wanted something deeper; I wanted to feel her on my skin again.
Now, I pull my brown hair into a bun while I do my nightly skin routine in the dorm’s communal bathroom before an evening of coding and waiting for a response from Dalton.
When I round the corner after leaving the bathroom, I stop in my tracks.
Speak of the devil, Dalton is leaning against the wall by my door with his eyes on his phone. His posture drips with the arcane elegance only a guy with too much money possesses, and he’s in the same navy suit he wore to work earlier. His jacket is draped over his shoulder, and he’s wearing suspenders, which I failed to notice earlier. Those suspenders look so good on him. They’re refined and moneyed and natural, not hackneyed and overkill like they would be on anyone else—and a stark juxtaposition to the thigh-length Georgetown shirt I’m wearing as pajamas.
His eyes flick up, examining me as I cover the length of the hallway. His scrutiny feels different, borderline wolfish, barely short of a glare.
I stare back, suppressing my own smile in an attempt to meet his energy.
“Do you know how easy it was for me to get your room number?” is the first thing he says. “Not happy about it.”
“How did you even find my building?”
“You mentioned Kennedy Hall once. I walked right on campus, someone held the door open for me, and when I asked some random kid in the lobby if he knew your room number, he told me.” Dalton shifts closer. “Why the fuck do random boys know your room number, Essie?”
I roll my eyes. “Relax,” I reply, opening the door.
He stops me with a firm hand. “You don’t lock your door?”
“Nobody does.”
Dalton rotates me to face him, and I nearly drop my shower caddy in the process. “I don’t care what anyone else does,” he murmurs, speaking slowly. “They could be wearing sparkly pink thongs and doing hot yoga, and I still wouldn’t give them an iota of my attention. I’m here for you. From now on, you’re going to lock your door.”
My breath catches. I’ve never seen Dalton so stern. Commanding.
…I don’t hate this. I don’t hate this at all.
“Okay,” I agree, forcing myself to exhale slowly. “I’ll lock my door from now on.”
“Good girl,” he murmurs before he takes a step forward—and I take one back, moving into the room.
His gaze pins mine, and he keeps advancing, and I keep moving backwards until the backs of my legs touch my wooden bed frame. Now, Dalton grins, closing the space between us.
“What are you doing here?” I finally ask. “It’s almost midnight.”
“I got off work early,” he deadpans.
“Did you figure anything out with Villatoro’s estate? Did—”
“I’m not here to talk about work,” he interjects, leaning forward—and there’s so much man in my tiny room.
“What are you here to talk about?”
His hand rises and tucks my hair behind my ear, precise and sure—the confident motions of a man who has touched me before, who enjoys touching me. “I’m here to talk about our deal.”
“Right now? It’s late and you’ve been working for, like, fifteen hours straight.”
He clicks his tongue. “You know a deal is like a cum-filled pussy. You’ve got to close it or all the good stuff slips out.”
My jaw lowers. “That’s horrendous . Are you serious right now?”
He keeps his wolfish stare focused on me. “No, baby. I’m not serious. Rule number one: Don’t let anyone rattle you in the middle of a deal.”
“Are we making a deal?”
His eyebrows tick before he cocks his head to the side. “Open my briefcase.”
He doesn’t make room for me to slip past him, so our bodies are nearly touching when I unclip the gold latch in the front and lift the black leather flap. There’s a forest green folder inside, and I recognize the color immediately. Green is the Hannington-Hale signifier for an ultra-high-net-worth client.
My name is on the tab.
I pass it to Dalton, and he slides a stapled document over to me: a thick packet printed on heavy paper and covered in carefully formatted text.
“It’s a contract,” I say aloud after a few seconds of reading.
“Of course it is,” he replies, straightening and sliding his hands into his pockets. Power stance. “You proposed a partnership. In order to protect our unique interests, we need a contract.”
“Where did you even get this?” I question, riffling through it. “It’s, like, a hundred pages long.”
“Twenty-seven,” he clarifies. “And where do you think I got it?”
Before I can tell him I have no idea where he got a full twenty-seven-page legal document about a camming partnership, the realization slams into me. “You told Lander and Everett?”
“I assume you told Valeria and Cora,” is his response. “And I tell them everything. It’s a happy coincidence they’re both graduates of the esteemed Harvard Law School.”
“They need jobs,” I murmur.
“Direly,” Dalton replies. He takes a silver pen out from his briefcase. “Initial on pages four, five, eight, and eleven. Sign and date on page twenty-seven.”
I start reading. The contract is boilerplate: four weeks of pre-recorded content where we both wear masks. We’ll film a minimum of once per week, and I’ll be the sole owner of all content and can use it for whatever purpose I see fit.
“You don’t want any compensation?” I ask, looking up at him.
Dalton is studying his fingernails while he waits. “No.”
“What do you get out of this then?”
His eyes peel away from his hands and lock on mine. “Don’t make me answer that, Essie.”
Oh. He doesn’t want to admit his compensation is four weeks of fucking the woman he apparently loves.
I know the responsible thing would be to forget this—for both our sakes. The ramifications could easily get messy, and Dalton has a knack for making things messy.
…But Dalton is also a grown ass man who knows the risks involved and understands the volatility of his own feelings.
“Are you almost finished?” he inquires, letting out a spoiled, rich boy sigh. “As much as I love watching you read, I’ve been awake for nineteen hours now.”
Fine. I sign and initial, and there—Dalton and I can add “camming partners” to the long list of things we are to each other.
He flips through the pages. “It’s good,” he declares. His extended hand is the final confirmation, and I can’t keep the smile from my face. We’re going to make so much money together.
“Hey,” I offer, tugging my fingertips as I watch Dalton put away the contract, “I know filming content might seem daunting—”
“Get on the bed and take out your phone,” he interjects, speaking while he latches his briefcase.
I blink through my confusion before I can offer a graceless “What?”
“Get on the bed and take out your phone,” he repeats before he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a thick, black cloth. With a flick, he unfurls it.
It’s not a cloth, but a mask—a fucking ski mask: black with two eye holes and a hole for his mouth.
Dalton came prepared.
He tugs the mask over the top of his head, but doesn’t cover his face yet. His eyes stay on mine, and with total frankness, my good friend Dalton—my colleague, my soon-to-be-stepbrother, and now camming partner—says, “I’m going to eat your pussy, and you’re going to record it.”