In Summertime Saga

Jenny's Sluttygram was at six thousand followers and climbing. I knew because she'd shown me the number after our last photo session, holding her phone out with both hands like a kid showing off a report card. Six thousand people looking at photos I'd taken of a woman who called me twerp. The photos were good. She knew the photos were good because the numbers were going up and Jenny understood numbers instinctively, as the score that proved she was winning.

She went upstairs early that night. Debbie was in the kitchen cleaning and the TV was on in the living room playing a home renovation show that nobody was watching and the house had that feeling it got after dinner when everyone was done being in the same room and had retreated to their separate spaces. Debbie turned off the kitchen light and said "goodnight, sweetie" and I said "night" and she went upstairs and her door closed and then it was just me and the renovation show and the orange cat on the third step.

I turned off the TV. The house went quiet. I was at the kitchen table with my notebook open to Bissette's latest assignment, which was conjugating irregular verbs, and the verbs were irregular and I was bored and thinking about money.

A hundred and forty-five dollars. Bike. Rhythm. Deliveries. Stats. The math was always running. I'd been in this body for a week and change and I had two stat points and a bicycle and a bruise that was fading and a deal to collect panties and a photography arrangement with a woman who was making more money per follower than I was making per pizza.

I closed the notebook. Went upstairs.

Jenny's door was closed. Music was playing behind it, low R&B with bass and breathy vocals, chosen to set a mood. I'd heard the music before on other nights and hadn't thought about it because Jenny played music in her room constantly and without explanation.

Tonight I stopped outside her door. I stopped because I heard the voice.

Jenny's voice was loud, direct, a little harsh, always pitched to carry. She talked like she was performing even when she wasn't, but the performance was confidence and volume and the occasional vulgarity dropped like a cherry on top.

The voice coming through the door was different. Softer. Breathier. There was a rise at the end of each sentence that turned statements into invitations and the whole thing had a purr underneath it that Jenny's real voice never had. The warmth was manufactured and the manufacturing was so smooth you could almost miss it if you didn't know what Jenny actually sounded like.

"Hi, babies." Muffled through the wood but clear enough to hear the smile in it. "How are we tonight? Missed you."

LiveCrush. The camshow. I knew what this was because I'd played the game and the webcam business was the spine of Jenny's entire route. In the game you discovered it by hacking her laptop or spying through the telescope. The password was BADMONSTER and the cam name was on Pink Channel and the whole thing was set up as a comedic voyeur sequence where the player character stumbled into it and got caught and the getting-caught became a business arrangement.

I wasn't stumbling into anything. I was standing outside her door listening to a woman I lived with perform for strangers on the internet and I already knew every detail of the operation because I'd clicked through every scene of it on a screen in a life that was gone.

I went to my room. Closed the door. The room was dark and quiet and the moon was coming through the window and the telescope was in the corner where it had been since I got here, dusty, pointed at the window at an angle that in the game was aimed at Tammy's house next door.

I looked at the telescope. Looked at my bed.

Then I went to the telescope and adjusted it.

Tammy's house was dark. The window the game wanted you to look through was closed, curtains drawn. I swung the telescope left. Slowly. Past the side of the house, past the yard, past the fence, and there was Jenny's window.

Her curtain was drawn. Almost. There was a gap on the left side where the fabric didn't quite reach the edge of the frame, maybe two inches of uncovered glass, and through that gap was a sliver of her room.

The ring light was the first thing. A circle of white LEDs on a stand, an influencer light, throwing flat even light across a specific area. The laptop was behind it, angled up, the camera pointed at the bed. And on the bed, in the center of the light, was Jenny.

Pink lingerie. Lace. A bralette that held her breasts up and together and a matching pair of panties that were more string than fabric and she was sitting cross-legged on the bedspread with her phone in one hand and her other hand resting on her knee. Her hair was down. She never wore it down around the house. Down and brushed and catching the ring light and she looked like a product being displayed for an audience that was paying for the privilege of looking.

The laptop screen was visible from this angle, barely. The chat window was scrolling. Messages moving fast, little colored rectangles of text crawling up the screen, and Jenny was reading them and smiling the cam smile, and she laughed at something someone typed and leaned forward and her breasts shifted in the bralette and the chat scrolled faster.

She uncrossed her legs. She recrossed them the other way and the lingerie shifted and her thigh caught the light and I watched for five seconds and then I took my eye away from the telescope and stood up straight.

My cock was half-hard in my jeans. My breathing had picked up. The room was dark and quiet and Jenny's muffled cam voice was coming through the wall between our rooms, the breathy purr, and I was standing next to a telescope pointed at her window and the smart thing to do was to keep watching and the smarter thing was to stop.

I sat on my bed. Lay back. The ceiling was white and blank and I stared at it.

In the game I would have watched the whole show. I would have watched it and jerked off to it and the game would have given me a cookie-jar replay and a comedic cutscene the next morning and the plot would have advanced and eventually the spying would have turned into participation and the participation would have turned into sex. That was the route. Spy, get caught, negotiate, escalate.

I was ten feet from a woman performing for strangers in pink lace and I'd looked for five seconds and stopped. The stopping was the move. Watching the whole show gave me what? A hard-on. Watching got me nothing I could use.

Being useful would get me everything.

Jenny had six thousand followers from photos I'd shot on her phone camera in natural window light with no equipment. Her cam setup was a ring light and a laptop camera. The production value was adequate. Jenny was ambitious and vain and hungry for money and if someone showed her that better production meant more money she would take the upgrade and the person who provided the upgrade would become indispensable.

I was already that person for the photos. The video was the next step. The lighting. The angles. The promotional content that drove traffic to the paid platform. The kid who held the phone becomes the one who runs the camera.

The cam voice was still coming through the wall. Soft and breathy and inviting. A woman performing warmth for money.

Tomorrow I'd pitch her. Better content, more subscribers, more money. She'd listen because it was about money. She'd agree because the math would be right. And I'd be in her room with a camera while she wore pink lace and the line between professional and personal would get thinner every session until it wasn't there anymore.

The voice through the wall went quiet. The music kept playing. Her bed creaked and then footsteps across the floor and her bathroom door closing and the shower turning on.

I stared at the ceiling. The house was quiet except for the shower running through the pipes in the wall. A car drove past outside, headlights sweeping across the ceiling and then gone.

I closed my eyes. Camera angles. Lighting setups. Subscriber counts.

The shower turned off. Her door closed. The music stopped.

I fell asleep thinking about money.