"Don't stop," I whisper. "Right there.Right there.I need you to—" My breath catches because he's done something with the angle, tilted his hips, and the head of his cock drags against the spot that makes my whole body clench. "Oh god. Declan.Don't stop."
His rhythm stutters. His hands tighten on my hips hard enough that I'll feel it tomorrow. The sound he makes against my neck is rough and wrecked and torn out of him, and I feel it vibrate through my chest into my spine.
He drives into me hard. Once. Twice. I come with my back arched off his bed and my hands fisted in his hair and a sound that fills the room. My body clenches around his cock in waves, pulsing, and I feel every contraction and he feels them too because his hips slam forward and he buries himself deep and holds there and I feel him come. The pulse of him inside me, his hands gripping my hips, his forehead dropping to my collarbone, a rough broken sound against my skin. It sets off another wave in me, an aftershock that rolls through my thighs and my stomach and I hold on to him and ride it out and let it take us both.
After a while the room comes back.
His breathing. Mine.
Through the open door: the photo. My dad and Declan, both laughing.
12
Billie
The charity stream has been running for two hours and twenty minutes and my kill count is sitting at eighty-seven, which is good, and my chat is in the kind of collective flow state where they're not even arguing with each other, which is rare, and I am in the zone in the way that only happens when everything else goes quiet and it's just me and the game and four thousand people watching me be competent at something.
I am, objectively, having a great stream.
My phone lights up on the desk.
I always keep it face-up during streams in case my dad calls. He has a whole thing about emergencies and I've never fully convinced him that I can check messages between rounds. I catch Declan's name on the screen and I glance at it without meaning to and I miss a shot I had in the bag.
First miss in forty minutes.
My chat notices immediately. BILLIE NO. BILLIE WHAT WAS THAT. she's been bodying everyone for an hour and then THIS. did she get a text. billie got a text. WHO TEXTED BILLIE.
I pick up the phone.
You're better when you stop thinking.
I look at it.
He's watching the stream right now. He's been watching and he saw the exact moment my focus slipped before I slipped it, and he knows why I play better when I'm not in my own head, which means he's watched me enough to know my patterns, which means he can read my gameplay the way other people read body language.
I set the phone down.
"I'm fine," I tell my chat. "Temporary equipment malfunction. The equipment being my brain."
My chat loses their minds. THE EQUIPMENT BEING HER BRAIN. BILLIE. billie has a boyfriend. she's blushing. IS SHE BLUSHING.
I am not blushing. I am a professional.
Then the donation notification rolls across the bottom of my screen.
Declan M. — $200.
Not DarkWatcher. Not an anonymous handle. His name. His real name, sitting in my donation feed where four thousand people can see it, and my hands tremble on the controller for two full seconds.
Declan M. In my stream. Where my chat can screenshot it, where anyone curious enough could look him up. Where the donation sits in the public record alongside every other donor and there is nothing anonymous about it. He has put his real name in my stream the way a man carves initials into a tree, except the tree is public and the initials are visible to anyone who bothers to look.
I pick up the next round and I run it clean. Eighty-eight, eighty-nine, ninety-two. I do not look at my phone again for the rest of the stream.
When it ends two hours later I sit in the ring light glow and I call him before I've taken the filter off.
He picks up on the second ring.
"You put your name where everyone could see it," I say.
