I sit in the kitchen. I don't open the laptop. Don't pour anything. My hands have stopped shaking. The rest hasn't stopped. The wanting is still there, sitting in my chest and my stomach and lower, and I wait for the right choice to feel like something other than the worst night of my life.
7
Billie
Iwent to get a glass of water and the kitchen window faces the street and I am standing in the dark with the light off so he can't see me looking, which is not my finest moment but I'm prepared to live with it. Second floor, decent angle. His car parked just past the streetlight, engine off. He's just sitting there.
A forty-eight-year-old man who runs a security firm is sitting in his car in the dark pointed at my window, and I am standing in my kitchen like a woman in a true-crime documentary except in this version the woman is the one doing the surveillance and she's wearing a Pokémon shirt and no pants. Really dignified all around.
I drink my water. I try to work out what I'm feeling, which turns out to be a fairly short exercise: I want him to come back upstairs. That's it. That's the whole feeling. No layers, no complexity, no interesting psychological dimensions.Just come back upstairs, please, delivered with the emotional sophistication of a golden retriever at a door.
I've been managing this wanting of this older man for way too long, if I'm being honest with myself at eleven PM in a dark kitchen. I know how to build a wall between wanting and doing. I've been building walls my whole life. Good-daughter wall, BrattyBaby wall, woman-who-has-her-shit-together wall.
The difference tonight is that I'm not sure I want to hold it.
He saidI can't.NotI won't.Notthis is wrongoryou're twenty-oneor any of the accurate objections he could have made and didn't. He saidI can'tand went down the stairs and has been sitting in his car pointed at my kitchen window ever since. Anyone who's thinking about whatI can'tmeans, as opposed toI won't,already has their answer.
I think about my dad. The night my mom died and Declan showing up and staying for three days. Every Sunday dinner for twenty-one years, Declan in the same chair, the same easy silence between two men who don't need to fill space with noise. My dad's whole sense of safety has Declan Maguire in the load-bearing wall.
I sit with that for a real minute. The cost of it. What it would do to two men who have been each other's constants for thirty years.
Then I look at the dark square of the kitchen window and I think about a man in a parked car who drove across the city in fourteen minutes to stand at my door and look at me like I was a problem he couldn't solve, and walked away anyway.
I pick up my phone.
I don't write a message.
I just send the link.
Then I go to my room and I get to work.
Here's the thing about what I do for a living. I've been doing it for eighteen months and I know exactly how a camera works andexactly how I work on camera. I know the difference between performing for an audience and performing for one person. The audience is a room. One person is a target. The skill sets overlap but the intent is completely different.
I have never aimed the second skill set at someone I actually wanted.
Tonight I'm aiming it at Declan Maguire, and my hands are shaking while I set up the phone stand, which is not something that happens. I have steady hands. I'm good at this. Apparently "good at this" has a footnote that reads:unless you genuinely care about the outcome, in which case, welcome to your hands shaking, enjoy the experience.
I take my hair down. I change out of the dress and into what I wear when I do private content: soft things, simple things, the kind that come off easily and look like I didn't think about them even though I thought about them plenty. I set up my phone on its stand, ring light low and warm. The angle I use for private sessions: close, intimate, the frame tighter than the public stream.
But tonight I do something I've never done on a private call.
I widen the frame.
My private content is always dark, always careful. Collarbone down. My face never in shot because the framing makes it unnecessary. The subscribers see my body, hear my voice, and the anonymity is the whole point of the architecture. Nobody on the private tier has ever seen my face. Not once. Not until the night I accidentally shifted into a wider angle and Declan recognized the dress he'd given me, and by then it was too late to take it back.
Tonight I set the frame at my chin. Then higher. Then all the way.
No angle trick. No careful crop. My real face, in warm light, looking directly into the camera.
I check the preview and my stomach does something I refuse to describe because I have more self-respect than that. I look like BrattyBaby except without any of the walls, which is exactly what I want him to see and also absolutely terrifying, and I am choosing not to engage with the terror right now because I have a phone call to make.
The link request comes in while I'm adjusting the stand.
He answered in four minutes. I don't know what he was doing for those four minutes and I have several theories, all of which involve a man staring at a link on his phone and having a brief, private argument with himself that he was always going to lose.
I accept it.
His face fills my screen and he looks exactly like a man who picked up before he'd decided to.
