Chapter 6 Declan
Declan
Iwatch the whole stream.
I know her pacing. She's letting the chat settle.
Letting the attention build. Giving everyone time to notice what she's wearing before she acknowledges it.
I've watched her do this for seven months and I watch her reach for the fabric of the skirt and hold it up for the camera and the blue in the ring light is the exact shade I stood in a store for twenty minutes to find.
I know why I found it. I knew before I admitted I knew.
I tip before she finishes the sentence.
Then she looks at the camera.
Not at the chat. Not at the notification corner. At the camera. At the specific point behind the lens where she knows I am. Because she has known where I am for weeks and has been performing for that exact point this entire time.
Every Tuesday. Every stream. Every tip. Every message I typed and deleted. She knew. She was watching me watch her. I was the only one who didn't know what I was doing.
I know you think so. I've known for a while, actually.
The stream ends.
Ninety seconds. I count them. Something I do when I need the thinking to stop and the deciding to start.
I get my keys.
I don't have a reason to be driving to her apartment. I know this. I build one anyway, the way I build cover stories when I want something badly enough. I'll say it's about the platform. Security. Something professional. The words assemble themselves on the drive over and none of them hold up.
Her building. Converted Victorian, quiet street. Three floors, her apartment on the second. I've been here a few time. Being in the security business, I noted the layout without deciding to. Which buzzer. Which stairwell. The window on the second floor, left side.
Her light is on.
I press the buzzer.
She doesn't ask who it is. The door opens. Immediate, no hesitation. She's been waiting. She detonated the situation and then she waited because she knew I'd come.
She was right.
She's still in the dress.
I come up the stairs and she's in the doorway and the blue is right there. Deeper in the hall light than it was in the garden. I have seen it on a screen and from thirty feet away and I am looking at it from four feet away and the dress is not the problem.
She is the problem.
Small but not delicate. She takes up more space than her size suggests. Always has. Her hair down. Her chin up. The freckles across her nose that her stream filter smooths away and that I've been noticing at Sunday dinners for years.
Billie. I have wanted her since before I had the name for it and I have the name now, the name and the wanting both, and she is right there.
I stop on the landing.
She's leaning in the doorframe. Arms loosely crossed. The expression of a woman who has been ahead of this long enough that she can afford to wait. Twenty-one years old. Looking at me like she's considerably older than that.
"Declan," she says.
"Billie." Even. "I wanted to talk about—"
"Don't," she says.
I stop.
She tilts her head.
"You watched the stream," she says.
She doesn't press. She has all the leverage and she knows it and she's choosing to be quiet about it.
Her throat above the dress. The line of her collarbone I have been careful not to look at for years. I'm looking at it now because I have run out of reasons not to. Her mouth. Slightly parted.
I want my hands on her. Not abstractly. Not the way I've wanted the woman on the screen for seven months, constructed out of voice and silhouette and imagination.
I want my hands on Billie. Specifically.
I want to get both hands in her hair and tilt her head back and find out what her mouth tastes like.
I want to feel the sound she makes against my lips.
I want to put my mouth on her throat where I can see her pulse and I want to feel it jump.
I want to get her inside and out of the dress and onto whatever surface is closest and I want to learn every freckle with my mouth.
I want to hear the sounds from the private content except close, except real, except aimed at me while I'm the one causing them.
I want to find out what her face does when I push inside her for the first time.
I want to go slow enough that she begs me not to.
I want to do it white knowing whose daughter she is. I want to do it with her father's name in my head. And that wanting — that specific, detailed, unforgivable wanting — is so loud in my body right now that my hands are shaking and I put them in my jacket pockets so she won't see.
She sees anyway. Her eyes drop to my pockets. Back up. Something shifts in her face. She knows what I just hid.
"Come in," she says. Steps back from the doorway.
I see the hall light behind her. Her apartment.
Her bed, somewhere behind her in that apartment, and I know exactly what I would do if I walked through that door and I know I would not stop and I know she wouldn't want me to stop and I know the sound of the door closing behind me would be the last sound of the version of my life where I am a man Ronan Callaghan trusts.
I don't move.
She waits. She wants me to come in. I can see it.
My hands are still shaking in my pockets.
I think about what happens if I go in. I put my mouth on hers.
I get my hands on her. I hear the sounds I've been hearing through speakers except close, except real.
And then it's morning and I have crossed something I cannot uncross and Ronan calls me the way he always does on a Sunday and I have to answer the phone as a man who fucked his daughter.
The wanting doesn't care. The wanting has no interest in Ronan or mornings or what kind of man I am.
The wanting is in my hands and my chest and my cock, which has been hard since I came up the stairs, and the only thing holding me on this landing is thirty years of being someone Ronan trusts and the knowledge that those thirty years end the moment I step through that door.
"I can't," I say.
My voice comes out even. It costs me everything I have.
Something moves in her face. She reads me. Whatever she finds makes her go still. Not hurt. Something more complicated.
"Okay," she says.
I should leave. I should turn around right now and go down the stairs and get in my car. I don't. I stand on the landing and I look at her and I let myself have a few more seconds of her face in the hall light because I am not strong enough to leave without them.
"I want you to be careful. Passwords, security—"
"Declan."
I stop.
"I know," she says. "I know why you came and I know why you're not coming in." Flat. Accurate. "You don't have to explain it."
One more second. I said three and I'm taking a fourth because I don't have it in me to stop at three.
The hall light. Her hair. Her mouth.
"Good night, Billie."
"Good night, Declan."
I go down the stairs. Every step is a decision.
Twelve steps from her landing to the lobby and every single one of them requires a separate act of will because my body is not going down these stairs, my body is turning around and going back up and through that door, and I make it to the lobby by not looking back. If I look back I'm done.
I am sitting in a parked car in the dark and I want to go back upstairs and put my hands on her and hear my name in that voice and I am gripping this steering wheel with both hands because the alternative is opening the car door.
The shadow crosses the window again. Settles.
I think about Ronan.
His face at the BBQ this afternoon. The way he hugged her when she came through the gate.
The warmth he carries for his kids, the easy, unguarded warmth that a man builds over decades of being the one person who always shows up.
I am supposed to be the other person who always shows up.
I drove across this city in fourteen minutes to stand at his daughter's door.
I'm sitting in the dark pointed at her window with an erection and my hands shaking on a steering wheel and if he could see me right now thirty years of friendship would end in the time it takes to understand what he was looking at.
I check the time. I start the engine.
The drive home. The garage. The dark house.
I sit in the kitchen. I don't open the laptop. Don't pour anything. My hands have stopped shaking. The rest hasn't stopped. The wanting is still there, sitting in my chest and my stomach and lower, and I wait for the right choice to feel like something other than the worst night of my life.