Eleven

EVERETT

On Monday, we spent an hour together and she only told me to leave once.

On Tuesday, she texted me and asked if I wanted coffee. Two hours.

On Wednesday, we sat on her couch and read. Four hours. A record.

But even when we weren’t together, the Halcyon’s thin walls let me feel close to her. The plinking water droplets in her shower. The idle hum of her music. The toaster springing when she made breakfast. I savored every moment.

Now, for the first time, I finally understand how Lander could live next door to Valeria for an entire year, practically gnawing at the metal bars of his enclosure to be with her, and still do nothing about it.

The banality of listening to someone live her life is satisfying.

But it’s Thursday, and tonight will be anything but banal.

Username: FuckingMyOwnFace

Password: Cor@i$Be@utiful

Once I log in, it doesn’t take me long to find her. Right now, she’s featured as one of the most popular cam models on the site, partially due to infamy from getting shot, but also because she’s well-known. She has devotees. Whales .

Then I click her profile and realize her user picture is from my apology shoot, and my heart starts racing. This is all becoming incredibly real. Watching her stream for the first time is seven months in the making, and there’s a reason I’ve avoided this for so long:

I know I might hate this.

And if I do hate it—the other men, their money, their demands—I’ll be absolutely fucked because I’ll still want her, but I’ll know exactly what goes down during a stream.

My apprehension is unprecedented. Unnerving. Still, I inhale and get ready to meet Lilith Lace. Shit .

Enter stream .

And there she is. Her.

…I know her.

The person filling my laptop’s screen is the same Cora I’ve always wanted.

She’s on her bed in a short black robe. Her legs are crossed, tucked under her and clad in thigh-high fishnet stockings. The muted bluish light from her laptop reflects against her silver piercings, and she’s typing. Waiting. Her lipstick is black, her eyeliner is heavy, and she looks absolutely unfuckwithable—and so pretty.

“Mostly returning faces, but we have some new viewers tonight,” she mentions, speaking for the first time.

Right now, the room’s public chat is flickering nonstop with messages, and I have no idea how she can keep up with it. It’s already filled with urgent orders—some polite, some incoherent, some downright vulgar.

My stomach tightens immediately.

TechLayoffSeverence: I want to see those tits GregP4455: Pussy now WillWork4Dome: Show me youre asshole

“ Youre ?” For fuck’s sake. If you’re going to objectify someone, at least make it grammatically correct.

The chat keeps populating and Cora keeps typing. I read message after message, dozens—maybe hundreds of them—asking her to perform for them, asking her to satisfy them. They’re vulgar. They’re relentless. I hate it . I knew it. I absolutely hate this shit, and I want to tell them to—

“If you all don’t shut the fuck up and pay, nobody is seeing any tits,” Cora says aloud.

The chat comes to a standstill. Cora stares directly at the camera, sighing.

And then this little smile unfolds on her face and spreads until she’s full-on grinning. “There we go,” she murmurs before sliding the robe off her shoulders and revealing her bare breasts.

And Cora’s breasts are the most breathtaking I’ve ever seen, bar none. They look pillowy soft, round, and large enough that my face would fit snugly between them. Her areolas are dark brown and small, but the tips are perky—partially thanks to her piercings and partially thanks to some divine tit god who decided Cora was their favorite person ever.

But the thing about Cora is she knows exactly how to use her breasts. There’s a balance of hide and seek when she toys with them, an element of a tease that’s surely the product of years of practice.

Immediately after she takes them out, she presses her fingertips over her nipples, covering them— barely . Somehow, that brief glimpse makes my pulse kick up even harder than the last time I saw her naked body.

Cora tilts her head to the side, letting her black hair fall over her shoulder. Her expression isn’t quite coy, but it isn’t quite cocky either. It’s in-between, mystifying, until she slides a hand down her front. She skims her abdomen, grazing the piercing in her belly button, before she makes contact with her pussy.

And I realize: The look on her face is amusement. She loves this shit.

She parts her legs.

If its job were to actually cover her pussy, her sheer black thong should have been fired on the spot. Luckily for all of us, its real job is to accentuate the plushness of her smooth lips and her many piercings. In my humble opinion, her thong deserves a hefty annual bonus and a promotion.

That silver. Those goddamn holes.

RicherThanISeem: Show us the cunt BlowJobNahBlowCareer: Play with it for daddy GregP4455: Id make it so good for u

My lip curls reflexively while reading the comments, and I wonder if any of them register with Cora. She’s brilliant—well-read and articulate and easily the quickest person I’ve ever spoken to. Her eyes have feasted on thousands of dense, esoteric works of literature that I barely comprehended. These comments are pathetic. They’re incoherent at best, trite at worst, with about as much depth as a tide pool.

The least these ball sacks could do is string a compelling sentence together.

Cora rises to her knees and slips off the robe dangling from her slender arms. It pools around her legs in a pile of black silk, revealing a black cloth band over her arm bandage. The result is kind of spectacular. This woman took a bullet a few days ago, and she hasn’t missed a step.

“Will you bear with me?” she asks, glancing at her arm before winking. “Let’s see how I do with one hand.”

Once her panties are off (and I silently thank them for their service), she procures a toy from off camera. “You know you’re not getting what you want unless you tip more,” she murmurs, wiggling the rabbit vibrator in the air.

Her encouragement must have done the trick tips-wise. Within seconds, Cora starts dragging the black silicone against her inner thigh.

Inhaling, I take in the slopes of her naked body, watching as the woman whose thumb was in my mouth a mere three days ago lays on her side, spreads her legs, and begins working herself with a vibrator in front of hundreds of viewers.

MissedMeNowFistMe: So hot GregP4455: I want u so much bb RobbyHobby: Are you gonna come for us

… Holy fuck .

If someone had asked me yesterday if every person’s body is alive underneath its skin, I would have said yes, obviously. From a purely literal standpoint, we are all alive and our bodies are moving, functioning things carrying out innumerable biological processes like machines. Our parts fit together, work together, and the sum is each of us.

Watching Cora, I no longer believe that.

All bodies are alive underneath our skin, but Cora’s body isn’t a machine—it’s a masterpiece. Her movements are lyrical, straddling the line between intentionality and incidental grace. When her hips rise, the indents of her flexing muscles are prosaic. Her body takes up a cadence of shifts and turns and the cadence is smooth, peppered with the faint interjections of her parted lips, her heaving breaths, and her arched spine.

When she faces the laptop, her hair cascades onto the mattress like spilled ink. Her groans punctuate moans and gasps, and it’s a full sensory experience now—one that evokes some of the best memories I have of sex. Twisting, thrusting, panting—every move reminds me of my most frenzied encounters, the ones I thought had imprinted in me indelibly. And yet I know she’d erase all those memories if she touched me. She could make me hers. Easily.

Maybe she already has.

And the remarkable thing is how genuine this performance is. This is how Cora carries herself when she’s loopy on codeine, when she’s laughing with our friends, when she’s ranting about something that pisses her off (usually me). This person I’m watching—Lilith Lace—is a person I know.

This is Cora Flores.

And I wonder what it’s like to touch a body like this—one brimming with life. I wonder what it would be like for her body to be mine, in a sense. To be the man who touches her. To be the one she performs for.

GregP4455: It’s so hot GregP4455: When r u gonna come GregP4455: Will you come now hurry

…No. Absolutely fucking not, GregP4455.

There’s no way I’m going to let Cora see this embarrassing shit when she comes.

FuckingMyOwnFace: Look at all your gorgeous little holes lined up like that, tight and ready for me to put something in them.

Send.

Wait. Shit. Somehow—probably because my erect dick has deprived my brain of blood—I forgot what public means. Everyone can see my message. Everyone .

Onscreen, Cora falters, losing her rhythm. Her eyes widen.

I shouldn’t have done that. I need to delete it. I need to figure out how to—

But then Cora smiles. Her lips remain parted, and a flicker of a frown knots her expression at first, but it melts quickly into the line of her raised brow.

Thanks to our encounter in her kitchen on Monday, I know that look.

More.

FuckingMyOwnFace: Touch your needy pussy with that toy, princess, but know it’s going to be me one day.

Cora blinks before shaking her head, as if she’s forcing herself to focus. Exhaling, she changes the angle of the vibrator and presses it against her clit, rubbing little circles around the bud and her hood piercing.

The words come easily now.

FuckingMyOwnFace: Practice like a good girl. Prep for me. Because you know whatever that toy does for you, I’ll do it better.

She puts the thick end of the vibrator into her pussy, letting the small appendage press against her clit. Her good arm is working the toy in a blur, moving so fast that I can hear the crude, wet sound of her stuffing herself. She arches. She gasps. And all I can think about as her spine curves off the mattress, is what a damn shame it is to see her pierced tits unattended.

She needs a hand on them. A mouth on them. A tongue circling those barbells to make her nipples feel amazing—the way she intended when she pierced them.

FuckingMyOwnFace: You’re perfect. Such a perfect little slut. You make me so proud.

Her climax bursts through. The moan she releases is throaty but melodic, tinged with a crackle of vocal fry. “Yes,” she grits out, eyes shut tight and her head back as much as her mattress allows. “Oh fuck, I love how good you make me feel. Such a good boy.”

A good boy.

A good boy.

Was I the good boy who made her come? I could be. I want to be.

A good boy. The very best.

FuckingMyOwnFace: I’m going to think about this night forever—especially when I fill those needy, slutty holes with my cum.

When I hit send for a fifth and final time, it’s like a shot of adrenaline and a taste of freedom. For the first time, I’ve said whatever I want to Cora without consequences.

And that freedom? It’s heady. The thought of doing this regularly—of worshipping Cora in front of anyone—is steadily becoming my white whale.

Onscreen, Cora tosses the vibrator to the side and props herself up on her elbow to wind things down.

My heart is galloping on the wide, open plains, trampling the tallgrass. And because I’m going to be her best customer, I send one more message:

FuckingMyOwnFace: Also, Tyler Shepherd, if you’re watching this right now: Log the fuck off.

Minutes later, when Cora ends the stream, I go straight to her condo and ring the bell. The door swings open, and she’s standing there, cheeks flushed pink and her hair damp at the temples. Even under the dim hallway lights, I can see her pupils dilated in the meadow of her brown irises. They’re locked on me. Her lips part and shut almost immediately before she inhales through her nose.

It takes me a beat to realize how heavily I’m breathing. She’s breathing audibly too, maybe from coming barely ten minutes ago, but certainly not for the same reason I am.

For me, everything is different now.

Cora’s expression doesn’t budge. Her eyes flicker over me until her brow lifts fractionally, barely.

“You’re,” I begin, shaking my head. “You’re—”

“I’m a camgirl,” she answers, enunciating the hard consonants in the words while shrugging. “This is how it goes.”

The acidity in her tone doesn’t compute at first. Then I realize: She’s waiting for me to tell her I hated it. Even after everything I wrote in the chat, even after I damn-near sprinted over here, Cora still doesn’t believe I could ever handle her career.

I don’t blame her. I waited a long time to tell her I was comfortable with sex work, so if she needs to hear it, I’ll say it. I’ll say it a hundred times.

“I’ve never been so impressed with anyone,” I tell her.

Finally, her composure breaks. She lets out a snicker and shakes her head. “You liked watching me degrade myself for hundreds of men? You were impressed with how shamelessly I’ll whore myself out for their money? Please, Everett. You promised me you wouldn’t lie.”

She said “whore .” I don’t react at first.

When I kissed Cora in the elevator, lust practically shoved the words out of my mouth: No wonder they pay you for it. You’re worth every penny, aren’t you?

I had regretted them in the moment—figured I’d gone too far—until she kissed me even harder.

And then I realized: This kind of desire made sense. The shit we say to each other is straight up vitriolic sometimes, but we say it because we both like the causticity. Of course there would be space for filthy words between us.

I tried again tonight, tentative but clear: Such a perfect little slut. Needy, slutty holes.

She came when she saw it.

In the elevator, Cora told me that our desires are a manifestation of how we perceive ourselves. Desire feeds us what we need.

…I think my princess needs to be degraded. Badly.

Being Cora, she takes my silence as distaste. “You don’t like that word, Everett? Because let me be clear: If you ever get the honor, you better be prepared to fuck me like I’m your whore.”

I take in her resolute stare. I’ve never called a woman a whore before, but if she needs it, I’ll give it to her. I’ll give her everything.

Frankly, I can’t imagine a guy out there who could degrade Cora Flores better than I could.

I lean in, putting our noses close. “I’ll fuck you however you want. You want to be my whore? I’ll make you my whore.”

A gentle smirk arises on her lips, but her raised eyebrow is a challenge.

Fine. I’ll prove it.

Keeping my eyes locked on hers, I take out my wallet. I count out three one-hundred-dollar bills and hold them out to her. “This is how it works, right? When you do a good job, you get a tip? Well, you did a very good job.”

The corner of her lip rises higher, and Cora takes the cash, folding the stack of bills in half and flattening a crease with her pinched fingers. Then she splits the bottom of her robe open, revealing the tiny black panties she wore earlier. They’re wet.

Slowly, she places the money under the band of her thong, dragging the bills against her skin before she tucks them in place.

The money looks unreal against her skin. God, I need a fucking taste.

I step forward, hand out—

She drops the silk fabric and winks. “Thanks for the tip, congressman,” she murmurs before she retreats and closes the door, leaving me standing in the hallway alone with my arm outstretched.

Disappointing, but it’s probably for the best. After all, I now have years of streams to catch up on.