Page 28 of Wells

Her face pops up on the screen at nine on the dot. Her sexy, eager red lips and mysterious black mask, only revealing two piercing blue eyes, stare back at me.

"Someone is early tonight," she says with a sultry smile. "Should I be flattered or concerned?”

I lean forward, as if I could get closer to her, and inhale. All I want to do is to smell her. I wonder if she smells like cherries, like her red lips look like they’d taste.

Both, I want to say. "I was thinking about you," I say instead.

"Oh, yeah. What were you thinking, exactly?'

"How much I want to taste you."

Across the room, the feeds run their quiet rows of light, and a dead man's name keeps rising up through all of them.

She settles back against the headboard and draws one knee up, exposing the curve of her round ass. She has on black lace thong panties tonight under a black short camisole dress.

"How are you, Midnight?”

“Better now that I get to see you.” I pull another cigarette from the pack, but don't light it yet. My hands cannot seem to hold one task tonight for more than a few seconds. “You look radiant tonight.”

“You've never done that before, messaged me during the day. I was pleasantly surprised to see the message pop up while I was at work. It made me wet for you when I was supposed to be concentrating. You're naughty, sneaking up on me at the office like that."

“That makes me very happy.”

There is a small pause before she answers. “I like making you happy.”

She gives it to me like she gives me everything, certain it is the line I want. Tonight it almost is. I came here to be handled, to hand the noise in my skull to the one person who knows the shape of me and let her run me until it quiets. So I do what I came for.

"Touch yourself."

She moves before I finish, her hand to her thigh, her breathing changing on cue. Her eyes slide half shut behind the rhinestone circles. The sound she makes is pitched for the speakers, set where I trained it.

It's flawless. She is always flawless. More than two months into whatever this is, and she knows how I like the show paced to the second. She runs it tonight without a single wrong note.

It does nothing for the thing that drove me here.

"Stop."

Her hand goes still on her thigh. "Am I going too slow? I can pick it up."

"No, that's not it." I set the unlit cigarette on the keyboard and leave it there. The room has gone quiet, only the air purifier and the river muffled thirty floors down. "Peoria."

"Yeah?"

"Take it off. All of it. I want nothing between us tonight."

For a second, she doesn't move. The hand on her thigh stays where it is, and the loose confidence she wears like a second skin goes out of her all at once. She looks less like the woman I pay and more like someone who walked into a room expecting one thing and found another.

"That's..." She stops and pulls the strap of the camisole up an inch, something her body does before her mouth can. "That's not really what this is. We've always agreed I could keep my clothes on, only exposing parts of me at a time."

"Don't you trust me, Peoria?"

"It's not that."

"Then what is it? I want all of you."

"This started as a way to keep my lights on." Her voice has dropped out of the register she sells into something with edges in it. "I'm good at the show. But I don't take it all off. You have all of me already. I told you I wouldn't see anyone else, and I haven't. I'm too shy to take off all of my clothes, as weird as that sounds with all we do together, all I do for you on camera."

There it is, the line she drew to keep herself safe, the same as I draw mine. I know the shape of that better than she could guess.