I keep going.
My hips are moving now, tilting into my fingers, and I'm wet enough that the slide is easy. I let him see it. I let him hear it.
"This is what you've been watching," I say, my voice lower than I planned. "Except this time you know who I am." I look at the camera. At him. "Does that make it better or worse?"
A long beat.
"Both," he says. Rough. The control has slipped a full register and I can hear the edges of what's underneath it and it makes me press harder against my own hand.
"Tell me what you want," I say. My hips shifting into my hand now, not subtle about it. I've stopped pretending this is a show. I can feel the build starting, the tightening, and I let him see exactly what his answer is going to do to me. I look at the camera. "Say it."
"Billie."
"Say it."
His knuckles are white on the wheel. The silver at his temples catches the light from his phone and he is gripping that wheel like a man holding a rope over a long drop and I want him sobadly I can feel it in my teeth. That's a new one for me. Desire in teeth. Adding it to the list.
"I want to be in that room," he says. Low and plain and certain. "I want to be the one making you sound like that."
Something opens up in my chest alongside everything happening between my thighs. I let him hear what it does to me. I don't hide any of it. The flush climbing my cheeks, the way my mouth opens, the sounds I'm making that are real and unpracticed and have his name tangled up in them. My fingers working my clit faster, pressing in tight circles, and I can feel myself getting close, the tension winding tighter with every breath.
"Then come upstairs," I say. Breathless. Actually breathless, not performing breathless. "You know which window is mine."
My hand moves faster. I let him watch every second of it. I let him hear me get close, the sounds I'm making that are aimed at him, that have his name in them, and my thighs are tensing and my back is starting to arch and I am right there, right at the edge—
And I stop.
I pull my hand free, letting him see the way my fingers and vibrator are glistening in the light.
I look at the camera with my chest heaving and my cheeks hot and I don't finish, and I make sure he can see exactly what he's done to me, and I make sure he knows I'm leaving this here, on the edge,unfinished.
"Come take it," I say. "Yourself."
I end the call.
8
Billie
He comes.
I open the door before he knocks a second time.
He's there. Still in what he was wearing at my door two hours ago, the cold off the street coming in around him, and he's looking at me with an expression I haven't seen on his face before.
I am still wound tight from the call and he knows that because he watched it happen and I know that he knows and neither of us says a word about any of it.
I have been waiting for this moment for weeks.
"You're forty-eight years old," I say.
He doesn't look away.
"Yes."
"You've known me since I was born."
"Yes."
