Cam Girl

by Leah Raeder

  —5—

  This is what happens when you lie. Lies grow thin and steely and hard and become bars. Bars become a cage.

  Ellis was probably awake. Huddled in her hoodie, typing away in the wraithlike glow of her laptop. I smoked a joint in a hot bath and stared up at the pine plank ceiling, thinking.

  I could’ve let myself out of this cage. But I chose to stay. For her.

  I slept for a few hours and woke unrested. Everything was soft and heather gray, a pencil sketch of a day. Rain coming. Frankie and Dane were heading out on the yacht, and I cornered her on a stone jetty while he coiled rope.

  “Can we talk?” My voice was a croak.

  Dane raised his eyebrows at us.

  “Alone,” I said.

  Frankie wrapped herself in her cardigan, warding off the chilly spray. “You look hungover. Get some sleep.”

  “I just need to talk to you. Please.”

  I must have looked haunted enough to convince her.

  “Morgan’s doing the run today,” she called to Dane. “We need some one-on-one time.”

  He headed over. “Girls’ day out?”

  “Something like that.”

  Dane frowned when he saw my face. “You okay?”

  “Come on.” Frankie took my arm. “Before he talks his way in.”

  We boarded while Dane stayed behind to help us cast off. I hauled up the stern and bow lines, pulled the fat boat fenders from the water. He watched me till I climbed to the helm.

  Frankie reclined in the captain’s chair, all in white, a dimple at one side of her mouth that I thought of as her well, well look. Against her clothes and the boat her skin shone burnished brown. My hands ached for my camera, to capture contrast, the clean edge between hues.

  I sat beside her. Wind washed my hair over my face.

  “What’s on your mind?” she said.

  “Don’t hire Ellis.”

  Her eyebrows lifted over her Ray-Bans. “Why?”

  “There’s bad blood between us. It’ll be a disaster.”

  “I like you, Morgan, but I can’t let your personal drama dictate my business decisions.”

  “You can find a million other coders. You won’t find another cam girl like me.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “No. I meant—I’m asking as a friend, okay? Please.”

  We cruised for a bit, the rush of water like silk tearing. Frankie had taken me under her wing. Taught me the tricks of the trade. How to tease and prolong, get paid for anticipation as well as delivery. How to sculpt a persona. How to protect myself. My first night on the job she’d unpinned a gold barrette from her hair, a wire butterfly. She’d placed it in my palm.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  I shook my head.

  “This is Tiana. I used to do live theater. Onstage, you’re in costume. You wear someone else’s face, someone else’s life. It’s easier to separate yourself from the character. But on cam, there’s no barrier. We’re bare-ass naked, at someone’s beck and call. Completely vulnerable.” She touched the butterfly in my hand. “So this is my trick. My costume. When I put this on, I’m Tiana. Anything that happens will happen to her, and it stays inside this. When I take it off, I’m Frankie. Understand?”

  It was strange, I thought later, that her trick was similar to how people separated themselves from their bodies when terrible things happened to those bodies. When a man held you down and unbuckled his belt. When a mother raised a stiff palm. As if you could just decide that bad things would happen to someone else, someone who wasn’t really you.

  But I took her advice and found a bracelet Elle had given me, silvery and fine as a spiderweb. I put it on every night and became Morgan. In a way, it felt like a fetter. And in a way being shackled felt good because it meant I couldn’t drift any further. I couldn’t get more lost.

  “Is this about the trouble you’re running from?” Frankie said now.

  My head snapped toward her. Dead giveaway.

  “You’re trying to protect Ellis from it, aren’t you?”

  “I just don’t want her around me.”

  “Dane said you nearly tore each other’s throats out on the boat.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “I think it was. But Dane is a man. He doesn’t see what’s really going on.” Frankie drummed on the wheel. “You two had a thing.”

  “I don’t want to work with her, okay? That’s all.”

  “Actually, I think you’d work great together.”

  My mouth fell. “Seriously?”

  “I watched you lock horns. She’s the dreamer, you’re the doer. Good pair. If she gets fancy ideas about the site, you can keep her grounded.” Her smile flashed, an arc of opal. “Besides, I haven’t seen you that animated since we met. Something lights up in you when you’re near her.”

  “Yeah, like a bomb.”

  “I already promised you’d be her liaison. Show her the ropes. I don’t have time and Dane will be in Boston. You’re my top choice.” She glanced at me over her sunglasses. “If you can handle this, I’ll make you a partner.”

  Promotion.

  Most of what I’d earned so far was paying off my student loans. More money meant I could return to grad school without worry. Or not, because what the hell would I do with an MFA? Teach budding young artists about the world I’d been severed from, the world I could only observe instead of touch? I didn’t even know what to do with the extra money I earned now. I rarely bought anything. The things I really wanted couldn’t be bought.

  I frowned suddenly. “Wait, Dane’s going to Boston?”

  “He didn’t tell you? That’s where we’re opening the new house.”

  That bastard.

  “Guess I’m not important enough to tell,” I muttered.

  Her eyes lingered on me. “Or maybe he doesn’t know how to say good-bye.”

  * * *

  Frankie had contracts to sign in downtown Portland. All those fancy foil-stamped documents about girls riding dildos and boys pulling on cock rings. Any of these lawyers in their crisp Armani and asshole roadsters could log on tonight and beg, Let me come on ur face.

  The rain thickened, coming down in sheets of silver tinsel. Frankie took me shopping, undaunted. She’d done this when we first met, bought me airy negligees and vaporous thongs, things so sheer it seemed any moisture would dissolve them, like spun sugar. Now we hopped from boutique to boutique, filling bags with designer denim, organza tops, strappy heels, more makeup than I could use in a year. She was spoiling me. I could’ve bought this stuff myself but these were gifts, and I’d learned quickly as a cam girl that all gifts carried a price. When she held a pair of garnets against my ear, I pulled away.

  “Happy birthday,” Elle had said, pushing a small box into my hands.

  “You did not.”

  “I did. Open it.”

  “You don’t have the money for this.”

  “Shut up and open it.”

  Inside, on a bed of velvet, lay a pair of ruby earrings set in sterling. The settings were molded into threads of cold fire.

  One day we’d gone window-shopping and pretended to buy all the things we couldn’t afford. Tried on clothes at high-end stores till they kicked us out, got spritzed with a potpourri of perfume at fragrance counters, talked a jeweler into taking the ruby earrings out of the glass case and reluctantly holding them up against my head. The jeweler said they looked lovely. Ellis said they looked like drops of blood bursting into flame. That night I painted a phoenix tearing its own wings apart. My brushstrokes were wild, paint licking up my arms as if fire were bleeding onto me, or from me. When I put the brush down, Elle dipped it carefully in the red and dabbed each of my earlobes.

  “You remembered,” I said softly, letting reminiscence fade.

  She turned my head and put an earring in, gentle. Then the other side. The graze of her fingers made me shiver.

  “Do they look lovely?” I said, smiling.

  �
�You do.”

  She never told me where she got the money. But eventually, I knew.

  (—Bergen, Vada. Happy Birthday, Baby. Oil on canvas.)

  Frankie was giving me a strange look.

  “Zoned out,” I said. “I’m starving. Call it a day?”

  We went to a hipster clam bar near the wharf. Frankie ordered a flight of red wine, then another, and by the time the steamers were served I was grinning stupidly, tipsy.

  “I have no idea how to do this,” I said.

  She raised an amused eyebrow. Her face said watch me.

  Frankie popped a shell with one hand and pulled out the clam, peeled the dark part off like a stocking, dipped the meat into the broth and melted butter and then finally lifted it, dripping gold, to her mouth. Her tongue flicked out to bring it inside slowly.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  She licked a glaze of butter from her lips. “Think you can do it?”

  “Show me one more time.”

  “Only if we go private, baby.”

  We both laughed.

  By my third steamer I was doing it like a pro, sucking the juice before it could trickle over my chin, gesturing with my wineglass like I wasn’t on the brink of dropping it. Being around Frankie made me feel sophisticated, her urbane air rubbing off. She was an econ major with a solid background in high culture, and when I talked about Frida Kahlo or Paul Klee she knew who I meant. “Describe it,” she’d say when I mentioned a painting, and I let the wine take rein over my tongue and told her how Kahlo was a raw cry, how her colors burned into the canvas like blood still hot from a vein, how she captured the way that pain, chronic pain, felt like a nightmare that started when you woke up, and it made everything surreal, every ordinary object a torture device, every mundane chore a labor sentence. It both impeded Kahlo’s expression and intensified all she experienced. That’s what made her great, I explained. All art comes from pain. She was closer to the nerve pulp than most of us. But every stroke of the brush, every lyric, every word whispered between human beings resulted from the pain of being alone. In our haunted heads, our imperfect bodies. Islands carved from clay and bone, our skulls like shells full of mist.

  Frankie stared at my hands. “That’s how it feels for you?”

  “I have good days and bad days.”

  “Can’t you have surgery?”

  “Already did.” Today was a good day, and the wine buffered any twinge of discomfort. “Messing with it more might make it worse. I could lose all function.”

  Sun speared through the rain, skewering the droplets crawling down the windows. Frankie tilted the cabernet in her glass.

  “I never guessed it was that bad by looking at you,” she said.

  “You probably see a hundred disabled people every day and don’t realize.”

  “Never thought of that.”

  “Most people just want to pass quietly in society. No preconceptions, no prejudices.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir. People look at me and immediately see black girl.” Frankie smiled, dimples popping. “Not the girl, or the person. But my blackness. Then comes that pause, you know, checking if they’re being racist or rude or whatever. Like they’re saying, very politely, ‘You’re not like us. You never will be.’ ”

  “Exactly. They’re othering you.”

  “I’m sorry if I’ve done that. Or not accommodated your needs.”

  “When I need help, I’ll ask. Assuming I need it makes me feel othered.” Except I never asked for help, even when I legit needed it. My dumb stubbornness. “If I’ve ever made you feel that way, I’m sorry, too.”

  “Oh, please.” She whisked a fingertip over my forearm and the hair there stood on end. “Look at your gorgeous color. Where’s your family from?”

  “Mom’s Puerto Rican, Dad’s Swedish. You?”

  “Nigerian, Brazilian, and English. And I swear, if I hear ‘chocolate, caramel, and nougat’ one more fucking time, I will murder someone.”

  “You mean you’re actually a person, not a Milky Way bar?”

  She grinned. “You get me. And I get you.”

  I took a long draught of wine. “Why’d you buy me all this stuff? Are you seducing me?”

  I’d said it jokingly, but her smile grew sly, almost carnal.

  “I like you, that’s all.” Frankie pushed a clam across her plate with a lilac nail. “You remind me of a younger me. Feisty, fiery. Chip on your shoulder. This business is tough, and it’s easy to see other women as enemies. But we’re the only real allies we’ve got.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “You’ve had to fight for everything in your life. You deserve some goodness pro bono. A rising tide lifts all boats.”

  “Maine’s getting to you, Frankie. Next you’ll grow a beard and stroke it while staring out to sea.” She laughed, charmingly, and I dared to ask something personal. “Why’d you get into camming? You’re like, superhumanly beautiful. Top model material.”

  “Modeling is a joke. There are millions of pretty faces out there. If you want in, you’ve got to fuck your way through talent scouts and photogs. Think the casting couch is only in Hollywood? It’s in fashion, too. It’s everywhere we sell our skin. And when men are the gatekeepers, they make us pay with our bodies to get in the door. But camming’s different. No gate. Anyone with an Internet connection can do it. Now we’ve only got to fuck ourselves.”

  We both giggled. We were slightly drunk.

  Then her gaze slid past me. “Speaking of the casting couch. Isn’t that your old boss?”

  Shit.

  Curtis sat at the far end of the butcher-block bar, hunched over a tin plate of fish and chips. He was still all skin and bones and shaggy hair. When our eyes met, he nodded.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  Frankie called for the bill. But the rain was brutal, and as we waited for a cab Curt sauntered over.

  “Vada?”

  I frowned as if trying to remember who he was. “Hey.”

  “Hi. You look—wow, you look great.”

  All those days hiking and rowing had toned and tanned me even darker. Less alcohol, more fresh air. Less thinking. Self-improvement, I guess.

  “How are you?” he said.

  Last time I’d seen him, I’d been desperate enough to fuck him for money. Trade my body for a small extension of my crappy lease on life. And now I’d made it my profession. Whoring it up for the entire Internet.

  Frankie slid an arm around my waist, as if sensing my embarrassment. Frankie, with her master’s degree and scalpel blade of a brain, who took no shame cashing in on her looks till she could do what she really loved: run her own business.

  If she didn’t feel embarrassed, why the fuck should I?

  I made a living doing something on my terms. On my time, at my comfort level. Without letting anyone touch me. And I made more money online than I ever would have in the real world.

  My eyes rose to his. “I’m good.”

  For the first time in ages, I actually meant it.

  “That’s great. That’s really great. Hey, if you ever want to catch up—”

  Our cab pulled to the curb, a yellow blur in the downpour, and Frankie and I strolled out together, arm in arm, leaving Curt there with his mouth hanging open.

  * * *

  We waited out the storm on the yacht, Frankie reading an e-book while I stared at the roil and wrath of the sea. My shoulder twitched involuntarily, mimicking drawing. I used to love attacking paper with a stub of charcoal, racing to capture motion before it stopped. Catching that in-between flicker where a movement hung breathless and timeless and forever. It was getting dark before we cast off, a plush velvet fog lying over the water, so thick I tried to scoop it up with my hands, like marshmallow. Once we launched there was only pure white in every direction. Heavy slabs of silence bordered us on all sides, magnifying the slap of water on the hull, our small human noises. Frankie glanced at me and for a wild moment I thought, This isn�
�t real. She’s Charon, ferrying me to the underworld.

  Then the pier materialized out of nothingness, a pair of loons ruffling and gliding off in the lavender twilight. Dane stepped through the haze and my heart lurched in a pleasant way. Frankie left us to handle the boat.

  We worked side by side wordlessly. Dane threw me a line without warning and I caught it; he knelt to help me tie it down without prompt. When I slid on the mist-filmed deck he put a steadying hand on my back. The imprint seared into my skin, a warmth silhouetted against the chill.

  We were walking up the pier when I yanked at his shirtsleeve, stopping him. An iron lantern bathed us with warm manila light.

  “Morgan—”

  “You didn’t tell me,” I said, moving closer. “That you’re leaving.”

  He put a palm against my cheek. “Didn’t want to worry you.”

  “Worry me. You can’t just leave without saying anything.”

  “You’re going to miss me.”

  “Whatever. No. A little.”

  “You will,” he said, stroking my face, and abruptly I broke free and stalked away from him.

  “Morgan.”

  Fuck, fuck, what was this? Confusion. Loneliness, manifesting as physical want. Like with Max. Dane was not someone I wanted a relationship with. Someone I’d fuck, yes, sure. But nothing beyond that. Nothing real.

  He caught my arm and I spun around and hurled myself at him. For a second we gripped each other, equally stunned, then one of us started the kiss and we both fell into it.

  His lips were soft and tinged with bitter earthy beer, and he kissed me gently, one hand behind my head, the other on my waist. I wrapped my arms around him like I’d imagined the night we swam beneath the stars. His body was hard and alive, so alive, moving against mine, pulling me to him so tightly every movement he made rippled through me like water. Our mouths opened, slow and sinuous, tongues curling and my legs parting and his hips pressing between them. I was ready for this. I’d been fucking myself all day, every day for the past four months, and the first warm body against mine made me wetter than I’d ever been on cam. Dane’s erection pressed into my thigh. I could imagine already how we’d fuck: he’d let me get on top, give him a show, then hold me in place and give it to me hard. If we could just get from here to the house without slowing down, without losing focus—