A face I have sat across from at a table, Sunday after Sunday. Bread rolls and wine and thirty years of being Ronan Callaghan's best friend.
I know this face.
My hand is on my cock. She is on my screen. I understand everything at once.
The voice.
The voice is what undoes me. Low and private and real on my screen, and it is the same voice she uses at Ronan's kitchen table. The same voice from the end of a long stream when BrattyBaby starts to dissolve. The same voice that has been pulling at me for seven months. I know now, with absolute certainty, that this was always Billie's voice.
It was always Billie.
She's on the screen. I know whose face is in the frame. I know whose voice I've been wanting for seven months. My cock is hard in my hand and I do not stop. I don't slow down. I don't look away.
I watch Billie Callaghan on my screen with her thighs spread and her vibrator working and her face flushed and visible for the first time and I stroke my cock and the wanting that has been building doesn't collapse under the weight of who she is. It doubles. It triples. Because it was always her. The voice I couldn't place. The body I memorised. The woman I've been watching at Sunday dinners for years and wanting on a screen for months and they are the same person and I am looking at all of her at once for the first time and my hand moves faster.
I think about Billie specifically now. Billie's mouth. Billie's thighs. Billie in Ronan's kitchen six days ago and I wanted to close those six inches and pin her against the counter and put myhand up her skirt and find out what sound she'd make with her father in the next room.
My hips push up into my fist.
I think about Billie under me. Billie saying “Declan”. The freckles across her nose while I fuck her. Her hands in my hair. Her face when she comes, which I am watching right now on my screen, which is happening right now.
She's close. The change in her breathing. Her voice going ragged. And I'm right there with her, grip tight, watching her face, her real face, Billie's face, and she arches and her mouth opens and I hear her come apart and it is Billie's sound, Billie's real unguarded sound, the one she makes at Sunday dinners when she laughs too hard except this is the other version, the one nobody hears, and I come so hard my vision whites at the edges.
My cock jerks in my fist and I feel it everywhere. Thick ropes of it across my hand, my stomach, my shirt. My hips snap up off the chair and I'm making a sound I don't recognize, low and wrecked, and I'm still stroking through it, still watching her on the screen, still coming while Billie Callaghan shakes apart in the same frame and it goes on longer than it should, longer than it has any right to, my whole body emptying itself in the dark while Ronan's daughter's face glows on my screen. I don't close my eyes. I watch her through every second of it. Her flushed throat. Her open mouth. The freckles I've been counting at Sunday dinners since she was old enough to sit at the table.
The last of it pulses through me and I go still. My hand wet. My breathing ragged. Her face on the screen, still.
Then it hits.
Not gradually. Not by degrees. All at once, like a door slamming open in a dark room and the light behind it is Ronan's kitchen and Ronan's table and Ronan's voice sayingsomething's up with Billietwenty minutes ago on a porch where I sat andlistened and said nothing. The wanting drains out and what fills the space is something colder and heavier and I sit there with my cock softening in my hand and her face on my screen and I understand exactly what kind of man I am.
I look down. My hand. My shirt. The evidence of it, specific and undeniable, and for a moment I cannot move. The study is quiet. The screen still lit. Somewhere in this city Billie Callaghan uploaded a video and I opened it and I watched it and I came to it knowing who she was and I did not stop and I cannot take any of it back.
After a long time I straighten. Clean up. The mechanical actions of a man putting a room back in order. I change my shirt. Wash my hands. Come back to the desk and put my hands flat on the surface and press down.
I have been mapping her. Not BrattyBaby. Billie. For years. At Sunday dinners, through the comfortable distance of being Ronan's best friend. Her laugh. The shade of blue that would be right for her.
I was already watching. I just didn't have a name for it.
Ronan saidsomething's up with Billie.He was right. Something is up with Billie.I am up with Billie.Ihavebeen up with Billie since October and I sat on his porch and told him she'd figure it out and drove home and her face was on my screen before my jacket was off.
His voice is still in my head.
His daughter's face is still on the screen.
I set the phone face-down on the desk.
Fuck.
5
Billie
Iput the dress on at noon and stood in front of the mirror for three minutes deciding whether I was actually going to do this.
I was absolutely going to do this. The three minutes were theater. I knew what I was doing before I unzipped the garment bag.
The dress is deep blue. Declan gave it to me for my birthday quiet about it the way he's quiet about everything, and I thanked him and wore it once to a friend's dinner and didn't think about it again until I put it on for a private-tier video and saidthis one's for you, you know who you are,and he watched me take it off.
