Chapter 4 Declan
Declan
Ronan is on his second beer when he gets to it.
He approaches things obliquely. Thirty years means I can hear when he's circling something.
A rhythm in his speech, the pauses slightly longer than they need to be.
He talks for twenty minutes about the gutters, a client's planning application, and whether Cian is going to make a decision about his apartment situation. All real conversation. All preamble.
I let him build it. He knows we can talk about anything. We’re more like brothers than friends after all these years.
He picks up his beer. "Something's up with Billie," he says.
I wait.
"She's not sleeping. Says she is, but." He turns the bottle in his hand. "Cian noticed it too. She's distracted. Not in a bad way, exactly, just, uh, somewhere else. Like she's got something going on she's not telling me about."
He looks at the garden. The quiet of a man who raised two kids alone and learned early that the things they don't tell you are the things that matter.
"Could be work. Could be a guy. Could be some online thing. You know how they are at that age, everything's online now." He shakes his head. "She won't talk to me about it. Says she's fine."
"She's twenty-one," I say. "She's smart. She'll figure it out."
"Yeah." He doesn't sound convinced. "I just worry."
"I know." I don’t really know, I never was married and never had kids of my own. But Cian and Billie are the closest thing family I have, so I worry too. I know she’s smart and she can handle herself, but I let Ronan talk until he feels better, because that’s what friends do.
***
The notification comes in twenty minutes after I walk through the door.
New upload. Private tier. Not the usual mass notification— this one is flagged for top-tier subscribers only. Direct delivery. The platform's way of marking content that was made for a smaller audience.
I see it the way I see all her notifications: immediately, before I've decided to look. Eleven seconds between the badge appearing and my thumb opening it.
Her private content follows a pattern. Wednesdays or Thursdays.
Always dark. Always close. The camera angled on her body from the collarbone down, framed so tight there's nothing identifiable.
No face. No background. Just her body and her voice in low light.
She built the frame to keep herself anonymous and she's been disciplined about it every single time.
I have watched every single one.
This one is flagged differently. It takes me a minute to realize that it’s more than top tier… it’s a DM.
You know who you are.
I open it.
Something's different.
The frame is wider than usual. Not by much, but enough that I notice, and I notice everything about her content. She always shoots tight. This one has more room. She's standing instead of lying back, further from the lens than she ever is.
Dark at first. Low light. The sound of her breathing, unhurried. A woman entirely comfortable being watched.
She speaks.
Not the stream register. Something underneath it, looser and more private, and the familiarity of it pulls at me the way it always does. That voice I should be able to place. I let it pass. I always let it pass.
“This one's private,” she says. “Just for you.”
She steps back from the camera. She's wearing something.
Blue. Deep blue. Something expensive.
Her voice drops further. Low and direct. Talking to one person. Her hands move to the hem of what she's wearing and she pulls it over her head, unhurried, like she's done this before and intends to take her time.
I should close the laptop.
She drops the blue fabric off-frame. Underneath it she's wearing nothing. The wider frame gives more than she usually gives. The curve of her waist. Her stomach. The shadow between her thighs.
She reaches off-camera and comes back with her hand wrapped around a vibrator. Rose gold. Small. She handles it with the easy familiarity of a long acquaintance. She settles back against the headboard and spreads her thighs and takes her time about it.
“I've been thinking about you,” she says. “Specifically you.”
My hand moves to my belt before I've decided anything.
She's on my screen and right now the only one watching is me and I open my pants and take my cock in my hand and I don't pretend I'm going to stop.
She presses the vibrator against her slit and makes a sound. Small. Entirely real. Nothing performed about it.
I stroke myself slowly. Eyes on the screen.
She tips her head back. Her throat comes into frame, the arc of it, and something in that line pulls at me.
Familiar in a way I don't examine. She makes another sound, fuller this time, and my grip tightens.
I can hear her getting wetter. The vibrator shifting against slick skin, the particular sound of a woman who has been thinking about this before she turned the camera on.
She arches. She says something, a breath, not quite a word, and her hand works faster.
I match her pace without deciding to. My thumb drags over the head of my cock and I think about replacing the vibrator with my mouth.
Spreading her open with both hands and tasting her while she makes those sounds.
I think about how long I'd stay there. Until she came at least twice.
Until she was shaking and pulling my hair and begging me to fuck her.
I think about pushing inside her after. How tight she'd be. How wet. How the first stroke would feel after an hour of my mouth on her and what sound she'd make when I bottomed out.
My hand works faster. Grip tight.
She's close. I can hear it. The change in her breathing. That's it, just like that and I —
The frame widens.
She tips forward toward the camera. Reaching for something. The angle shifts. The tight crop she's been maintaining opens up. And her face comes fully into frame.
I go still.
Freckles across her nose.
The line of her jaw.
A face I have sat across from at a table, Sunday after Sunday. Bread rolls and wine and thirty years of being Ronan Callaghan's best friend.
I know this face.
My hand is on my cock. She is on my screen. I understand everything at once.
The voice.
The voice is what undoes me. Low and private and real on my screen, and it is the same voice she uses at Ronan's kitchen table.
The same voice from the end of a long stream when BrattyBaby starts to dissolve.
The same voice that has been pulling at me for seven months.
I know now, with absolute certainty, that this was always Billie's voice.
It was always Billie.
She's on the screen. I know whose face is in the frame. I know whose voice I've been wanting for seven months. My cock is hard in my hand and I do not stop. I don't slow down. I don't look away.
I watch Billie Callaghan on my screen with her thighs spread and her vibrator working and her face flushed and visible for the first time and I stroke my cock and the wanting that has been building doesn't collapse under the weight of who she is.
It doubles. It triples. Because it was always her.
The voice I couldn't place. The body I memorised.
The woman I've been watching at Sunday dinners for years and wanting on a screen for months and they are the same person and I am looking at all of her at once for the first time and my hand moves faster.
I think about Billie specifically now. Billie's mouth. Billie's thighs. Billie in Ronan's kitchen six days ago and I wanted to close those six inches and pin her against the counter and put my hand up her skirt and find out what sound she'd make with her father in the next room.
My hips push up into my fist.
I think about Billie under me. Billie saying “Declan”. The freckles across her nose while I fuck her. Her hands in my hair. Her face when she comes, which I am watching right now on my screen, which is happening right now.
She's close. The change in her breathing.
Her voice going ragged. And I'm right there with her, grip tight, watching her face, her real face, Billie's face, and she arches and her mouth opens and I hear her come apart and it is Billie's sound, Billie's real unguarded sound, the one she makes at Sunday dinners when she laughs too hard except this is the other version, the one nobody hears, and I come so hard my vision whites at the edges.
My cock jerks in my fist and I feel it everywhere.
Thick ropes of it across my hand, my stomach, my shirt.
My hips snap up off the chair and I'm making a sound I don't recognize, low and wrecked, and I'm still stroking through it, still watching her on the screen, still coming while Billie Callaghan shakes apart in the same frame and it goes on longer than it should, longer than it has any right to, my whole body emptying itself in the dark while Ronan's daughter's face glows on my screen.
I don't close my eyes. I watch her through every second of it.
Her flushed throat. Her open mouth. The freckles I've been counting at Sunday dinners since she was old enough to sit at the table.
The last of it pulses through me and I go still. My hand wet. My breathing ragged. Her face on the screen, still.
Then it hits.
Not gradually. Not by degrees. All at once, like a door slamming open in a dark room and the light behind it is Ronan's kitchen and Ronan's table and Ronan's voice saying something's up with Billie twenty minutes ago on a porch where I sat and listened and said nothing.
The wanting drains out and what fills the space is something colder and heavier and I sit there with my cock softening in my hand and her face on my screen and I understand exactly what kind of man I am.
I look down. My hand. My shirt. The evidence of it, specific and undeniable, and for a moment I cannot move.
The study is quiet. The screen still lit.
Somewhere in this city Billie Callaghan uploaded a video and I opened it and I watched it and I came to it knowing who she was and I did not stop and I cannot take any of it back.
After a long time I straighten. Clean up. The mechanical actions of a man putting a room back in order. I change my shirt. Wash my hands. Come back to the desk and put my hands flat on the surface and press down.
I have been mapping her. Not BrattyBaby. Billie. For years. At Sunday dinners, through the comfortable distance of being Ronan's best friend. Her laugh. The shade of blue that would be right for her.
I was already watching. I just didn't have a name for it.
Ronan said something's up with Billie. He was right. Something is up with Billie. I am up with Billie. I have been up with Billie since October and I sat on his porch and told him she'd figure it out and drove home and her face was on my screen before my jacket was off.
His voice is still in my head.
His daughter's face is still on the screen.
I set the phone face-down on the desk.
Fuck.