by Harper Bliss
“What do you mean?” I ask, even though I know very well what she means. She’s been hinting at it, and I’ve been pretty receptive to the idea, taking her hints not only in jest, but giving her a genuine reply at more regular intervals. Still, that video we made plays in my head every time the subject comes up.
“Allez, chérie,” she says. “Tu sais.” You know.
“All right. If I understand correctly, you would like to engage in some Internet sex just to take the edge off for when you find yourself in the magnetic presence of your president.”
“That’s exactly it, yes. You know me so well.” She purses her lips. “I want to see you, Zoya.” Already, when she says my name in an imploring manner like that, I know she wants something really badly. She can’t hide the desire in her voice. “Really see you.”
“Me too.” My tone is suddenly serious.
“Good.” Her smile is sweet and seductive.
“How does it work?” I know it makes me sound overly naive. And it’s not as if Camille is well-versed in long-distance relationship protocols. We’re figuring this out as we go along, together.
“I imagine we find a comfortable place where we won’t be disturbed.” She looks down. “Which, in my case, means I’ll need to get a pussycat off my lap.”
I chuckle. I’m already lying in bed, though I am still fully dressed.
“Then you’ll have to strip for me because you must already be in a sultrier evening mood and I may need a bit more enticing to get my juices flowing.” She sits there grinning again. “What with it still being so early here.”
“Ten in the morning is hardly the crack of dawn.”
“It’s been a bit of a crazy week.” She pretends to stifle a yawn.
“Don’t I know it.” Apparently, the French like to engage in many after-work drinks and dinners during the week. After having been away for two months, Camille has many people to see. While I have to drag myself back out there and pick up my life where I left it post-Rebecca. Maybe now that we’re back on sort-of speaking terms, I should see some of our mutual friends who knew about Rebecca’s affair and failed to tell me. Right after the break up, in my head, I had put them into her camp immediately and refused to speak to them when they reached out.
“Give me a few minutes while I change rooms.” She blows a kiss into the camera and I hear an offended meow as she shoos Iris off her lap. The screen gets blurry as Camille walks to her bedroom, of which I’ve gotten as detailed a tour as a laptop camera allows.
While I wait, anticipation hums in my blood. I won’t have to look at myself on the screen. With a few clicks I can make the little rectangle with my image disappear completely and only focus on Camille. As long as we’re not recording this.
“Hey,” she says, her head resting on an upturned palm. It looks like she’s lying on her side. “I’m ready for my striptease now.”
“You were serious about that?”
She just smiles and says nothing. I’m not really in the mood to start stripping just yet.
“Talk to me,” I say, wishing I had control over the zoom function of her camera and I could let my lens swoop over her body the way that I see fit, letting my focus slide from one area to the next—feeling a little more in control than I do now.
“I want to see you, Zoya,” she repeats. Her tone has gained intensity. “Please.” With a soft smile on her lips, she starts to unbutton her blouse. It’s a linen one of which she seems to have an endless supply in pastel colors. “I want you to see me,” she continues. “As soon as we log off Skype, it’s all I think about. I’ve barely been back for a month, but that video isn’t cutting it anymore. I need something more and new to tide me over until I can hold you in my arms again.”
“How many more days?” I ask, even though I know the number. I repeat it ceaselessly throughout the day. It’s the first thing I think of when I wake up, when I have subtracted another night from the time keeping us apart.
“Thirty-three,” she says, her voice so sultry she makes it sound like a dirty word.
Camille shrugs out of her blouse. She’s not wearing a bra. The sight of her naked chest is all I need to spur me on to uncover myself. I clumsily drag my top over my head, not caring about removing garments in a sexy way. Camille has pushed her body away from the camera a bit, so more of her is visible, and the sight of her wearing just jeans and nothing else is too thrilling for me to care much for decorum.
“That’s my favorite outfit on you,” I say with a husky voice.
“Yeah? Should I go out in it tonight? Cause a scandal?” She chuckles and flips open her jeans button. “I’m waiting.” Her hand remains on her crotch, not moving.
I unhook my bra and let my breasts spill free. It feels so different to do it while she’s watching me, even more so because she’s watching me on a laptop from so many miles away.
“I want to touch you,” she says. Everything about her face tells me she’s deadly serious.
Instinctively, I start thinking of ways to make it possible. But she’s simply too far away for a quick weekend rendezvous. Since starting my show ten years ago, I’ve fallen ill one single time. My voice had totally gone and there was no way I could appear on television. I was hastily replaced by a news anchor, but it’s not advisable to have the host of The Zoya Das Show replaced by someone else too often. Which is one of the reasons why, over the decade that I’ve done the show, I’ve started insisting on shorter seasons as time has progressed. Making the show is intense and being ready for an energy-draining interview every week takes a toll on the mind and the body. To such an extent that I always feel a little sorry for the guests we have booked for the last episodes of the season, because by then, I’m usually so exhausted I can’t help but give them a little less of myself.
To even think about taking a week off for a quick visit to France is inconceivable. Although the thought has entered my mind. But I adore my job and consider myself fortunate that the network has kept faith in me during the turmoil in TV land of the last few years. I couldn’t possibly feign illness to hop over to France to see my girlfriend. This comes with the job, of course. A job I’m well paid for and get to take a couple of months off from every year.
So when I say, “Me too” to Camille, I mean it from the bottom of my heart but I say it with the full knowledge that there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it.
“Touch yourself for me,” she says. “I will feel it.”
I believe her.
I slip out of my jeans and sit in front of my laptop wearing just underwear. No, I sit in front of Camille in lingerie. There. That sounds entirely different.
And it’s not as if I haven’t touched myself numerous times since she left, pretending she was watching me. In a way, this is just another fantasy coming true. But the distance between fantasy and reality is hard to bridge sometimes, so I do feel awkward when I hook my thumbs underneath my panties and slide them over my legs. Baring myself to her.
It also feels surprisingly exhilarating, just like this entire journey with Camille has been.
I glance at the screen, at Camille’s transfixed face. She’s still wearing her jeans, which seems highly unfair to me. I want to see her just as much.
I tilt my head and she snaps to attention. “I only see half of you,” she says in a husky tone. “You’ll need to reposition your laptop.”
“And you’ll need to take your jeans off.” I can’t keep a smile out of my voice. Despite the exhilaration, there’s an air of ludicrousness to this situation that keeps me teetering on the brink of hysterical laughter.
“I think the best angle would be achieved if you placed the camera between your legs, but not too close,” she says, ignoring my remark about disrobing more.
“So much for foreplay,” I protest, refusing to be directed in this way from so many miles away.
Camille giggles. “I’m sorry. I got a little sidetracked by your nakedness. I just… really want to see all of you. It’s been driving me cr
azy.” In between the giggles, I can hear the desperation in her voice. A sentiment I fully sympathize with. I drive myself crazy with thoughts of her at least once every day.
“Okay. I’ll do it.” In this moment, this is all I can give her. This is what the first months of our relationship are reduced to. Two women trying to figure out the best angle for their laptop’s camera in order to have successful Skype sex.
“Me too.” I watch her wiggle out of her jeans and panties and instantly understand her urgency from before. Seeing her like that has the exact same effect on me.
When we finally do lie down, each on our respective ends of the world, laptop perched on a bunch of pillows near our ankles, I can really only see her chin, but I see so many other things as well. I see Camille’s hands caressing her breasts, playing with her nipples, trailing along her belly button and, finally, resting at the apex of her thighs.
And, oh, does that sight arouse me. Even though I can only see her neck and chin, it’s so unmistakably her. I would recognize those hands anywhere. The curve of her belly. The way she spreads her legs a little asymmetrically, with her left knee never managing to fall as deeply as her right.
I knead my own breasts and seeing her like that, and lying here in this position, does have the strange effect on me that when my hands touch my own skin, I can almost believe it’s her touching me. Because we’re doing this together. This is the kind of intimacy we can share across the many miles of distance.
Camille runs one finger delicately over her nether lips and my nipples harden at the sight. I’m perplexed by my rapidly growing levels of arousal. I bring my own hand down and mirror her movements, as though she’s guiding me, wordlessly telling me what to do with myself.
Camille seems to have a nose for these things, a knack for drawing me out of my own prudish self the way Rebecca never could. Maybe it’s because she’s French, though that seems a bit simplistic. She’s many, many more things than French, though, silly as it may sound, the fact that she is adds to her allure.
Camille circles her finger around her clit and as she does I wish I had a bigger screen. I wish I had pushed the record button so I could zoom in later.
I follow her lead and am in for another surprise when I circle my own clit. The touch shoots through me like an arrow of lust was shot straight from her house in Paris and traveled all the way to Sydney at an unimaginable speed.
My finger remains glued to my clit as I watch Camille stroke herself. She might be putting on a show for me when she lets two fingers slip inside of herself and utters a slight moan. Whatever her intentions, what she’s doing is not missing its effect, because I feel compelled to increase the speed at which my finger circles my clit. The vision of Camille’s own fingers fucking her is, by far, the most arousing thing I’ve ever seen. I make a mental note to ask her to do so when we’re physically together, curious about the effect it would have on me then. Maybe the fact that I’m enjoying it so much right now is inexorably connected to this particular situation. To her being so far away and us trying to create closeness by doing this. Maybe the lust traveling through me right now is helped by the lack of proximity because I’m not sure I could do this with her in the room, whether I could reach this stage of abandon.
But I do now. Camille lets her fingers slip out and even that action ratchets up my arousal. She starts circling her clit again, only for a few rounds, then brings her fingers back inside. My breathing is ragged and my clit throbs against my fingertip. I increase my rhythm and I can feel myself slipping over the edge. My eyes are glued to the screen, to the image of Camille’s fingers inside herself—an image so arresting I will remember it forever. Then I experience another first. I come while staring at a laptop screen, while engaging in Internet sex with my long-distance lover. The climax is quick but intense and exhilarating because of its surprise factor.
I see Camille’s body jerking a little on the screen. Seeing me come has pushed her over her very own edge as well. Her hands lie limp between her legs and I hear a chuckle burst through the speaker.
When we’ve repositioned our laptops and can see each other’s faces properly again, Camille has a triumphant smirk on her face.
“Did you like that?” she asks coyly. Clearly, she already knows the answer.
But I’m in no mood to be coy myself. I’m engulfed by passion and love, still reeling from that unexpected bout of horniness and delight running through me at the mere sight of her. “It was wonderful,” I say, my voice sweet as honey.
“Same time next week?” she asks, the grin wiped off her face.
“Oh yes.” We lie naked on our beds chatting for two hours after.
Chapter Seventeen
Weeks pass and even though my life is tinted by the shiny new gloss of falling in love, I fail to find my groove. In between work, of which the hours seem to extend as the season draws nearer to its close, composing emails to Camille, skyping with Camille at often ungodly hours, and keeping a semblance of a social life, I fail to make any decisions about putting the house on the market and starting the process of moving to Darlinghurst. It seems as though, subconsciously, something is stopping me from taking the next step away from my former life. It’s not because of Rebecca, with whom I’ll never be friends even though our interactions have grown more civilized. Rebecca is not the type of person to push me on the house. She’s not waiting for the money from the sale. And she has already moved on.
It feels as though I’ve become incapable of following through on the decision to move away from Balmain. Somewhere in the back of my brain, the thought rests that it would be futile to take a big step like moving house and neighborhood right now. There’s too much turmoil going on in my mind and, even though I’m not willing to admit this to myself out loud, I feel like I need to keep my mind clear to focus on another, more important decision.
Because I regularly find myself staring at my reflection in the mirror and asking myself why I’m doing this. Yes, of course, the practicalities of my life don’t allow me to see Camille in France. And the same goes for her. The distance we harbor between us is too vast for many things, but it isn’t for the love I feel for her and the way it multiplies in magnitude and force every single day. Some nights, when I can’t sleep because my mind is too wound up thinking about her and trying to come up with creative ways to bridge the distance, all I can think of is the moment we’ll finally be together again. How it will make me feel. To wake up next to her every day. Go to sleep kissing her goodnight. And I ask myself which sacrifices I’m willing to make. If the time comes—and if my visit to Paris goes well—would I be willing to make the ultimate one? Would I be willing to leave Australia? Start a new life in France—a country where I can’t even speak the language?
In the dead of night, darkness all around me, when my decision doesn’t carry much weight, my answer is always an astoundingly easy yes. Because I know that a woman like Camille only comes along every so often. I’m forty-seven. For me, she might be the last one to ever present herself the way she did. Cocking a smile and seizing my heart in the process.
Even though we only spent six days in each other’s physical presence, there’s no doubt in my mind I want to be with her. But the sacrifice would be real and great. If I move to France, I would need to start from scratch. The career I’ve built in Sydney wouldn’t mean a thing. I’d be jobless. I haven’t been without a job since I left university. What would I possibly do with myself all day? Let love fill my hours? I’m not as naive to think that romance can take the place of professional satisfaction. And with these thoughts, I am alone. It would feel too ridiculous to talk about this with Caitlin, although her and Josephine’s relationship seems to have progressed rather quickly as well. But it’s not the same. Because they live in the same city and the same country. Camille and I do not.
I also don’t dare breach the subject with Camille. And, in a way, it’s funny that the only person I’ve talked to about this briefly is my ex. Because she knows me and she
knows the way I think.
But ever since Camille left, even though her visit to Australia was short, I feel like something big—the biggest thing possible—is missing. I don’t have children to distract me with tales of their life and grandchildren to care for. My family is in Perth and even though we talk regularly, I don’t see them very often and we don’t have the kind of close relationship where I feel I need to show up every other month for a weekend with them.
Most nights, when I lie in bed pining for Camille, it feels like I don’t have much to stay for at all. But I know that if I keep mulling this over in my head, without taking the pressure off by saying the words out loud to someone, I will drive myself crazy sooner rather than later. So when I meet Caitlin for coffee at the Pink Bean after leaving work early one day, I’m glad neither Micky nor Josephine are present, and I can spill my heart to her without snarky interruptions.
“How many more days, my friend?” Caitlin asks after she has given me a lingering hug. She has taken to asking me this question after she overheard me and Camille signing off on a phone call. “You look like you can’t go on much longer without a healthy dose of your French lover.”
“Twenty-one,” I say on a sigh. “It feels more like twenty-one years.”
“You will come back, won’t you?” She narrows her eyes then flashes a smile.
“I have to. I present a show that is named after me.” I sigh again.
Caitlin quirks up her eyebrows. “Jesus. You make it sound all exciting.” She leans over the table. “Just off the top of my head, I can think of at least five men at ANBC who would happily bump you off your Saturday night prime time throne and present a show that is named after them.”
“Don’t I know it.” Traditionally, female newscasters are preferred to brighten up breakfast shows or present the news, not do the type of interviewing I do on television. The fact that I’ve been doing it for ten years straight doesn’t sit right with quite a few men who still believe a woman’s place is elsewhere. “But I just want the season to be over. I always get tired as July approaches, but this year, it’s different. It’s not just fatigue. I’ve always loved this job, every aspect of it, but lately it has been feeling more like a burden. Like a cage around my freedom. Look at you, Caitlin. You could pick up your life and decide to spend six months in another country at the drop of a hat. You even did it. You lived in the US for so long, decided to come back and did so, because you could. If you wanted to, you could reinvent yourself in another place all over again.”