I put my hand on hers on the rail. Then she leaned into me, and I wrapped an arm around her, and we faced the salt spray and ruthless wind all the way home.

Ellis said it’d take a while to crack into the cloned drive. Time to kill.

I’d flaked out of work so much this week that one of my regulars sent a “breakup” email. The camworld is fickle, intense, and brutal. One day they love you; the next you’re a “cum-guzzling gutterslut” who doesn’t know the first thing about customer service and is “probably a dyke irl.”

Do you ever wonder if porn creates a sense of entitlement in a certain type of person?

I don’t wonder.

I had a tie in either hand, debating which color I should strangle myself with tonight—aubergine or pomegranate?—when my email pinged.

A thousand bucks.

Him.

“Hi, Blue.”

I flopped onto a cloud of goose-down pillows. For the first time ever, I was camming from my real bed. Beside me the dormer window looked over the ocean and the spinning pulsar of a lighthouse, the firefly flares of ship signals. I’d slid the window open and a breeze flicked in, cool and ozonic, that smell of sparks that presaged rain.

SoBlue: hi, you.

SoBlue: this is somewhere new.

SoBlue: where are you?

“My room. The part viewers don’t see.” I smiled cryptically. “You’re the first.”

SoBlue: i’m a lucky boy.

SoBlue: so this is where you sleep.

SoBlue: gazing up at the night sky.

“It’s like a planetarium.” I tilted the screen to give him a better view, careful to avoid the photos on the wall. I’d tested lines of sight. I knew the safe zones. “The sky is so clear here, the stars looked etched in. Have you ever seen scratchboard art? It’s cardstock that’s been coated with black India ink and engraved with a stylus, so the drawing is all sharp white lines, like a woodcut. That’s how it looks tonight. Etched.” I stared through my reflection, the gold buds of Christmas lights in the rafters. “Is it nighttime where you are?”

SoBlue: yes.

“So you’re in the Western hemisphere.”

SoBlue: uh oh.

SoBlue: she’s getting warmer.

SoBlue: soon there’ll be a knock at my door.

“I’ll show up prepared. Tie you up and torture you the way you’ve been torturing me.”

SoBlue: by being winningly sincere and unbearably charming?

“And a total cock tease.”

SoBlue: here’s the fault in your plan:

SoBlue: i would greatly enjoy being tortured by you.

“I bet you would.”

SoBlue: morgan.

SoBlue: hey.

SoBlue: you look sad tonight.

SoBlue: something’s upset you.

I stared at the vacant rectangle of his cam as if it were human, a shadowed face, an extreme close-up of a pupil. As if at any second it would come alive and the vague thumbnail in my head—a blur of fingers, eyes glazed with cyan light—would become detailed, whole. Picasso’s bull in reverse.

“Something I’ve been running from is beginning to catch up with me. And it might hurt somebody I care about.”

SoBlue: your best friend.

“Yeah.” I leaned back, sighing. “I just started scraping my life back together, and now it’s falling apart again.”

SoBlue: what kind of trouble are you in?

“Legal. Ethical. Moral.”

SoBlue: that’s a lot.

SoBlue: which one bothers you the most?

“Moral.”

SoBlue: that’s the one that really matters.

SoBlue: did you hurt someone, morgan?

The breeze whisked across my shoulders, and I shivered. “Yes.”

SoBlue: intentionally?

“Depends who you’re talking about. I hurt a lot of people. Him. And her. And me.”

SoBlue: him?

“A bystander. Someone in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

SoBlue: and “her” is your friend.

“Yeah. My friend.” I laughed, faintly. “You can call her Red.”

SoBlue: okay.

SoBlue: so you hurt the bystander, and red.

SoBlue: unintentionally.

SoBlue: because you were trying to hurt yourself.

I sat up, my spine ramrod straight. “I didn’t say that.”

SoBlue: morgan.

SoBlue: it’s okay.

“It’s not okay. That’s not what I said. You’re putting words in my mouth.” Go on the offense. “Why are you fishing for info?”

SoBlue: because i can’t stand seeing you sad, or afraid.

SoBlue: it tears at me inside.

SoBlue: i wish i could shoulder some of your burden.

SoBlue: let you rest for a while. breathe.

“I’m not some damsel in distress.”

SoBlue: and i’m no prince come to save you.

“Good,” I snapped back. “Because I’ve already got one of those.”

SoBlue: do you?

SoBlue: strange.

SoBlue: you’ve never mentioned a man in your life.

SoBlue: never mentioned anyone else.

SoBlue: only red.

“There is no one else,” I said impulsively. “It’s her.”

SoBlue: i thought so.

It felt oddly thrilling, to get it out. To him especially. I swept a hand through my hair, my tension draining.

SoBlue: tell me about her.

SoBlue: what is she like?

“Worried about your competition?”

SoBlue: didn’t realize it was a contest.

SoBlue: i just want to know you.

SoBlue: and she’s an important part of you.

I pressed a knuckle to my mouth, mulling. From the water came the eerie, mournful call of a loon, rising and bending into a haunting shriek at the stars. The call they made when searching for their mate.

“Be right back,” I said.

I left the bed and pawed through a box beside my desk. When I returned I started to say something, then simply flipped open the sketchbook.

This was the last one from before the accident. Figure studies, but of only one figure. One pair of hands repeating again and again and consuming the book, an obsession, hazy sketches coalescing around them: a thin body draped in a bedsheet, the avian vertebrae, the slender crane neck. That rake of hair catching and burning the light in a thousand angel-fine fuses.

I flipped the pages slowly. When I reached the end and the furious scribbles tearing the paper, I looked into the lens and said, “This is what I did, Blue. This is how I hurt myself. I lost this.”

SoBlue: the art, or the girl?

“Both.” I lowered the book. My style was on the masculine side—bold lines digging into the paper, aggressive, unhesitating—and when I drew Ellis, it brought out her androgyny. “How do you know that’s a girl?”

SoBlue: from context.

SoBlue: she must be red.

SoBlue: your obsession.

SoBlue: the way you’re mine.

“I’m not—”

Footsteps thudded up the stairs, then a cursory knock followed by my door banging open.

“I just cracked Ryan’s password,” Elle said, bounding in. “You told me to get you as soon as—”

She cut off when I leaped from the bed and lunged at her.

“Oh my god. I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were doing a—”

I grabbed her and cupped a hand over her mouth. Shook my head and pointed at the laptop. Her cheeks bloomed carnation pink.

Sorry! she mouthed when I released her.

I mimed walking downstairs. Five minutes.

Elle nodded, chagrined, and crept out of the room. I shut the door behind her and locked it, let out a sigh like I’d been punched.

There were messages waiting when I returned to the laptop.

SoBlue: where did you go?

SoBlue: is everything okay?

For a moment I stood there, my heart throbbing in my fingertips. A frisson of realization glided up my spine.

I sat down and typed.

Morgan: sorry

Morgan: I’m fine

Morgan: you know what?

Morgan: you just answered a question I didn’t even know I was asking

SoBlue: what question?

So easy to talk to. So comfortable, familiar. I felt like I’d known him years, not weeks. In the back of my mind I’d wondered if—sometimes almost hoped that—Blue was Elle.

Strange, how it came as both relief and disappointment.