1
Billie
Iam sixty-three minutes into a live stream, my kill count is at thirty-eight, and I cannot stop thinking about Declan Maguire.
This is not new. This is, in fact, the problem.
More specifically, Declan’s hands. They're big. Not in a way he seems to notice or care about, which somehow makes it worse. Just objectively, structurally large hands attached to a man who has been sitting across from me at Sunday dinner since before I had object permanence, and every time he picks up a beer bottle my brain goes somewhere it has no business going while my dad is passing the bread rolls. I smile. I pass the bread rolls. I am a perfectly normal human being about it. I have been a perfectly normal human being about Declan Maguire for considerably longer than I've been performing anything else, which is saying something, because performing is literally my job.
The stream is carrying itself. My hands know this game well enough to run on autopilot while my brain wanders off to its current favorite destination: a man who is forty-eight years old, has been in my family's life since before I was born, and who I now know has been watching me on a screen every Tuesday night since October.
Watching me. The private tier.
I have been professionally sexually explicit for eighteen months and not once lost sleep over it. I know my body the way I know my gaming stats: comprehensively, without embarrassment, through the kind of sustained attention that would be weird if it weren't also my income. I've had a vibrator since I was nineteen and no particular interest in having a man involved in anything I do in the dark. The private tier is mine. What I look like, what I sound like, how far I take it, when I stop. Every frame is a choice I made on purpose.
The best part is that it’s all anonymous.
So naturally my dad's best friend has been watching all of it since October,withoutknowing that it’s me, and I haven't slept through the night in two weeks. Not because I'm upset. Because the image of Declan Maguire sitting in whatever room he sits in on Tuesday nights, watching me come apart on a screen, and I don't know what his face does when it happens, and I want to know what his face does, and that wanting is keeping me up like some unhinged detective with a conspiracy board except the conspiracy board is just one man and several hundred hours of streaming data. Very normal behavior. Very well-adjusted.
BILLIE YOU ARE UNHINGED!!!
That's GremlinKing, who has been in my chat since I had three hundred subscribers and a secondhand webcam, and who apparently intends to die here. My kill count ticks to thirty-nine. The donations roll in the corner of my second monitor, peripheral awareness I've trained myself to manage withoutbreaking focus. Stream survival skill number one, right afterdon't let them see you sweatand right beforeyour real laugh and your stream laugh are different, use the right one.
DarkWatcher45 tips two hundred dollars.
He always tips early.
I let myself look at the notification. BrattyBaby doesn't react to tips the way a new streamer does, all gasps and bright eyes andoh my god thank you.BrattyBaby clocks it. Cool. Unhurried. Like a woman who expected exactly this. It's a good bit. It works because it's half true: I did expect this. I've been expecting it since eight forty-five when I went live, and before that since six PM when I started getting ready, and before that since basically two weeks ago when I figured out who he was and understood that Tuesdays were about to become a whole situation.
Two hundred dollars. No message tonight. Sometimes he sends something short, specific, delivered without softening. Sometimes just the tip and silence. Either way his presence in the chat lands the same: steady, patient, paying attention in a way that has nothing to do with the notification algorithm and everything to do with him.
I know who he is.
And because of this, I have been putting on the best streams of my career for fourteen days, which is honestly rude of me to my previous streams, but here we are.
I lean back in my chair. Not all the way, just the angle I've learned reads well on camera. I drop my voice to the bottom of its range and address my chat with the unhurried confidence that took me six months to build and now comes as naturally as blinking.
"DarkWatcher. Two hundred dollars." I let his name sit in the air. "You've been here since the start. I appreciate a man who shows up on time."
My chat explodes. Three hundred people with opinions about DarkWatcher45 and whether I'm flirting and whether this means something. I let them have it. I take a long sip from my water bottle. Hydration, yes, but also a pause. Also giving the camera a moment to hold the particular quality of BrattyBaby's heavily-filtered expression, which is the expression of a woman who has significantly more information than anyone else in the room.
Which is true. Spectacularly, almost dizzyingly true.
Somewhere in this city, Declan Maguire just heard me say his screen name.
He's been watching long enough to know that I read tips, acknowledge them, move on. What he doesn't know is that I said it differently tonight. A half-degree slower. A fraction warmer. The exact calibration I normally reserve for the end of a long stream when I'm tired and my guard comes down and BrattyBaby and Billie Callaghan start to blur at the edges.
I did that on purpose.
I do everything on purpose now when DarkWatcher45 is in my chat.
The game loads into the next round. I roll my shoulders, crack my neck and drop back into the match. GremlinKing is already calling out positions. Three regulars filling the squad slots. Normal Tuesday night, to everyone watching.
Forty minutes later I've run the kill count to fifty-two and I've been doing the thing I've been doing for two weeks: performing for one person in a room of three hundred. A particular kind of smile when the round goes well. A particular frustration when it doesn't, genuine and unguarded, the version my chat has learned to love because it's the most real I ever sound on the public stream.
Around DarkWatcher45's tip I stop constructing BrattyBaby and I let something underneath show at the edges. The real version. The one I haven't made a joke about yet.
I'm working up to it.
