Chapter 16
Billie
Declane sets a case folder down in front of me on the kitchen table between us like it's evidence, which I suppose it is, and he opens it to the first page and turns it toward me and I look at it.
Timestamps. Account IDs. Cached messages, screenshots, metadata analysis.
The kind of documentation that only comes from someone who has been building a file at speed with the thoroughness of a man who does this for a living.
I knew about the comment with my name. I knew about the message describing my street.
I did not know about the messages before those.
I did not know about the IP analysis or the account creation patterns or the cross-referencing with other platforms. I did not know that the person who wrote my name in my chat has also been leaving comments on my Instagram under a different handle for three months, or that there's a pattern to the timing that suggests he watches from a consistent location, or that the location is within walking distance of my building.
Three months. He's been at this for three months. I thought the name comment was the beginning. It wasn't even close.
I go quiet.
This is not a thing I do. I have a voice for every situation.
I have a joke for every situation. I have been talking my way through uncomfortable moments since I was old enough to realize that funny people get left alone, and right now I have nothing.
My mouth is closed and my brain is closed and I am looking at eight pages of a man I don't know who has been building a picture of me the way Declan builds pictures of me, except the picture is wrong and the building is wrong and the man is wrong and he lives close enough to walk to my apartment.
"Why didn't you tell me?" Declan asks.
He's standing across the table from me. Not sitting. The posture of a man who sat down, saw what the conversation was going to be, and stood back up.
"I handled it," I say.
"Billie."
"This crap is normal for girl streamers,” I admit. “I flagged the accounts. I documented the pattern. I have a system, I've had a system for eighteen months, and it works, and I handled it."
"You handled the two you knew about." He's not raising his voice. He's not doing the careful-choosing-words thing from the argument about the private tier. This is something else. This is the flat, even register of a man who is trying very hard not to be frightened in front of me.
"Why didn't you tell me," he tries again.
I should have a smart answer. I should have something wry and self-deprecating about my instinct for independence or my allergy to asking for help or the fact that I have been managing my own problems since I was sixteen years old and my mom died and I watched my dad fall apart and decided somebody in this family was going to hold it together.
What comes out is: "Because I didn't want you to look at me like I couldn't handle it."
He's quiet for a moment.
"I'm not looking at you like that," he says.
He isn't. I check. His face is not pity, not condescension, not the face of a man who thinks I'm fragile.
It's the face of a man who is angry about a situation and concerned about a person and completely unsurprised that she handled it alone because he knows her well enough to know that's what she does.
"I started the file when I pulled the deleted comment. Few days ago." He looks at the folder. "But the activity goes back months. The Instagram accounts, the timing patterns. He's been watching you since before I knew you were BrattyBaby."
"Months." I look at the folder. "He's been doing this for months."
"The accounts were separate. Different platforms, different handles. It took cross-referencing to see the pattern."
"And my moderation system?"
"Caught the obvious ones. Missed the big picture."
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?"
"I'm processing. Give me a minute."
He gives me a minute. He gives me several minutes, actually, standing at his kitchen counter while I sit at the table and read every page of the folder and feel the shape of something I've been telling myself was manageable, get considerably larger and considerably less manageable.
When I'm done I close the folder.
"I'm scared," I say.
I have not said this sentence out loud to another person in approximately five years.
The last time was to my brother, in the hospital parking lot, when my dad was having tests done and I was pretending to be fine and Cian looked at me and said you don't have to do that with me and I cried in his car for ten minutes and then went back inside and performed fine for the rest of the day.
"I know," Declan says.
He doesn't say anything. He puts his arms around me and I press my face into his chest and I stand there.
Just that. Just standing in his kitchen being held by a man who has been watching me manage things alone for months and has been waiting, with the patience of someone who has waited for everything, for me to stop.
We stand there for a while. The fridge hums. The folder sits on the table behind me. His hand on the back of my head, the way my dad holds me when I hug him, except nothing else about this is like my dad and I am not going to think about that comparison right now.
"I'm sorry about the argument," I say. Into his chest.
He's quiet for a moment. "Don’t be sorry. I’m sorry. You were right."
"I know I was right. That's not what I'm sorry about." I pull back enough to look at him. "I'm sorry I made it sound like what you feel about the private tier doesn't matter. It matters. I just can't let it change what I do."
He looks at me and his face relaxes. "I know," he says. "I'm not asking you to."
"You kind of were."
"I was." No qualifier. "I was wrong about that. I'm not wrong about the file."
I lean against his shoulder. He puts his arm around me.
We sit like that for a while in the lamplight.
Not talking. Not performing anything for each other.
Just sitting with the specific weight of everything that's real: the file, the fight, the fact that someone has been standing outside my building, and the fact that I am here, in this room, with this man, and the doors are locked and he knows every angle of approach and I feel safe.
I feel safe. That's the thing. Not fine. Not managed. Safe. Which is a different word and a different feeling and I'm not used to it.
He leans down and presses his mouth to my hair. Just that. Soft. Not a move. Just a man putting his mouth on the head of a woman he's worried about.
I turn my face up and kiss him.
It's not urgent. It's not an escalation. It's just a kiss that says I'm here and you're here and the day is over and I want to be closer to you than talking allows. He kisses me back the same way.
Then, we move to his bedroom. He pulls me against him and I go, and we're just lying in his bed fully clothed with his arm around me and my head on his chest and his thumb moving against my shoulder. The lamp is on. The door is closed.
His thumb keeps moving. My breathing slows.
His heart is steady under my ear. I close my eyes and something happens that I wasn't expecting: I relax.
Actually relax. Not the performed version.
My whole body lets go of something it's been holding since the first time my name showed up in my own chat in someone else's handwriting.
His hand moves from my shoulder to my hair. He strokes it. Slow, repetitive, the way you'd soothe something frightened, and I would normally have a reaction to being treated like something frightened but right now I don't. Right now it's exactly what I need and I press closer to him and breathe.
"Billie."
"I don't want to be in my head tonight," I say against his throat. "I just want to feel you."
He kisses me again. Slower this time, deeper, and I feel the shift — the moment it stops being comfort and starts being something else.
Not a sharp line. A gradual change, like the room warming up by degrees.
His hand in my hair becomes his hand on my neck becomes his hand sliding down my back, and I arch into him because I want his hands on me.
I reach for him. He catches my hands. Brings them to his mouth.
Kisses my knuckles, and the gentleness of it finishes what the hair-stroking started.
Something behind my eyes goes hot and I make a sound that is not a sex sound.
It's the sound of a woman who has been holding it together for days and has finally, finally put it down.
"I've got you," he says. Low. Against my hands. "I'm right here."
He settles over me. Forehead against mine. Hands on my face. His body between me and everything outside this room.
"I need you closer."
He understands. He shifts his weight. Chest against mine, skin to skin, the warmth of him everywhere, and I can feel his heart beating against my sternum and my arms are around his neck and this is just two people pressed together trying to make the outside world smaller by making the inside world as close as possible.
His hand slides down my stomach. Between my thighs. Slow, unhurried, following the warmth. Not asking. Knowing.
His fingers find my clit and I'm already wet, which makes sense because I've been lying against him for however long that was with his heart under my ear and his hand in my hair and apparently safety and tenderness and his body next to mine combine into something my body processes as want.
I push against his hand and he gives me what I need: slow, steady pressure.
Two fingers sliding inside me, curling. His thumb working my clit in circles while his mouth stays at my ear, low and close.
"You're safe here," he says. "You're in my house. In my bed. No one is getting through that door."
I make a sound.
"I've got you," he says again, and his fingers curl deeper and his thumb presses harder and I'm climbing, tension building in my thighs and my stomach and I'm gripping his shoulders and my face is still pressed against his neck because I can't look at him right now, I can't, if I look at him I'm going to fall apart in a way that has nothing to do with the orgasm that's building and everything to do with the fact that someone is finally, finally holding the thing I've been carrying alone.
I come quietly. A shudder, a gasp, a clenching around his fingers while I press my face against his throat and he holds me through it with his free arm around my back and his voice in my ear saying that's it, I've got you, I'm right here.
The aftershock rolls through me and my eyes are wet, which is mortifying, and I say "don't look at me" and he says "I'm not" and he is. Of course he is. He's always looking.
He gives me a minute. His hand still between my thighs, still inside me, not moving. Just there. Then he withdraws slowly, carefully, and settles his weight over me and I feel his cock against my thigh, hard, and I reach down and take him in my hand and guide him in.
He enters me slowly. So slowly. Face to face, his forehead against mine, his eyes open.
I keep mine open too even though the instinct is to close them because tonight is not about hiding and the eye contact is almost too much.
I can see everything on his face. The want.
The fear underneath it. The something else underneath that, the thing I've been circling for weeks without saying its name.
He starts to move. Slow and deep, his hips rolling, every stroke filling me completely.
His hands frame my face. His thumbs against my cheekbones.
I have never been looked at like this during sex.
I have never been looked at like this during anything.
Four thousand people watch me every week and not one of them has seen a fraction of what Declan Maguire is seeing right now.
"You're safe," he says again, low, his mouth close to mine. "Nothing is going to happen to you."
I pull him deeper with my legs around him. His cock pushes in and the angle makes me gasp, and I hold on.
"Right here," he says. "I'm right here."
And it comes out.
Not planned. Not chosen. Not performed or tested or decided. Just the fear and the safety and his voice in my ear and his body inside mine and the word rises up from somewhere I didn't know it lived and I say it against his mouth on a breath.
"Daddy."
Everything stops.
His whole body goes still. Every muscle. His hands tighten on my face. His cock is buried deep inside me and he is not moving and I can feel what that word has done to him— physically, immediately, unmistakably. He is harder inside me than he was a second ago. His breathing has changed.
I just called my dad's best friend Daddy during sex, says my brain, which has maintained operations throughout every crisis I've ever experienced and is not about to stop now. I think that means I've genuinely lost my mind. I also think I'm going to say it again.
"Say it again," he says. Not a command. Rawer than a command. His voice is wrecked and his eyes are dark and his hands are holding my face like I'm something he can't believe is real.
I look at him. The silver at his temples under my hands. His dark eyes, stripped of every layer of control I've ever seen on him. The underneath. The way, way underneath.
"Daddy," I say. Quieter this time. Deliberate.
He starts to fuck me again.
This time it’s desperate and close and his forehead is against mine and his hands are on my face and he drives into me deep and slow and I feel every inch of it and I say it again, "Daddy," and he makes a sound against my mouth that I feel in my whole body, a sound I have never heard him make, low and broken and absolutely undone.
His thumb finds my clit between us. Pressing, circling, while his cock fills me in long deep strokes. The combination builds fast, too fast, and I'm climbing again with my hands in his hair and my legs locked around him and his face so close I can feel his breath on my lips.
"I've got you," he says, and his voice cracks on it, actually cracks, and I say "Daddy" one more time because I can feel what it does to him, I can feel his cock throb inside me when I say it, and that tips me over the edge.
I come with my eyes open. Looking at him.
His face an inch from mine. Clenching around his cock, pulsing, my thighs shaking, and I say his name and it undoes whatever he had left.
He drives deep and holds there and comes with his forehead pressed to mine and his hands on my face and a sound that is the most honest thing I have ever heard from him.
Low. Wrecked. Completely surrendered.