Chapter 61
SLOANE
Maggie comes back in from locking up, and I have my phone pointed at her before she's through the door.
She's just done the evening rounds — checked the gates, the sheds, the latches, the whole nightly ritual. I'm fresh out of the shower in my robe with my hair wet, and I lift the phone and film her walking in.
"No." She puts a hand up. "Sloane, no. I look terrible."
I shake my head. She looks gorgeous and she doesn't even know it.
Maggie crosses the kitchen with a playful glint in her eyes, takes the phone from me and puts it on the counter. She taps it to stop the filming.
"There are far more fun things we could be doing right now than making videos," she whispers. "Unless you want to make the naughty kind?"
"Wait." My voice has gone breathless already. "Let me just —" I trail away as her hands land on my waist. Her lips are on mine, her nails digging into my skin, and whatever I was doing stops mattering.
She kisses me deeper, her hand sliding up the back of my neck and into my wet hair. The other hand is splayed against my hip, holding me there. Her mouth moves to my jaw, then to the spot just below my ear. I shiver against her and feel her smile against my skin.
"Turn around," she murmurs. "Hands on the counter."
I turn slowly, breath unsteady, and put my hands flat on the cold counter. My hair falls forward over my shoulder.
Her arms come around me from behind, sliding inside the front of my gown. Her palms find my breasts and settle there, caressing me while her mouth is at the side of my neck. She pulls me back against her.
"Maggie. What are you…" I moan when her thumb passes over my nipple. She does it again and my hips push back against her.
"I'm going to fuck you." Her right hand drops from my breast, slides down and around me under the robe, and her fingers slip between my legs. "Is that okay?"
"Yes, I — Yes." I'm already wet and she knows it.
"Christ," she breathes against my neck as she enters me with two fingers.
I gasp and bite down on whatever other sound was about to come out of me, my hands gripping the edge of the counter as she fucks me. It's fast and hard and so sexy I can't keep quiet for long. I can't do anything except hold on and moan and let her take me apart standing up.
I've never been fucked like this and it's not what I thought sex would look like with a woman. I'd assumed soft and slow, lots of feelings. And there's plenty of that with Maggie. But there is also this. I had no idea I would want it so badly.
Her breath is quick and uneven against my shoulder and she's making sounds of her own that go straight through me.
My head drops between my hands, I push back against her hand and she meets me every time, harder.
The pressure builds fast and unmanageable, and then her fingers curl inside me and find the spot that makes my whole body shake.
I come fast, her arm the only thing keeping me upright, and she holds me with her mouth pressed to the back of my neck until my legs decide to work again. I'm breathing like I've run somewhere and she's breathing almost as hard against my back.
"God," I manage. "I wish I'd known about this years ago."
Maggie chuckles, still holding me. "Nah. Then you'd never have had a string of useless boyfriends, never have made a series of terrible decisions and driven a Porsche through my fence." She presses a kiss to my shoulder. "And then we'd never have met. So. Worth the wait."
"Fair enough." I turn around in her arms, my robe half off, and kiss her properly, slowly now, tasting the grin still on her mouth. "Although I'm choosing to be insulted on behalf of past me."
"Past you would agree with me and you know it."
She kisses me again, and her hands settle on my bare hips. The heat that should be spent is already climbing back. I drag my mouth along her jaw and feel her shiver. "Do you want to take this upstairs?"
Maggie nods as she locks her eyes with mine and lets me go, reluctantly. I turn to grab my phone off the counter and that's when I see the screen. It's still recording.
The little red timer's running. 04:32. 04:33. I laugh. "You didn't turn it off. Guess we made that video after all."
Maggie looks at it. "Four and a half minutes, that must be a record," she says with a smug grin. "Although it only caught the kitchen ceiling so there's not much to watch back." Then her grin suddenly drops. "Wait, it wasn't live, was it?"
"Of course not." I'm stabbing at the screen.
"It's fine, I just have to delete it." I stop the recording and I'm about to do so, but in my flustered, post-everything, not-thinking state, my thumb has done something else entirely, because the share sheet's open, there's a spinner going, and a little progress bar crawling across the top of the screen.
"No." The bottom drops out of my stomach. "No no no no no."
"Sloane. What's happening?"
"I think I'm uploading it. I think I just —" The bar's at forty percent. "I can't cancel it, it won't let me cancel mid-upload, it just keeps —" I jab the X in the corner. Nothing. I jab the back arrow. The bar jumps to sixty. "Why is it going faster when I try to stop it? Why does it do that?"
"Delete it!"
"I can't delete it until it's posted! That's the whole — it has to finish posting before I can take it down, that's how it works!" I'm pacing the kitchen now, phone held out in front of me like it's a live grenade. "Come on. Come on. Stop. STOP."
"Can't you turn your phone off? Will that help? Which account is it on?" Maggie's panicking, peering at the screen over my shoulder. "Sloane. Is that — Oh my god, it's posting to Dawson's Sanctuary —"
The bar hits ninety-five and Maggie makes a noise I've never heard her make before. Then she snatches the phone from me and starts stabbing her finger at it the way I was doing seconds ago. It's a moment of pure horror — the two of us watching a progress bar finish a job neither of us can stop.
"Fuck! It posted." The spinner vanishes.
"It's posted. Okay. Now I can delete it quickly, now it'll let me —" I take the phone back from her and find the post. There it is, live, on Dawson's Sanctuary: a thumbnail of Maggie walking innocently into her own kitchen, the first frame, before she set the phone down.
It looks like nothing but it sounds like everything.
I hit the menu, and Delete, and Are you sure, and YES, OBVIOUSLY I'M SURE, and the screen thinks about it for a year and a half, and then the post is gone.
I stare at the empty grid where it was. "It's gone. I deleted it. It's gone." I'm shaking. "How long was it up?"
Maggie looks at me. "Thirty seconds? Less?"
"Thirty seconds." I press the heel of my hand to my forehead. "And the thumbnail's just you walking into a kitchen, you can't see anything, it's the ceiling for four-and-a-half minutes. Even if someone clicked it right away they'd just get a light fixture and —" I stop. "Fuck. The audio."
Maggie's eyes widen and there's nothing I can do to stop her from spiralling because I'm spiralling myself.
I don't tell her the worst part. The part I know and she doesn't, because she's never lived inside a platform like I have.
Thirty seconds is enough. If even one person was scrolling at the right moment — and statistically, in any given thirty-second window, plenty of them are — they could have screen-recorded it.
Reposted it to their Story. Saved it to their camera roll.
There are entire apps designed to grab content the second it goes up.
Deleting the original doesn't matter if it's already been copied.
And then my phone buzzes, and an Instagram message pops up. It's from Ruthie, and it says, Honey did you mean to post that?