Cam Girl

I laughed. “Emoji zen, huh?”

SoBlue: some of my most profound thoughts are emoji.

“We are such Mille

In the back of my mind I thought:

Or you’re really good at faking it.

SoBlue: i feel ancient tonight.

SoBlue: like a . . .

SoBlue: redwood tree. or something.

“Are you trying to say you’ve got some massive wood?”

SoBlue: maybe i am.

SoBlue: maybe you should take your shirt off.

I set the beer bottle on the windowsill. My thighs tensed and a pull started low in my belly. We’d never done anything sexual before. I was still amped from Elle, my blood fizzing. I checked myself in the cam: hair tucked into a lazy chignon, my body draped with shadow. This wasn’t my pro setup with floodlights and calibrated colors. But if he wanted that, he could’ve asked.

I grasped the hem of my tank and held eye contact with the lens until I pulled the shirt over my head.

Typically after an article of clothing came off, I’d flaunt the newly exposed area. Instead I just sat there in my bra, arms limp, feeling him look at me.

SoBlue: god.

SoBlue: you are so beautiful.

“Remember what you said, about seeing how long I could last?”

SoBlue: yes.

“This is how long. I want you to fuck me, Blue.”

SoBlue: you.

SoBlue: you have no idea how i’ve craved those words.

SoBlue: touch your belly.

I did, remembering how I’d asked Dane to do the same.

SoBlue: stroke.

A breath escaped me involuntarily as I complied. I ran a palm up and down my skin, slow, feeling the taut satin he must be imagining. He didn’t type for a while, so I let the hand stray. Up between my breasts, down between my thighs.

SoBlue: i can feel your softness.

SoBlue: all curves and silk.

SoBlue: open your bra.

On the upstroke I caught the clasp and flicked it open. When my breasts fell free I took one in my hand, ran my thumb around the nipple. My breathing grew pronounced, my breast swelling in my palm. I raised my chin, top teeth bared. That fuck-me look.

“Are you hard, Blue?”

SoBlue: like you wouldn’t believe.

SoBlue: put the other hand around your throat.

SoBlue: just below your jaw.

I did it languorously, fitting it beneath the bone and gripping till the carotids throbbed, two wings of blood. My nipples hardened. I dug my thumb into an artery and exhaled slowly, slowly, like the last sigh leaving the lungs at death. A pleasant buzz percolated over my brain.

SoBlue: tighter.

“You, too.”

SoBlue: i am.

SoBlue: i’m so fucking hard.

SoBlue: show me how you’d hold me.

My hand clamped and the head rush made my skull feel like a shaken bottle of soda. A vignette of fog gathered at the edges of my awareness, a dulling of all senses. I couldn’t keep this pressure up for long.

SoBlue: how does it feel?

“Like falling asleep. It’s fuzzy and strange but also . . . lucid. Dreamlike.” My voice was gauzy, drifting. Letters swam on the screen. I squeezed my breast and felt only an abstract tingling, as if my body were not fully here but ethereal, in between worlds.

SoBlue: release.

Letting the blood flow again hurt more than cutting it off, and that was part of the rush. Pins and needles in the brain.

SoBlue: take your shorts off.

He wasn’t giving me time to recover. Good.

Woozily I unbuttoned, slid out.

SoBlue: panties.

Those too. Then I was completely nude in front of Blue for the first time in private.

My head felt heavy and gimbaled, like a lantern in a ship, pivoting with the waves. Red had drained from the sky and now it was a deep hyacinth purple. The laptop lighting made me look like some creeper on Chatroulette. Between my thighs was only darkness.

“What are you thinking about?” I said, my voice thick.

SoBlue: my hand between your legs.

“Like this?”

I dragged my left hand up the inside of a thigh. Before I touched myself I could feel the wetness, and the thought that it was partly because of Elle and partly Blue turned me electric. In that moment when my fingertips traced my lips and every nerve sparked like a firecracker, I realized I had an image in my head: a tall, lean, fair-ski

In a real private show I’d have my pussy up to the lens, anatomy on display in absurd HD. In this show you couldn’t even see it, just my hand delving into shadow.

And it was more erotic than any show I’d ever done.

SoBlue: inside.

I was so wet it happened almost before I realized I was doing it. My finger slipped inside and I groaned, a real one, no porn star fakery but an animal sound from low in my gut, full of agony and resentment because this felt so goddamn good and I didn’t want it to end and also didn’t want to endure it.

SoBlue: show me how she fucked you.

Everything in me stilled. “What?”

SoBlue: don’t stop.

SoBlue: fuck your finger.

SoBlue: and show me how she fucked you.

SoBlue: the object of your obsession.

SoBlue: red.

Shock is an incredible sexual tool. It intensifies arousal. Blue knew what he was doing.

“Like this.” I brought the other hand to my clit, carefully. It was hard to get off with both hands since the accident. One too gentle, one too fierce. “With her fingers. Inside me.” My words unraveled into a gasp. Part of me was picturing Blue’s hands, a stiff finger between my legs and his cock in the other fist, pumping slowly, matching pace with the way he fucked me. But part of me was picturing her. Holding me in our bed, kissing me sweetly, delicately, while she fucked me with two fingers, so tender we kept pausing to touch each other’s faces, constantly stu

Cognitive fucking dissonance.

“It was intense, Blue.” Slow down, slow down. Lightly. I took my finger deep and held still, teeth gritting at the tightness. Tension unrelieved by friction. “She used to do this. Drive me crazy till I wanted to hurt her for not letting me come. I’d wrap my hands around her throat and squeeze. Till we were both right at the edge, and everything became so clear. Clearer than when you actually come. Clearer than reality. It’s like looking into the sun. You can’t take very much of it. I’d beg her to finish and she’d say, ‘You’re so pretty when you come,’ and I felt it, I felt beautiful in a way I haven’t with anyone else. Deeper than my skin. My blood or marrow. She saw through all that like no one else does.”

SoBlue: you see her the same way.

“I wish I didn’t.”

SoBlue: why?

“Because what does that make me?” My face lowered as I withdrew my finger, felt the stark loss, the need to be filled again, fucked, and I closed my eyes and shut Ellis out and thought of Blue. Slim straight hips, jeans unzipped. His cock hard and hot to the touch. “I’m bi, but I prefer guys.” I penetrated myself again but in my head it was him, my back to a wall and my knees hooked around his waist. “I’ve been with girls before, but never seriously. Not like her.” Broad shoulders, dense bone. His dick driving into me and filling me with heat. “Guys are different. The way you think, the way your mind works . . . that’s what I fall for. That’s what thrills me. With girls it’s just sex. No romance, no fantasy. Not for me.”

“I love you,” I’d told her, “but this isn’t my future, Elle. This isn’t what I dreamed of.”

“What did you dream of?”

“She’s the only exception. And that’s not how I see myself. Not as some—whatever. I’m not like that.”

“Me in my mother’s wedding dress. A cathedral full of sunlight. My family in a front pew, his family in the other.”