He's still in his car. The interior light is on. I can see him clearly: the set of his jaw, the silver at his temples, the stillness that means he is paying complete attention. His eyes move over my screen and I watch him take in what he's looking at. The warm light, the close frame, no virtual background. My face. My actual face, which he has never seen on this platform before, which no one has ever seen on this platform, and he knows that. I can see the moment he understands what I've done.
Something shifts in his expression. Something underneath the control gives way by about a millimeter, which on Declan Maguire is the equivalent of another man falling out of his chair.
"Hi," I say.
He says nothing.
I smile at the camera. Not BrattyBaby's smile. Smaller. Private. "You drove away."
"I did."
"And then you answered."
He holds my gaze. Says nothing.
Good. I have his full attention and he has no idea what I'm about to do with it, which is my preferred operating position. I reach up and take my hair in both hands, twist it over one shoulder, and settle back against my headboard. Slow. Unhurried. I look at the phone like I have all the time in the world, which I do, because there is no audience and no schedule and no timer running. Just me and a man in a parked car and whatever I decide to do next.
"I want to show you something," I say.
"Billie."
I hold the camera steady. "Private tier. You know what that means."
A beat.
"I know what that means," he says.
"Then you know what I do on camera when there's no audience." I tilt my head. I reach off-camera and pick up the vibrator I keep on my nightstand. Rose gold, small, the one I'm most comfortable with. I hold it up so the camera catches it. "You've watched me use this."
His jaw locks. I see it happen in real time, the muscle jumping.
"You watched me and you thought I was someone you'd never meet," I say. "Someone anonymous. Someone who didn't know your name." I look straight into the camera. "I've known your name the whole time, Declan."
"Billie." Rough at the edges. Two syllables and they sound like they cost him something.
"I want you to watch me." I keep my voice even. "You.Just you." I hold the camera. "Can you do that?"
A long pause. The interior of his car is dim behind him and his face is lit by the phone screen and he looks like a man at the edge of a decision he cannot come back from. I've seen that look on men before, on camera. It has never done to me what his version of it is doing right now.
"Yes," he says.
Low and absolute. That one word moves through me from my throat to between my thighs and I let it land for exactly one second before I pick up the thread and start working.
I know what I look like on camera. I know how to use low light, how to use the close frame, how to use my voice to take someone apart from a distance. I've been doing it professionally for a year and a half.
I have never cared this much about the result, and caring changes everything. My hand is less steady. My breathing is already different. The performance version of this would be smooth and controlled and right now I am neither of those things, and the part of my brain that runs quality control is screaming about it and the rest of me has decided that the quality control department can take the night off, because this is not a performance, this is me, on a call with Declan Maguire, about to touch myself for him, and if my hand is shaking a little that's just what's true.
I slip my hand beneath the waistband of what I'm wearing. I let my eyes half-close. I watch his face on my screen.
"I think about your hands," I say. My fingers find my clit, starting slow, and the touch registers sharper than usual because he's watching and that makes everything louder. "I've been thinking about your hands at Sunday dinner for years and pretending I wasn't. You pass the bread and I think about what those hands would feel like and then I ask my dad about his week like a completely normal person." A breath. My fingers move in a slow circle, finding the rhythm. "You want to know what I think about them doing?"
He says nothing. His jaw is locked.
"I think about you getting me on my back and taking your time." My hips shift against my hand. "I think about what it would feel like to have your cock inside me and not be able to doanything about how slow you go. Because you would go slow." I let him hear the change in my breathing. My fingers press harder, circling my clit, and the warmth is building low and real. "I know you would. That's what I think about when I do this."
On screen his hand moves. Not toward himself. Away. Both hands finding the steering wheel. Gripping it.
I see that and something in my chest turns over: he is not going to touch himself. He has decided, in this parked car on my street, that his hand is not what he wants tonight and he would rather grip a steering wheel until his knuckles crack than accept a substitute. That's the most Declan Maguire thing I have ever witnessed. The wanting just doubled. Tripled. I'm doing math I'm not qualified for.
