8. Aster
ASTER
Eight months later.
The kitchen camera is still there.
I know where all six of them are now—the kitchen, the living room, the hallway, the hallway outlet, the bedroom smoke detector, and the one I found in February behind the bookshelf in the living room that Rye claims was a backup and I claim was a lie of omission.
We had a three-day disagreement about it.
He was right that it was a backup. I was right that he should have told me.
We resolved it the way we’ve resolved most things: honestly, directly, and in bed.
The cameras are on. I made that choice. Not in the passive way I made it at the beginning—not the way I didn’t pull them down in the first week and told myself I was processing.
I made it explicitly, in a conversation, using the exact words: I want you to keep watching.
I want to know you’re watching. That’s what I want.
He asked me why.
I told him what I understood by then, what the server room visit had clarified, what living in his gaze for eight months had confirmed: I was a woman who had been performing a version of herself for years—for Connor, for social situations, for everyone—and the first time someone had seen the real version and wanted it—the 3 AM version, the kitchen table version, the unguarded laugh in June.
That’s the version he built a profile to reach.
That’s the version he installed four cameras to see—or six, once I’d found the two he never mentioned.
Being wanted that completely, that persistently, by a man willing to wait eight years for the right conditions—that’s not something I’m interested in walking away from. I told him that.
He covered the lens of the kitchen camera for an hour after I said it.
I had a strong sense that he was composing himself.
My sister has opinions about all of this. Significant ones. She has expressed them over several long phone calls and one very frank dinner where she used the word insane in a way that was not entirely wrong.
I’ve told her what I know to be true, which is that the version of obsession that lived in that server room is also the version that tracked my cycle through my health app and showed up outside my door within twenty minutes of my text.
The version that sat at the end of dinner tables for eight years and listened.
The version that had thirty-seven items in a folder and only used four of them—the ones I needed to get free, the ones that would cost him his best friend.
She’s coming around. The ring helped. So did the baby moving, which she felt at dinner last month, which is hard to maintain righteous anger through when your niece or nephew is introducing themselves through your sister’s stomach.
Rye gave me the ring in the server room.
Not kneeling—he’s not that kind of man. He just slid it across the equipment shelf the way he’d slid his phone across the restaurant table, face-up, in a presentation of information.
Here is a thing you should have. I put it on myself.
He watched me do it with an expression I’ve seen in the footage, the one he makes when something he’s been waiting for confirms itself.
I watch myself in the footage sometimes.
He shows me segments when I ask. The kitchen table in 2022, the signing, the June laugh.
There’s a new file now—the morning I found the fifth camera and set it back in the outlet, which he watched on the live feed and apparently saved with the tag choosing.
He showed me that one last week. I watched myself stand in the hallway holding the camera in my palm, making a decision.
It’s strange to see yourself making a decision you remember making.
To watch the outside of a moment you lived from the inside.
What I see in the footage is a woman who is still angry, still processing, and choosing anyway.
Choosing the complicated thing over the simpler one.
Choosing to put the camera back. Walk to the kitchen.
Stand in front of the lens. Say with her body: I know you’re watching and I want you to keep watching.
That’s who I am now. I was always going to be her—Rye just watched it happen first.
He’s in the kitchen when I come out of the bedroom at 8 AM, making the elaborate coffee that takes twelve minutes—the one I’ve started calling the surveillance coffee because he began making it the first morning he stayed over.
Every morning since. The best thing I’ve ever tasted.
He makes it without being asked. I don’t ask.
He watches the camera, he knows when I’m awake, and by the time I reach the kitchen there’s a cup waiting.
Eight months of this. I’m not confused by it anymore. I’m not confused about what I am to him—the primary subject, the constant, the one the system has been built around since before he admitted it was built around me. I’m not confused about what he is to me either.
The thing I felt in the message at 11:47. The fantasy. The man who already knows.
He’s that. He’s exactly that.
“Morning,” he says.
I walk into the kitchen. He turns from the counter, eyes going to my face first and then to the rest of me—the attentiveness that hasn’t changed in eight months, that I have learned to expect the way I expect the coffee. I put my hand on his chest. He covers it with his.
“Baby moved again at 5 AM,” I say. “You probably have footage.”
“I’ll watch it later.” His other hand at the back of my neck—the hold I know. “How do you feel?”
“Large.”
“You’re perfect.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“You’re large and perfect.” He kisses my forehead. “Sit down.”
I sit at the kitchen table, my chair, the left one, the one that appears in years of footage, the one he touched on a Tuesday afternoon in April when he stood in my kitchen alone for twenty minutes, put his hand on the back of it, and left without taking anything.
I know about that day now. I’ve asked him about it more than once.
I know what he was doing there and why he left and what it cost him to leave.
The coffee arrives. I wrap my hands around the cup.
“Watch me tonight,” I say.
“I always watch you.”
“I know.” I look at him over the rim. “I want you to know I want you to.”
He goes very still. That absolute stillness—the one I know means the restraint is the thing keeping him upright. I spent the first two weeks of knowing him confusing that stillness for distance. It’s not distance. It’s eight years of weight.
“Come here,” I say.
He comes here.
I pull him down into the chair next to mine—not into my chair, into the other one, the one that’s been empty in all the footage until recently, the side of the table that was never occupied.
I climb into his lap, which I can barely do at eight months, and he helps me, his hands finding the places they know.
My belly between us, which should make this awkward, which doesn’t.
“You’re always mine,” I say against his mouth.
“Since before you knew it,” he says against mine.
“Since before I knew it.” I find his eyes. “Tell me again.”
He doesn’t use words. He uses his hands—the ones that fixed my kitchen chair lock, cut a copy of my key, and tracked my cycle through an app I didn’t know he had access to.
The hands I’ve been pulling toward me by the shirt since a parking lot in November.
His thumb finding my clit—the exact pressure, no adjustment needed, he learned this weeks ago and he doesn’t forget anything—and I make a sound the kitchen camera catches.
I know it catches it. I don’t care. That is who I am now.
“Watch me,” I say. Not to him. To the room.
He makes a low sound. His mouth at my neck.
“You’ve been watching me for eight years,” I say. “Watch me choose this.”
“Say what you want.” His voice at my ear, the rough one. “Out loud. For the record.”
“I want you.” I pull him closer by the shirt—the grip he knows. “I want you to have all of this. Every version. The one you watched from a server room for eight years and the one I’m giving you right now.” I find his eyes. “Stay in the footage. I want to watch this later and see what you saw.”
He makes a sound that tells me the control is gone. That’s what I wanted. That’s what I asked for.
He gets his cock out. I’m already pulling him between my thighs.
When he pushes inside me—his cock filling my pussy, the familiar stretch of him that I have learned to need—I stop thinking entirely.
He moves. My pussy takes him the way it always does, soaking, clenching around his cock on every thrust. His thumb finds my clit without being asked—he stopped needing to ask a long time ago.
I hold his shoulders and ride him slow in the kitchen chair, eight months pregnant, deliberate, my body his the way it’s been since a parking lot in November. His forehead drops to mine. His cock drives deep and stays.
I come saying his name, quiet, into the apartment where the cameras are rolling and I don’t care, where I have never been more seen and never wanted anything different. The most myself I’ve ever been. The most seen. Both things are the same thing.
We stay in the kitchen. The camera in the upper right corner has a clean angle on us.
I know it. I’m past caring—past caring since I put the outlet camera back in the wall, since I tested the bedroom camera audio, since I stood in front of the kitchen lens deliberately and said I know you’re watching with my body.
I was always going to end up here. Some people arrive at the thing they want through clean, uncomplicated routes. I arrived through an encrypted server, a parking lot in November, and a man who was patient for eight years because he understood what he was waiting for.
I wasn’t a woman something dark happened to.
I looked at it. I recognized it. I walked in anyway.
Later, in the bedroom—the ring on my hand, the baby moving, Rye’s arms around me from behind—he reaches past me and covers the bedroom camera with his palm. The way he always does when it’s just between us. I put my hand over his.
“Leave it,” I say.
He looks at me over my shoulder.
“I want it on,” I say. “I want a record.”
He reads my face. Then he moves his hand away from the lens.
We have a record.
The End