We both froze. She blushed.
“Oh,” I said. “You’re here already.”
She snapped the lid shut and stared at the table.
I grabbed coffee and a yogurt, totally cavalier, and sat across from her. Dull platinum sun poured at her back, a humid fog of light. I watched her as I ate. Super tomboy today: rolled-up cargos, plaid shirt, her hair doing that cute thing where her bangs swept upward. She adjusted her glasses, rubbed a smudge off her phone. Anything to avoid looking at me.
“So, what’d you think?” I said at last.
“Of what?”
“My show.”
The blush deepened. “Excuse me?”
“You can’t blush and then feign ignorance. I know you, Elle.”
For a second she met my gaze and something sparked, but then she looked away again. “It was . . . good, I guess. I have no idea.”
“Was it hot? Did it turn you on?”
“Can we talk about why I’m here? Frankie wants you to show me around.”
I licked the last bit of lemon yogurt from the spoon and smiled. “This is the kitchen. Where we eat. Hungry?”
Ellis wasn’t amused. She kept her head bowed, eyes lowered, and I started to feel guilty for goading her, then resentful for the guilt.
“Let’s get this over with. Come on.”
I walked her through the first floor of our sprawling Queen Anne mansion. Odd-angled rooms printed with wild zebra stripes of sun and shadow, gabled windows, French doors, halls that bent and doubled back and didn’t quite seem to line up, as if the house were a slowly spun kaleidoscope. Frankie had let me decorate and I’d matched the eclectic architecture: sleek Eames chairs, tables made from whitewashed driftwood, wrought-iron lanterns grandly crumbling into rust. On every wall I’d hung prints: Klee’s pixelated mosaics of color, Kandinsky’s schizophrenic geometry. Elle glued herself to my side, staring.
“This is so you,” she said. I don’t think she meant me to hear, but a tiny wick flared in my heart.
I walked ahead, leaving her to catch up.
The second and third floors were all bedrooms, doors closed. Cammers. Most of us slept during the day, waiting for clients to come home from work and eat dinner with their families or their TVs and then shut themselves in dark rooms with bright screens. The attic lay at the top of a rickety staircase, and when Elle felt the boards give, she stumbled. I caught her, pulling her close. We stared at each other.
“Easy,” I muttered. But I held on till she found her footing again.
“So this is your room.”
She nudged past me. Curiosity always got the better of her awkwardness.
Elle inspected the desk first, traced fingertips over my camera and handmade softboxes. Clothes hung from a beam of the slanted roof and her hands drifted through satin and silk, stirring them like a breath. She scanned the camming bed, squinted at the photos of broken things. Then over to my real bed across the room. I came up behind her, slowly.
I’d peeled each photo from Mrs. Mulhavey’s guest room and transplanted them here. Creased now, frayed from the obsessive stroking of fingers. Elle’s face and mine. The way we used to smile before we killed a boy and ruined each other’s lives. My love and longing scarred the paper clearer than any ink.
She glanced at me and I met her gaze.
Our eyes held for a second, then we turned away.
“I’ll show you the site,” I said.
We settled at my desk.
“So. This is how camming works.”
I showed her how clients bought tokens, tipped us, purchased photos, videos, personal merchandise—worn panties or unwashed socks or used razors—how we banned problematic users, handled special requests for Snapchat and other apps. Some of it baffled her—“They actually buy your dirty socks?” she exclaimed, and I laughed—and Elle took notes, absorbing my every word. In the middle of explaining, I realized how utterly natural this felt. Familiar. Warm. We slid back into our roles so effortlessly when we stopped thinking about how we’d hurt each other.
Ellis cleared her throat. “Vada?”
That name snapped me out of it. Nobody but Max called me that anymore.
“I’m working tonight,” I said, standing. “We can finish tomorrow. Need a ride to the mainland?”
She stared at her phone, avoiding eye contact. “I’m, uh, staying on the island, actually.”
“Where?”
“There’s a place in the woods I’m fixing up.”
My eyes narrowed. “You are not talking about the tree house.”
Elle shrugged sheepishly.
Deep in the woods, a few hundred yards from here, was an old one-room cabin built on stilts and the thick arms of an ancient oak. I climbed up there once: abandoned, the wood rotting, soft and barnacled with moss like a sunken ship. Some sea coffin tossed up onto land.
“You can’t stay there.”
“Dane said it was fine.”
“Dane’s not the brightest crayon in the box. That thing is falling apart.”
Her eyes flashed up to mine. “That’s why it suits me.”
What the hell could I say to that?
“Do you want me to—” I began, but she grabbed her laptop bag and darted down the stairs, quick as a bird. “—walk you out,” I finished to the room, and sat down, feeling like the air around me, the vacant chair. Empty.
#Cumshow at 1,000 tokens.
One hour in, and I’d already hit seven hundred.
Seven hundred dollars for sixty minutes of lying on my bed, teasing myself with a silicone dick. Making fuck-me eyes at the cam, pulling on a tie, moaning the screennames of the men who tipped me. In the next hour I’d fuck this dildo and fake an orgasm and go back to reading that Dalí bio or tinkering with my digital photos or brooding at the window, wondering what Elle was up to out in the woods.
But for now, customer service.
iwatchusleep: damn bb you are TNT
iwatchusleep: you’re gonna make me blow
SixPackCoverModel: boom
iwatchusleep: haha
BigManOnCampus: my cock is so fucking hard
BigManOnCampus: I want to fuck the shit out of your tight little pussy
[MOD]UnicornTears: BigManOnCampus has received a warning. Total warnings: 1.
1 warning = 5 min mute | 2 = temp kick | 3 = PERMABAN
~Keep it FUN and BEHAVE!~
aussieboi: no1 cares about ur cock
I smirked at the screen. “You can tell me about your cock in a tip note, Big Man.”
Viewers could message cammers privately if they tipped a minimum of twenty tokens. Once, a guy tipped me seventeen times in a row to describe himself getting off. Why he didn’t just pay for a private chat, which would’ve been cheaper in the long run, was a mystery. Insecurity, perhaps. Maybe he couldn’t handle the pressure of my undivided attention.
Or maybe he was just bad at math.
I clutched one tit hard and opened my mouth, gasping.
ero_sennin: can I see your tats plz bb?
aussieboi: check her photos m8
ero_sennin: I know but I want to see her ass ^_^
SoBlue has tipped Morgan 100 tokens.
“Thank you, Blue. Ero, is this better?” I rolled to my left side, ass to the cam, ink exposed. A beep signaled an incoming private message. I glanced over my shoulder.
[PM from SoBlue]: i’d like to take you private.
“Sorry, Blue. No private tonight. Just enjoy the show, baby.”
aussieboi: dont be greedy
aussieboi: shes on every nite
BigManOnCampus has tipped Morgan 20 tokens.
[PM from BigManOnCampus]: I want to shoot my hot cum in your mouth
“You’re a dirty boy, Big Man. You can tell me more in another tip.” I flopped onto my back, legs spread to the cam. “Just a few more tokens. I’m so fucking wet. I can’t wait to come for you boys.”
ero_sennin: come on guys!
ero_sennin: almost there . . .
SoBlue has tipped Morgan 179 tokens.
The token counter ticked up to 999. I laughed. “Thank you again, Blue.”
[PM from SoBlue]: i will pay you $1000 if you go private with me for an hour.