Chapter 7 Billie
Billie
Iwent to get a glass of water and the kitchen window faces the street and I am standing in the dark with the light off so he can't see me looking, which is not my finest moment but I'm prepared to live with it.
Second floor, decent angle. His car parked just past the streetlight, engine off. He's just sitting there.
A forty-eight-year-old man who runs a security firm is sitting in his car in the dark pointed at my window, and I am standing in my kitchen like a woman in a true-crime documentary except in this version the woman is the one doing the surveillance and she's wearing a Pokémon shirt and no pants. Really dignified all around.
I drink my water. I try to work out what I'm feeling, which turns out to be a fairly short exercise: I want him to come back upstairs.
That's it. That's the whole feeling. No layers, no complexity, no interesting psychological dimensions.
Just come back upstairs, please, delivered with the emotional sophistication of a golden retriever at a door.
I've been managing this wanting of this older man for way too long, if I'm being honest with myself at eleven PM in a dark kitchen.
I know how to build a wall between wanting and doing.
I've been building walls my whole life. Good-daughter wall, BrattyBaby wall, woman-who-has-her-shit-together wall.
The difference tonight is that I'm not sure I want to hold it.
He said I can't. Not I won't. Not this is wrong or you're twenty-one or any of the accurate objections he could have made and didn't. He said I can't and went down the stairs and has been sitting in his car pointed at my kitchen window ever since.
Anyone who's thinking about what I can't means, as opposed to I won't, already has their answer.
I think about my dad. The night my mom died and Declan showing up and staying for three days.
Every Sunday dinner for twenty-one years, Declan in the same chair, the same easy silence between two men who don't need to fill space with noise.
My dad's whole sense of safety has Declan Maguire in the load-bearing wall.
I sit with that for a real minute. The cost of it. What it would do to two men who have been each other's constants for thirty years.
Then I look at the dark square of the kitchen window and I think about a man in a parked car who drove across the city in fourteen minutes to stand at my door and look at me like I was a problem he couldn't solve, and walked away anyway.
I pick up my phone.
I don't write a message.
I just send the link.
Then I go to my room and I get to work.
Here's the thing about what I do for a living.
I've been doing it for eighteen months and I know exactly how a camera works and exactly how I work on camera.
I know the difference between performing for an audience and performing for one person.
The audience is a room. One person is a target.
The skill sets overlap but the intent is completely different.
I have never aimed the second skill set at someone I actually wanted.
Tonight I'm aiming it at Declan Maguire, and my hands are shaking while I set up the phone stand, which is not something that happens.
I have steady hands. I'm good at this. Apparently "good at this" has a footnote that reads: unless you genuinely care about the outcome, in which case, welcome to your hands shaking, enjoy the experience.
I take my hair down. I change out of the dress and into what I wear when I do private content: soft things, simple things, the kind that come off easily and look like I didn't think about them even though I thought about them plenty.
I set up my phone on its stand, ring light low and warm.
The angle I use for private sessions: close, intimate, the frame tighter than the public stream.
But tonight I do something I've never done on a private call.
I widen the frame.
My private content is always dark, always careful.
Collarbone down. My face never in shot because the framing makes it unnecessary.
The subscribers see my body, hear my voice, and the anonymity is the whole point of the architecture.
Nobody on the private tier has ever seen my face.
Not once. Not until the night I accidentally shifted into a wider angle and Declan recognized the dress he'd given me, and by then it was too late to take it back.
Tonight I set the frame at my chin. Then higher. Then all the way.
No angle trick. No careful crop. My real face, in warm light, looking directly into the camera.
I check the preview and my stomach does something I refuse to describe because I have more self-respect than that.
I look like BrattyBaby except without any of the walls, which is exactly what I want him to see and also absolutely terrifying, and I am choosing not to engage with the terror right now because I have a phone call to make.
The link request comes in while I'm adjusting the stand.
He answered in four minutes. I don't know what he was doing for those four minutes and I have several theories, all of which involve a man staring at a link on his phone and having a brief, private argument with himself that he was always going to lose.
I accept it.
His face fills my screen and he looks exactly like a man who picked up before he'd decided to.
He's still in his car. The interior light is on.
I can see him clearly: the set of his jaw, the silver at his temples, the stillness that means he is paying complete attention.
His eyes move over my screen and I watch him take in what he's looking at.
The warm light, the close frame, no virtual background.
My face. My actual face, which he has never seen on this platform before, which no one has ever seen on this platform, and he knows that.
I can see the moment he understands what I've done.
Something shifts in his expression. Something underneath the control gives way by about a millimeter, which on Declan Maguire is the equivalent of another man falling out of his chair.
"Hi," I say.
He says nothing.
I smile at the camera. Not BrattyBaby's smile. Smaller. Private. "You drove away."
"I did."
"And then you answered."
He holds my gaze. Says nothing.
Good. I have his full attention and he has no idea what I'm about to do with it, which is my preferred operating position.
I reach up and take my hair in both hands, twist it over one shoulder, and settle back against my headboard.
Slow. Unhurried. I look at the phone like I have all the time in the world, which I do, because there is no audience and no schedule and no timer running.
Just me and a man in a parked car and whatever I decide to do next.
"I want to show you something," I say.
"Billie."
I hold the camera steady. "Private tier. You know what that means."
A beat.
"I know what that means," he says.
"Then you know what I do on camera when there's no audience." I tilt my head. I reach off-camera and pick up the vibrator I keep on my nightstand. Rose gold, small, the one I'm most comfortable with. I hold it up so the camera catches it. "You've watched me use this."
His jaw locks. I see it happen in real time, the muscle jumping.
"You watched me and you thought I was someone you'd never meet," I say. "Someone anonymous. Someone who didn't know your name." I look straight into the camera. "I've known your name the whole time, Declan."
"Billie." Rough at the edges. Two syllables and they sound like they cost him something.
"I want you to watch me." I keep my voice even. "You. Just you." I hold the camera. "Can you do that?"
A long pause. The interior of his car is dim behind him and his face is lit by the phone screen and he looks like a man at the edge of a decision he cannot come back from. I've seen that look on men before, on camera. It has never done to me what his version of it is doing right now.
"Yes," he says.
Low and absolute. That one word moves through me from my throat to between my thighs and I let it land for exactly one second before I pick up the thread and start working.
I know what I look like on camera. I know how to use low light, how to use the close frame, how to use my voice to take someone apart from a distance. I've been doing it professionally for a year and a half.
I have never cared this much about the result, and caring changes everything.
My hand is less steady. My breathing is already different.
The performance version of this would be smooth and controlled and right now I am neither of those things, and the part of my brain that runs quality control is screaming about it and the rest of me has decided that the quality control department can take the night off, because this is not a performance, this is me, on a call with Declan Maguire, about to touch myself for him, and if my hand is shaking a little that's just what's true.
I slip my hand beneath the waistband of what I'm wearing. I let my eyes half-close. I watch his face on my screen.
"I think about your hands," I say. My fingers find my clit, starting slow, and the touch registers sharper than usual because he's watching and that makes everything louder.
"I've been thinking about your hands at Sunday dinner for years and pretending I wasn't. You pass the bread and I think about what those hands would feel like and then I ask my dad about his week like a completely normal person.
" A breath. My fingers move in a slow circle, finding the rhythm.
"You want to know what I think about them doing? "
He says nothing. His jaw is locked.
"I think about you getting me on my back and taking your time.
" My hips shift against my hand. "I think about what it would feel like to have your cock inside me and not be able to do anything about how slow you go.
Because you would go slow." I let him hear the change in my breathing.
My fingers press harder, circling my clit, and the warmth is building low and real.
"I know you would. That's what I think about when I do this. "
On screen his hand moves. Not toward himself. Away. Both hands finding the steering wheel. Gripping it.
I see that and something in my chest turns over: he is not going to touch himself.
He has decided, in this parked car on my street, that his hand is not what he wants tonight and he would rather grip a steering wheel until his knuckles crack than accept a substitute.
That's the most Declan Maguire thing I have ever witnessed.
The wanting just doubled. Tripled. I'm doing math I'm not qualified for.
I keep going.
My hips are moving now, tilting into my fingers, and I'm wet enough that the slide is easy. I let him see it. I let him hear it.
"This is what you've been watching," I say, my voice lower than I planned. "Except this time you know who I am." I look at the camera. At him. "Does that make it better or worse?"
A long beat.
"Both," he says. Rough. The control has slipped a full register and I can hear the edges of what's underneath it and it makes me press harder against my own hand.
"Tell me what you want," I say. My hips shifting into my hand now, not subtle about it. I've stopped pretending this is a show. I can feel the build starting, the tightening, and I let him see exactly what his answer is going to do to me. I look at the camera. "Say it."
"Billie."
"Say it."
His knuckles are white on the wheel. The silver at his temples catches the light from his phone and he is gripping that wheel like a man holding a rope over a long drop and I want him so badly I can feel it in my teeth. That's a new one for me. Desire in teeth. Adding it to the list.
"I want to be in that room," he says. Low and plain and certain. "I want to be the one making you sound like that."
Something opens up in my chest alongside everything happening between my thighs.
I let him hear what it does to me. I don't hide any of it.
The flush climbing my cheeks, the way my mouth opens, the sounds I'm making that are real and unpracticed and have his name tangled up in them.
My fingers working my clit faster, pressing in tight circles, and I can feel myself getting close, the tension winding tighter with every breath.
"Then come upstairs," I say. Breathless. Actually breathless, not performing breathless. "You know which window is mine."
My hand moves faster. I let him watch every second of it. I let him hear me get close, the sounds I'm making that are aimed at him, that have his name in them, and my thighs are tensing and my back is starting to arch and I am right there, right at the edge—
And I stop.
I pull my hand free, letting him see the way my fingers and vibrator are glistening in the light.
I look at the camera with my chest heaving and my cheeks hot and I don't finish, and I make sure he can see exactly what he's done to me, and I make sure he knows I'm leaving this here, on the edge, unfinished.
"Come take it," I say. "Yourself."
I end the call.