EIGHT Wells
EIGHT
Wells
Raising the Mask: Tradition lets a masker lift the edge of the disguise for one trusted face, a brief reveal that becomes its own kind of intimacy. He gives her the single thing he has never given anyone, the sound of himself letting go.
Her face pops up on the screen at nine on the dot. Her sexy, eager red lips and mysterious black mask, only revealing two piercing blue eyes, stare back at me.
"Someone is early tonight," she says with a sultry smile. "Should I be flattered or concerned?”
I lean forward, as if I could get closer to her, and inhale. All I want to do is to smell her. I wonder if she smells like cherries, like her red lips look like they’d taste.
Both, I want to say. "I was thinking about you," I say instead.
"Oh, yeah. What were you thinking, exactly?'
"How much I want to taste you."
Across the room, the feeds run their quiet rows of light, and a dead man's name keeps rising up through all of them.
She settles back against the headboard and draws one knee up, exposing the curve of her round ass. She has on black lace thong panties tonight under a black short camisole dress.
"How are you, Midnight?”
“Better now that I get to see you.” I pull another cigarette from the pack, but don't light it yet. My hands cannot seem to hold one task tonight for more than a few seconds. “You look radiant tonight.”
“You've never done that before, messaged me during the day. I was pleasantly surprised to see the message pop up while I was at work. It made me wet for you when I was supposed to be concentrating. You're naughty, sneaking up on me at the office like that."
“That makes me very happy.”
There is a small pause before she answers. “I like making you happy.”
She gives it to me like she gives me everything, certain it is the line I want. Tonight it almost is. I came here to be handled, to hand the noise in my skull to the one person who knows the shape of me and let her run me until it quiets. So I do what I came for.
"Touch yourself."
She moves before I finish, her hand to her thigh, her breathing changing on cue. Her eyes slide half shut behind the rhinestone circles. The sound she makes is pitched for the speakers, set where I trained it.
It's flawless. She is always flawless. More than two months into whatever this is, and she knows how I like the show paced to the second. She runs it tonight without a single wrong note.
It does nothing for the thing that drove me here.
"Stop."
Her hand goes still on her thigh. "Am I going too slow? I can pick it up."
"No, that's not it." I set the unlit cigarette on the keyboard and leave it there. The room has gone quiet, only the air purifier and the river muffled thirty floors down. "Peoria."
"Yeah?"
"Take it off. All of it. I want nothing between us tonight."
For a second, she doesn't move. The hand on her thigh stays where it is, and the loose confidence she wears like a second skin goes out of her all at once. She looks less like the woman I pay and more like someone who walked into a room expecting one thing and found another.
"That's..." She stops and pulls the strap of the camisole up an inch, something her body does before her mouth can. "That's not really what this is. We've always agreed I could keep my clothes on, only exposing parts of me at a time."
"Don't you trust me, Peoria?"
"It's not that."
"Then what is it? I want all of you."
"This started as a way to keep my lights on.
" Her voice has dropped out of the register she sells into something with edges in it.
"I'm good at the show. But I don't take it all off.
You have all of me already. I told you I wouldn't see anyone else, and I haven't.
I'm too shy to take off all of my clothes, as weird as that sounds with all we do together, all I do for you on camera. "
There it is, the line she drew to keep herself safe, the same as I draw mine. I know the shape of that better than she could guess.
"You keep the mask," I tell her. "The mask, the wig, anything that keeps you yours. I am not asking for who you are. I just want to see you, just this once."
She is quiet, working it. When she answers, her voice is careful. "Then give me something back of you, something you aren't easily willing to share."
"Name it."
"You sit back there in the dark every time, and you take. I hand you everything, but I never get one thing of yours. Not your face, not your name, not even the sound of you."
The ask lands square in the place I keep walled off, and the old refusal comes up on reflex. I breathe past it.
"Not my face. That I can't give you, and it has nothing to do with you."
The last time someone learned who I was, it cost me everything I had. The dark is how I stay safe. The dark stays.
She doesn't push.
"Okay," she says. "Not your face." A pause, then lower, "But I know you, Midnight.
I know exactly when you finish, because you go silent on me.
Every single time. You shut yourself off right when it would be the most real, and you leave me out here by myself, coming for you on camera.
" Her thumb moves slowly against her hip.
"Let me hear you tonight. Let me hear you let go. Fall with me."
It is the one thing I never give to anyone.
Not the words, not the face, the loss of control itself, the proof that she reaches me.
The modulator will keep my voice a stranger's no matter what comes out of me, so what she is asking for was never my cover. It’s only the thing I have spent a lifetime refusing to hand over.
"Okay," I say.
She sits up against the pillows and reaches for the hem of the camisole, and there is nothing practiced in it, none of the slow tease she sells.
She pulls it over her head like a woman undressing alone, drops it off the side of the bed, and lies back, the platinum hair loose around the mask.
The silver ring in her navel catches the light, more of herself handed to a black square than she has ever given it.
She leaves her black thongs on.
"There," she says, quieter. "Your turn is coming."
"Touch yourself," I tell her, and the command is gone out of it. "Slow. Not for the camera. For you. I want to know what you sound like when nobody taught you how."
Her hand moves low, and there is no choreography in it this time. Her breath catches on its own. The sound she makes is small, with nothing built for a speaker in it, and it catches somewhere in me and holds.
"Talk to me," she breathes. "I always do this in the dark. Talk to me so I know you're there. Don't hold back. I want to hear you come apart with me."
So I give it to her out loud, not muting any of it.
"I haven't been able to hold still since your reply came through this afternoon." It comes out lower than I let it, the flatness gone out of it. "I cleared my whole night for you."
Her breath stutters. "Keep going."
"You are what I look forward to all week." My hand moves with the sound of her. "I dream about you when we aren't together on here."
"Midnight," she says, and the name comes apart in the middle of her mouth.
"I'm here. I'm not going anywhere." The command is long gone from my voice. "I'm imagining being inside of you, your tight pussy."
Her sounds climb, and I let mine climb with them, further off the flat line every time hers rises.
I stop tracking the frame. I stop managing the picture.
There is only her breathing and the heat climbing through me and the unbearable nearness of a woman I have never touched coming undone a thousand miles away while I come undone with her.
When she tips over, she does it openly, holding nothing back, my name coming apart in her mouth. And for the first time on this call, I do not reach for silence. I don't swallow it. I don't flatten my palm to the desk and wait it out behind the screen.
I let the rough sound out of me, all of it, the breath and the break and the proof, and the startled noise she makes when she hears it is worth more than the whole arrangement.
"Oh," she breathes, and I can hear the smile in it. "There you are. I love hearing you break for me, Midnight. You sound just like I imagined you would."
"Only for you, Peoria."
For a while, neither of us speaks. Her chest rises and falls. The platinum hair has slipped across the pillow. I sit in the quiet, the cool air brushing over my sweaty skin.
I pick up the cigarette off the keyboard and finally light it, pulling in a lungful of nicotine. I've had real women in real rooms. Not one of them ever gutted me out like a woman whose real name I don't know and whose skin I've never felt.
“Thank you,” I say, and the word carries something it has never carried before.
"It's my pleasure, Midnight. That was amazing. We should do it like that more often."
"Not so shy anymore, huh?"
"You make me feel like I could do anything."
I smile at that and take another drag.
She runs her fingers over her chest, humming a few notes under her breath while she stretches out, still bare but for the underwear.
I don't know the song. It lodges in me anyway, the kind of small thing I will not be able to shake, though I could not say why it matters.
I'm too many sleepless nights deep this month to chase the thought down.
We talk about nothing in particular. She tells me about a new yoga pose she has been working on, and I tell her about a movie I half-watched last night. She laughs, and I soak it all up, knowing now that I've had more of her, there's no going back.
She yawns into the back of her hand. "Night, Midnight. Don't let the bedbugs bite."
"Night, Peoria.”
With her, the armor's down. I notice it the way you notice a sound stopping, the absence of a thing that has run so long you forgot it was there.
I don't put it back up right away. I sit in the dark a while longer and let it stay down, and I don't let myself ask why I'd rather feel exposed with her than safe without her.
This growing need for her is a trap. I can see the shape of it even if I can't find the door out.
The part that sits the worst is that I could end it tonight if I wanted to.
I could have her real name and her real face inside an hour, the street she lives on, the route she takes to work.
Finding people who do not want to be found is the thing I do better than anyone in this city.
And I will never aim a single one of those tools at her, because the day I know who she is, she stops being the one part of my life no one gets to touch, me least of all.
So I keep her a stranger on purpose. I want a woman I have promised myself I will never find and will never meet, and lately I catch myself wishing the wall between us was not one I built with my own hands.
I can't tell which is heavier to carry, that I could have her and won't, or that I have started to want to.