by Leah Raeder
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-skinned man, hair and eyes of indeterminate shade. His hands I pictured clearly: those long elegant fingers, veins cording up his arms like fine blue vines spiraling up Grecian marble. Hands that typed with surgical precision, never misspelled. That would touch me that way, too. Laconically. Intensely. Not a single movement wasted.
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 stunned.
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.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
I heard the incoming message pings from Blue, but I was lost in myself, in the fantasy of fucking him. The fantasy of riding his cock and feeling completely enveloped, his arms around me and his muscle and masculinity something solid, steadfast. Something normal.
“And you next to me, Ellis. As my maid of honor.”
“Go to hell.”
“Sometimes I wish I’d never met her.”
SoBlue: you’re close.
SoBlue: hold it back.
SoBlue: get a tie.
I stopped, though it almost made me scream. Dug into a drawer beside the bed and found a knotted argyle tie. Slung it hastily around my neck and tugged it snug.
Strangulation was a relief, a valve slowing my th
oughts. But still the memory leaked through.
“I’d rather die than be your maid of honor.”
“Stop being dramatic.”
“We’re perfect for each other. But you can’t get over this stupid idea of a plastic bride and groom on your perfect vanilla cake at your perfect straight wedding.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Elle. Sorry my dreams are so fucking heteronormative. Sorry my skin is brown and I deal with enough shit for it and the idea of becoming even more marginalized exhausts me.”
“That’s not an excuse. You think my life has been easy?”
“You’re a rich little white girl, so yeah. Doesn’t really compare.”
She turned to go and I made some sound of fury, wordless, raw, and hurled myself at her. We slammed into the wall. I put my hands around her neck.
“Do it,” she spit in my face. “Tighter, baby. Come on. Like when you fuck me. Because this is the only way you’re okay with us being together. When it hurts me the way it’s hurting you.”
(—Bergen, Vada. How to Break a Heart. Watercolor on paper.)
SoBlue: are you thinking about her?
“No.” I grimaced. “Yes. Fuck. Stop talking about her.”
SoBlue: i can’t help it.
SoBlue: i’m becoming obsessed, too.
SoBlue: she’s the one who gets to see you.
SoBlue: to touch you.
SoBlue: to make you wet.
“I wish it was you instead.”
I wanted to yank the words back as soon as I spoke, but they were out, irretrievable.
SoBlue: selfish.
SoBlue: all that matters to you is you.
“That’s right. Now tell me how you’d fuck me.”
SoBlue: with this long, thick cock, morgan.
SoBlue: that i’m holding for you.
SoBlue: stroking.
SoBlue: do you want it?
“Fuck yes.”
SoBlue: good.
SoBlue: because i’m going to give it to you.
SoBlue: i’m going to bury it deep.
SoBlue: make you take it all and hold it inside.
SoBlue: make you feel me pushing into the core of you.
“God, Blue.”
SoBlue: pull the tie tighter.
SoBlue: fuck your hand.
SoBlue: and feel me inside you.
SoBlue: until you ache with fullness.
SoBlue: until you don’t remember ever feeling empty.
I rode two fingers and held the tie in my weak fist, trying not to let the pain come before I did.
SoBlue: i’m going to hold you up against a wall and fuck you.
SoBlue: make you take every inch of me.
SoBlue: make you ride me because there’s nothing to hold on to but my body.
SoBlue: all you can do is take it.
SoBlue: feel it, morgan. feel my hips meeting yours.
SoBlue: feel me pushing inside.
SoBlue: into your tightness.
SoBlue: into your sweet wet cunt.
SoBlue: you can’t stop this now.
SoBlue: me and you.
SoBlue: all you can do is get fucked.
SoBlue: take my dick over and over.
SoBlue: feel it go all the way in.
SoBlue: feel me touch the core of you.
SoBlue: the deepest, sweetest part.
SoBlue: you’re so full it almost hurts but you like it that way.
SoBlue: you like riding the edge of pain.
SoBlue: you like knowing i’m so close to hurting you.
SoBlue: but not knowing if i will.
SoBlue: god, you’re so tight.
SoBlue: so sweet.
SoBlue: i’m going to come.
SoBlue: i’m going to come inside you.
SoBlue: show me your face.
SoBlue: look at me.
I looked dead into the lens, my body tense, combustible, waiting for the spark to set it off, and he gave it to me.
SoBlue: good girl.
SoBlue: take me deep.
SoBlue: tighter, baby.
SoBlue: you’re so fucking pretty when you come.
Holy shit.
I pulled the tie to prolong my climax, catching the explosion at its peak and drawing it out into a plateau, a flatline at the height of sensation, a still frame paused at the moment of the biggest firework bursting. In reality it was just deoxygenated blood and CO2, but it made me feel superhuman, like I could tear myself apart, or punch through the window and pluck the stars out of the sky. A moment of pure power.
Then I blacked out.
It wasn’t a full-on faint, because the next thing I knew my palms were mashing the keys, spewing gibberish onto the screen, as Blue typed:
SoBlue: morgan.
SoBlue: can you read this?
I sat up, clawing the tie away from my neck. Afterward I always hated the feel of the ligature. It was a binding now, a trap, not the key to freedom.
I nodded groggily and slipped my tank back on.
SoBlue: you scared me for a minute there.
“I scared myself.”
SoBlue: are you all right?
“I’m fine. Really. That was just . . . intense.”
SoBlue: yeah.
SoBlue: wow.
For some reason, it was hard to look at the camera. “Do you need to, like, clean up?”
SoBlue: yes.
SoBlue: be right back.
SoBlue: don’t go.
Those two small words—don’t go—struck me as ineffably sad. A lifeline between us, across a vast digital ocean. A thin shining thread spanning the darkness.
I thought of Ellis alone in the cabin. Blue using her words to get me off.
And how I liked him because he was like her, with one key difference: he was a real boy.
What a selfish piece of shit I was.
I almost closed the chat out of guilt but he came back before I grew a pair.
SoBlue: morgan.
“Yeah?”
He didn’t type for a full minute, and somehow I sensed him staring at the screen, at the pixels that made up my eyes. The way you’d look into the eyes of someone you’d just made come so hard they lost a little slice of reality.
SoBlue: i wish i could hold you right now.
My lungs felt waterlogged. As if I’d been under without realizing. As if, in the place where there should be clean air and filtered blood, there was just a sunken wrecked thing, a shattered prow, trapped air bubbles in a small space velvety with sea moss.
“Good night, Blue.”
I shut everything down and lay in bed, clutching a pillow to my ribs. Tighter, and tighter, and tighter, as if I could crush it into myself, into the watery hollow between my lungs that ached to be filled with another person’s heartbeat.
—FALL—
—9—
Firelight flickered over the sand. They’d dug a pit for the clambake and the smell still lingered, seaweed and lobster and steamers, mixing with woodsmoke and the cold salty air. I held Elle’s hand as we picked our way around beach chairs and steel pails, vapor whispering off the melting ice, a stray sun hat floating in a tide pool as if someone had dived in and shattered into a hundred starfish.
End of summer was different out here. The beach was effaced with fog, the earth sighing out its ghosts. A breeze flicked over the ocean and sank neat and sharp through my skin like a switchblade. I shivered and Ellis drew closer, slinking her arm around my waist. In Chicago it’d still be warm and muggy but here it felt closer to the end of all things. Wind whistled over the stony, jagged shore where islands snapped off and drifted and would, someday, go fully under. A disintegrating beauty, slowly sinking into haze and abyss.
Up on the hill Max’s house glowed like a golden coal. He’d invited us to the Labor Day clambake. We’d gone but skulked in the shadows, watching. He made friendly noises at his neighbors, drank, went home alone. Under cover of darkness, we followed.
Ellis stopped just shy of
the road, fussing with the Bluetooth mic pinned inside my blouse.
“It’s fine,” I said, brushing her hands away. “He won’t see it.”
“I don’t want to give him any cause to shoot you.”
“He’s not going to shoot me. Relax.”
“We can still renege.”
“Nope. Once I commit, I’m like a cat. I sink my claws in and don’t let go till I shred everything.”
Ellis sighed. “Come back to me in one piece.”
On impulse I leaned in¸ kissed her cheek. Trailed my fingers along her jaw.
“You look beautiful,” she said. “For a dork.”
“So do you. For a nerd.”
As I walked to the house I wondered if Max was watching me on cam. I wore a midthigh skirt and a blouse with a deep neckline, subtle makeup. On the ferry ride I’d felt Elle staring, so I’d leaned up against the railing and let the wind have a field day with me. She’d blushed, but hadn’t looked away.
It was strange. Part of what made camming bearable was that I loved being looked at by men. I loved the quiet, tigerish way their eyes followed me, as if just waiting for the bars to be lifted, the cage opened, so they could pounce. The intricacies of beauty were wasted on them. They never noticed uneven eyebrows or uncoordinated shoes. A tiger doesn’t care what shoes you’re wearing when it eats you. Dolling myself up had never been about impressing men—I did it for myself, and for other women. To make Frankie look at me and say, “Damn. I’d go gay for that.” To make Ellis stare at me in a way that made a flame start low in my belly.
With Elle it was somewhere in between. She noticed the intricacies, but she was a tiger, too.
Like Blue.
My pulse quickened as I walked up the front steps. Max had a gun and I was wearing a wire, sort of. But he’d invited me. He wanted to talk.
I punched the bell.
When the door opened he was still in beach clothes: dress shirt, cuffed twill trousers, boating shoes. His oxford was halfway unbuttoned, revealing light chest hair. It took a second for my eyes to travel to his face.
“Good evening,” he said, smiling.
“Hi.”
“Come in. Please.”
I hesitated on the threshold. “Are you filming this?”
“The cameras are off, Vada.”
We’d have that on record, if he lied.
Inside I walked slowly, observing. The first time I’d been in here I was flustered, hyped on emotion. This time I was ready.