4. Aster
ASTER
Three terabytes.
He says it like it’s a number. Like numbers of that size are things people say. Three terabytes of footage. I’m standing in a sub-basement room under his company’s building—forty-two square feet, climate-controlled, lit in server-blue—and the number doesn’t get smaller the more I turn it over.
I woke up this morning in Rye’s bed. His bed, not mine, because at some point after the couch we moved to the bedroom and he didn’t ask if I wanted to stay, he just carried me there, which is a thing I should object to and currently do not have the bandwidth to object to.
I woke up and he was already awake, lying on his side, watching me. Which I now understand is simply what Rye does. He watches. He has always been watching. He will apparently watch me for the rest of my natural life, or until one of us decides this is insane.
I told him over coffee: I want to see everything.
He drove me here without arguing.
I can still feel him in me—the physical proof of it.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to as I stand in this room absorbing the number three terabytes—I’m carrying Rye Calloway inside me—the physical fact of last night, the parking lot, the couch—and every time I shift my weight the proof is there.
I haven’t said anything about that. There’s nothing to say. My body is its own animal right now and apparently it has opinions.
“Show me,” I say.
He shows me.
The system is organized the way Rye organizes everything—precise, sorted, searchable.
The footage files are sorted by room and date.
There are tags. Hundreds of tags. I don’t look at the tags yet because looking at the tags will require me to think about which moments a man saved as significant across years of watching my kitchen, my bedroom, the hallway I walk through every morning. I’m not ready for that yet.
“How often did you watch?” I ask.
“Every day.”
“Every day.”
“At least once. Usually more.” He says it without apology, without performance of guilt.
Just a fact he’s laid on the table the same way he’s laid all the other facts on various tables in the last eighteen hours.
“The live feeds are on my phone. I wired a notification system to the door sensors. When you were home, I knew.”
“When I was home.” I turn to look at him.
He’s standing two feet away, leaning against the wall of the server room with his arms crossed, watching me process.
He is always watching me process. I have apparently been a subject of ongoing study.
“Eight years. You watched me every day for eight years.”
“Yes.”
“While I was married to your best friend.”
“Yes.”
“While you were at our dinner parties.”
Something moves in his expression—not guilt, something more complicated. “Yes.”
I turn back to the monitor. I find the kitchen folder. I click on a file from November, four years ago—I pick it because something about the date sits in my chest, something I half-remember. The footage plays.
I’m at the kitchen table. It’s late—the overhead light is on but the windows are dark.
I’m in pajamas and there’s a glass of wine on the table that I’m not drinking.
I’m staring at the wall. Just sitting there, very still.
I know from the inside what that stillness felt like—the hollow ache of a night when you’ve tried, failed, you’re so tired of trying.
Can’t say that to anyone. The person you’d say it to is the problem.
I remember that night. Connor hadn’t come home. Again.
“You watched that,” I say.
“Yes.”
“I was so—I was?—”
“Disappearing.” His voice is quiet behind me. “You said that six months later, on the camera. You said you’d been disappearing and he hadn’t noticed.”
I heard him say that at the restaurant—he knew that word, I thought it was because Connor had told him, I didn’t understand yet that he’d been in a server room watching my life in real time.
He heard me say that to Connor. He heard me say it.
I scroll. I find the night of the signing—the divorce papers, the steady hand, the coffee I didn’t drink.
I watch myself sign my name four times and sit in silence for seven minutes and then pick up my phone.
I watch. I know exactly what I was feeling.
What I was thinking. The camera can’t capture that—the camera only has the outside—but the outside is enough to know this was a woman at the very bottom of something.
He watched that from six thousand miles away.
Something about that—being witnessed at the bottom—pulls something tight in my chest that isn’t horror, or isn’t only horror.
“Come look at this one,” Rye says.
I cross to where he’s pulled up a different file—living room, June, earlier this year.
I watch myself on the couch with my feet tucked under me, watching something on the TV, and I’m laughing.
A real laugh, unguarded, the kind I stopped having in the last three years of the marriage and apparently started having again after the divorce, and he’s been watching me have it on a camera in my own living room.
“I saved that one because it was the first time you laughed like that in fourteen months,” he says. “I have the timestamp.”
He has the timestamp of the first time I laughed again.
My chest does the thing it does right before I cry. I don’t cry. I just stand there holding it.
He crosses to me before I finish the thought.
Not slow. Not cautious. The way he moves in the parking lot—like the decision was already made and motion is just the formality.
His hand comes to my waist from behind and I go still, every part of me going still, because his hand on my waist in a forty-two square foot room containing my whole life on its drives is the thing my body has no idea what to do with.
“Don’t.” The word comes out thin. Not the word I meant to use—I meant stop or I’m not ready or we need to talk about this—but what comes out is don’t and it doesn’t sound like I mean it. “Rye?—”
“I know.” His mouth at my temple. Not a kiss. Just his breath there, the heat of him at my back. “Your hands are shaking.”
“I’m trying to?—”
“You’ve been standing here for forty minutes and your breathing changed when I crossed the room.”
“That’s—”
“Tell me what it means.”
I know what it means. I hate that I know what it means.
I’m standing in a room that should horrify me—that does horrify me, on some level that my body is currently voting to override—his cock is hard against my hip.
I’m wet and he knows it. He’s been reading my body the way he reads the monitors.
He’s been reading my body for eight years.
There is no version of this moment where I successfully lie to him about what’s happening to me.
“Tell me to stop,” he says. Low. The parking lot register. “And mean it.”
My hands find the front of his shirt.
I can’t mean it.
He knows I can’t mean it. The server room knows I can’t mean it—the audio recording my breathing right now, the drives humming with years of footage of me, waiting without knowing I was waiting, for exactly this.
“How many times have you watched it?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer. Which is an answer.
I turn around. He’s very close—he crossed the room without me noticing, which is also very Rye, moving in the background of spaces, always present.
His hand comes to my face. His thumb at my jaw.
He’s looking at me the way he looked at me on the couch last night, the way he’s always looked at me according to the version of history I’m still constructing.
“I watched you at the bottom of everything,” I say. “I watched you watch me.”
“Not at the bottom. Through all of it.” His thumb moves along my jaw. “The bottom. The middle. The morning you put plants back in the kitchen window, the first Sunday dinner you made for yourself alone, the laugh I have on file.”
“You have my laugh on file.”
“I have everything.”
I am aware of a physical reality happening in my body right now that I never agreed to.
I am standing in a server room containing eight years of footage of my own life, footage I didn’t consent to, footage of my absolute worst and most private moments, and I am wet.
I am standing in a room that should horrify me.
My body is making a decision without me.
Being this thoroughly known—being wanted enough for this—is the most erotic thing that has ever happened to me.
I hate that. I need it anyway.
“All of it,” I say.
“Everything.” His other hand at my waist. “Every book you read twice. Every Sunday dinner. Every night at the kitchen table not drinking wine. Every morning coffee. Every fight, every silence, every version of you since you were twenty-six—the night I understood what you were going to mean to me.”
“I was married.”
“I know.”
“You watched me anyway.”
“I couldn’t stop.” His forehead drops to mine. “I tried, in year two, to pull the cameras. I drove to your building with the tools. I sat outside for four hours. I didn’t go in.”
“Because you couldn’t.”
“Because I couldn’t. Because watching you was the most honest thing I’d been doing in years and I didn’t know how to stop doing the true thing.”
I pull him in by the front of his shirt. The same grip as the parking lot, as the couch—my hands have apparently decided this is how they relate to him and they’re not asking for my input. He makes a noise when I pull—the noise he makes when the control slips. I want to hear more of that noise.
“Show me the laugh file later,” I say against his mouth.
“Yes.”
“Right now I want you to do something else.”
He lifts me onto the edge of the server rack—smooth metal edge, cool even through my jeans—and steps between my knees and looks at me for a moment in the blue server light.
“You should be telling me to delete all of it,” he says.
“I will. Later.”
“After.”
“After.”
He takes me in the server room with eight years of my life running on the drives behind him. My jeans on the floor. His hands on my thighs, spreading them. His mouth between them—his tongue on my clit before I’ve finished the thought, and the sound I make bounces off the server racks.
He knows exactly where. He’s known since a file I didn’t know existed. I fist my hand in his hair and hold on, the alternative being the floor, and his mouth doesn’t stop, doesn’t move, doesn’t ask. He already knows.
The combination is exact: surveillance footage and proximity, my clit and his tongue and eight years of watching me until he knew my body before I gave it to him.
“I watched you on the couch in June,” he says, his mouth coming off me just long enough to speak. “Laughing. I came to that footage.”
“Rye—”
“I’ve come to you a hundred times. Two hundred.
Every version of you on every camera.” He comes back up, his cock pushing inside me—all the way, my pussy taking him while I gasp and grip the rack edge.
Cold metal at my back. His body warm at my front.
The drives humming behind him. His cock buried in me.
I am going to fall apart. “The parking lot was the first time the real thing was better.”
“Was it.” My voice is the 11 PM voice, the honest one. “Better?”
“So much better.” Deeper. I gasp. His head drops, his mouth at my ear. “Your pussy is better than every recording I ever made. The real thing is devastating, Aster. I’ve been watching you for eight years and you’re still more than I prepared for.”
I pull him closer. My legs tight around him. “Then stop being gentle about it.”
He stops being gentle about it.
I come to the sound of my own name in Rye Calloway’s mouth in a room full of surveillance footage of my life, and the orgasm hits so hard my vision cuts to blue-white and I’m dimly aware I’ve made a sound the server room audio will capture, which is appropriate, which is exactly what should be in these files.
He follows me. His cum filling me, deep in the server room. Doesn’t pull out. I’m full of him—his cock still inside me, his cum inside me—which I’ve been in some form since last night and which I don’t want to stop being.
I am aware of how insane this is. I don’t, even slightly, want it to stop.
“I want to watch that footage,” I say after, when the blue light is back and my breathing has returned to something manageable.
“Which footage?”
“The kitchen table. The fight. The night I signed the papers.” I look at him. “The laugh file.”
He watches my face for a moment. “You want to see yourself through my eyes.”
“I want to see what you’ve been watching. I want to understand what eight years of this looked like.” I pause. “I want to see myself the way someone was watching me when I didn’t know I was being seen.”
He helps me off the server rack. Hands me my jeans. Turns back to the monitor.
“Kitchen table, 2022,” he says, pulling up the file. “This is the night I knew I was going to have to do something.”
I sit down in the one chair in the server room. He stays standing. He pulls up the footage and I watch myself at the kitchen table that I’m now seeing from the outside, from his angle, and I understand what he saw because I was there for it. I know what it felt like from the inside.
From the outside, it looks like a woman who deserved better and wasn’t getting it.
I watch him watch me watch it.
Something is settling in my chest. Not peace—it’s too complicated for peace, it’s going to be complicated for a while, the cameras and the years and the questions I haven’t finished asking. But it’s the start of understanding what it means to be this thoroughly wanted.
“You’re not going to delete them,” he says. Not accusatory. He already knows.
“Not today,” I say.
He doesn’t say anything. He pulls up the laugh file without being asked.
I watch myself laugh on his monitor in a room that contains everything he ever felt about me.
I don’t hate him.
That’s the most honest thing I know right now and I don’t know what to do with it yet.