POINT AND CLICK

L. C. Spoering

Nights are long. I enjoy them, and always feel the rush to remind people of that: I like my life, my work. But they are long, and work is work.

I dress carefully every evening: stockings, push-up bra and hair in a bun. I’ve been doing this for years, and the practice has paid off: I know what they like, and what words to say, motions to make. It’s a bit like a play, I think, rehearsed and staged, and when I told a passing stranger I was a performer, I didn’t think I was lying. I still don’t.

I apply makeup. I don’t wear much when I’m out during the day—mascara, maybe, blush and lip gloss—but at night, I get out the eyeliner and palette of eye shadows, the brushes that feel like silk whispers over my skin, the tube of red lipstick that goes on almost obscenely, hanging thick and lush, constantly reminding me of its presence.

My office is three feet from my bed, and I draw a curtain between them, section off one life from another. No one seems to notice the confines of my workspace, the sparse, stark color that surrounds me. I am bright red and pale white and shining brown, clad in black or gray, shedding myself, piece by piece. I learned to talk against the mic of the headset like it’s a natural extension long ago; I don’t even think about it. What was once an alien creature on my head is part of my costume: my antenna, bug woman, fantasy creature with appropriate accessories, dividing me from the norm. I am set aside, and it shows.

I’ve been a cam girl, of sorts, since my second semester of college. It was one of those things: you’re young, and you’re broke, and no one wants to train another waitress who will be gone by the next year, hire on a kid who’s never worked a cash register. I had a computer; I had a webcam. The initial investment was an online handle. I had nothing to lose.

Four years later, I can still remember the adrenaline, the fear that coursed through my veins with the first call, the first time I unbuttoned the unremarkable blouse I was wearing for the eager face that shone out from the cam somewhere else in the country. I used what I had, then, clothes I’d collected from thrift stores in high school: knee-high boots and filmy blouses, pencil skirts I hemmed with duct tape and ingenuity. I bought bras on sale, a size too small, so my cleavage swelled up under my chin. The other me was born.

At eight, I open up the store: a few simple clicks, a swipe of my mouse. I leave my laptop on my dresser, next to the overflowing box of costume jewelry, and figurines of horses left over from a ridiculous childhood collection. I never make my bed, but the curtain hides it. This version of me lives on a different plane, in a different atmosphere. She breathes in against the mic and smiles at her next customer.

They’re shy, some of them. The handles usually betray them, with macho names and icons attached. Their faces onscreen are drawn, and a little terrified, and I think of the women on phones that came before me when I meet them, leaning in close to the camera.

“Don’t worry,” I say, my perfectly plucked eyebrows high, a sweet smile made of my slicked-up lips. “It’s just you and me.”

I take off my top for the first, and talk him through his jerking off of the cock I don’t quite see by the angling of his camera. What surprised me, first, about working in front of the cam was how rarely I really ever fucked myself. I’m enough, being there, just there, and the power trip is in only needing to show up to the game.

Some of them are nonchalant, smug, as if I’m the one who clicked through to the chat. I bite my lip and play along. I’m shy for them, hesitant, drawing back layers to pinch at my nipples through my bra, shifting in my seat as though I can’t quite resist their charms. Sometimes it’s true. It’s those clients that confuse me the most.

There was one, back in the beginning, a ten-minute chat where he seemed to be clicking something just off to the right side of my face. I was offended, but felt a neediness rise in me I’d never felt before. My desire was to be the one and only thing he wanted, to please him, to draw all of his attention and a smile that could only be mine, that spent, satisfied gaze of someone who has gotten everything he’s ever asked for. He got off, in the end, but the result was unsatisfying, with my screen going black; I signed off for the night early, and lay in bed with my vibrator between my legs, trying to recreate the sensation and never quite getting there.

I get off for the third guy, a dildo pressed into my cunt and fingers in my mouth. I’ve learned how to keep my eyes on his, on the screen, and so he hums his orgasm with me, stuttering his thanks before he logs off. I wipe my hands on a towel I keep under the desk, and redress, regroup.

I pause when I view my queue. My fingers twitch on the mouse, and I find myself looking back and forth across my little space, like I’m fully expecting someone to hop out of the shadows to tell me I’m being punk’d.

I open the chat, and her face pops up on the screen. I can feel my breaths suddenly becoming shallow, as though they’re trying, without me, to make my cleavage heave. “You’re back,” I say, and the fluttery excitement in my voice isn’t feigned.

“Miss me?” she replies, and I can see her cross her long legs, leaning back in her chair.

I don’t know why she visits. She’s beautiful, and the sliver of her apartment I can see behind her is too well appointed, lavishly decorated. Honestly, she looks too good to be clicking on video chats late on a Friday night. I shouldn’t judge—I try not to—but there it is. I expect a certain kind of person to appear on my screen, especially on weekends, and she is not that. She never has been.

I first met her two years ago. Two years in, I was past my clumsiness on the cam, more easily adaptable to situations and surprises. Still, she surprised me: I don’t get many women, and, really, she is possibly the most attractive I’ve ever seen. There’s something familiar about her face, and it clicked, one day, that she could be the identical twin to an actress I like, from movies where the girl rides off into the sunset after deeming herself over the guy.

Her handle is innocuous—sbh1199—and, of course, I don’t know her name. They tell me sometimes, but she never has. One night, she told me to call her Mistress and I, in a daze I can never replicate with anyone else, did so without hesitation.

“I want you to take your shirt off.” Her words snap me back to reality, and I nod, almost too eager, my head loose on my neck and tipping back and forth madly like a bobble head stuck to a dashboard of a car traveling a rough road. I realize I look silly, and feel a blush inch up my neck to my cheeks. My fingers almost fumble on the buttons on my blouse.

“Have you come tonight?” Her tone is conversational, but I still pause, for just a second. No one else asks me about the others: it’s not a rule, but it’s unspoken, this notion that I’m a stranger who services people this way. She doesn’t sound annoyed, or like she’s baiting, and, after a moment, I nod, pulling my eyes up to her face there on the screen, biting at the tip of my tongue.

“How many times?” she presses, and she shakes the bracelets decorating her arm down to her wrist, then props her hands on her knee. She is gorgeous, and composed like a photograph.

“Just once,” I say, more relieved than I probably should be.

She pauses for a moment, and turns her bracelets with the knob of her knee, covered in the fine, thin fabric of her tights, black and mottled through the grain of the camera’s eye.

“How long have you been on tonight?” she asks, and I have a momentary flash to a table in a café, two cups of coffee between us. I know, without a doubt, should she ask me out on a date, I wouldn’t hesitate but, as it is, I’ve never checked where she is. Safety dictates these things, and a form of legality, but I know I would blurt my home address if she so much as asked.

“Just an hour and a half,” I say, letting my gaze stray to the clock in the corner of the screen, just for a second. But, in that second, she is standing, and all I can see is the sweep of her skirt and her narrow waistline. I catch my breath.

“Sit tight, little one,” comes her disembodied voice, as if she were standing above me, and I do, fingers knotted in my lap and shoulders tense.

She arrives back in front of the camera a couple of minutes later. There is a cost for this absence, but the spread of her house, open to my eyes while she is away from the computer, shows it’s expansive, with large windows. She has money. She has that face, and that voice, and that body. Why does she need me?

Settling herself in the chair, she holds up her hand; I squint and lean into the screen, the dim light of her picture making it difficult for me to discern what is wrapped up by her fingers, held up next to her smirk.

She lets me examine, and I swallow when I figure it out, making my headset bob with the motion of my jaw.

“I thought you might like it,” she coos, stroking the shaft of the dildo with a manicured hand. “I thought of you when I saw it.”

My heart skips a beat, two. Could I have a heart attack right here? Is that possible?

“Me?” I sound mousy to my own ears, and I bite viciously at the inside of my lip in punishment.

“Of course, kitten,” she says, and the way she speaks that word sounds like a purr, like she might drag her tongue along the length of my spine and along my neck to flick behind my ear. My skin burns just from the thought.

“I think of you often,” she goes on, and crosses her legs, one knee over the other, so that I can see her gently prying her shoe from her foot to place it on the floor. She switches legs, does it again, and then she slides her skirt up her thighs to unclip her garters, beginning the long roll of her stockings, one at a time, down the length of her legs and off the toes of her feet.

“Do you think about me?” she asks, and I have become so hypnotized by her motions, her undressing, that I jump with the question, startled out of my own reverie.

She looks amused, but she waits, her stockings arranged in one hand, the dildo placed obscenely over her lap.

“All the time,” I blurt, finally, my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth. I’m dizzy, and wonder if she can see it, if my eyes are glassy, if I’m wavering in my seat as much as I feel I might be.

“Good.” Her stockings are set aside and now I can see her legs, long and smooth—her knees are bony, and seem a little more swollen than the rest of her legs, but the flaw only adds something to her appearance, making me feel like I’m going to swoon, the heroine of a Victorian novel.

She stands, the dildo resting at attention on the arm of the chair. Her hands go behind her back and I suck in an audible breath; I even hear her chuckle over the headset. “Good things come to those who wait, kitten.” It’s the second time she’s called me that, and I feel something buzz in my chest, a hive of bees woken up in the most unlikely of places.

Her skirt dislodges from her hips and she wiggles out of it, lifting one leg and then the other, a little unsteadily, to take it off. She is not wearing panties. I think I might faint.

“I’d like to see you on your knees, kitten,” she announces, face back in frame. I stare at her, and then quickly look side to side at my small office corner; the sheet I use to separate it from my bedroom nearly brushes the back of my chair when I push it back. I have no real room to maneuver.

She waits, though, waits with her blouse nearly open to her black-lace bra and the dildo in her hands. She has a fluff of pubic hair on the slight curve of her mons—black as the hair on her head. I focus on that as I reach behind me to push the curtain along the wire, the rings clicking against each other as they move.

My room behind me can’t really be seen, as the lights are off, but I’m acutely aware of how physically I just opened the divide. My mouth feels dry as sand as I push the chair back to find my way to the floor.

“Adjust the camera,” she reminds me, and I reach up, angle it down. She nods when she’s satisfied, and I find myself already panting, shoulders trembling a little, the nub of the carpet digging into my knees.

“Hands on your desk,” she says next, and I lift them there, shoving the mouse and keyboard out of the way so I can lay each palm flat on the surface. My nails are painted, another detail I’ve become meticulous about, and, for a moment, that’s what fills my vision: my cold hands, the purple-painted nails.

“Good girl,” she says, almost offhandedly, but I gasp, and then blush at my own reaction, clenching my cunt tight under my skirt.

She smiles and settles back in her chair. I can see her nipples through her bra, now that her blouse has parted and settled under her arms; I can see the rolls her belly forms as she finds a more comfortable position, her legs parted. Even with the grain of the camera, I can see her cunt, wet and swollen. I can’t help myself: I lick my lips.

“You like that, don’t you?” she hums, and I nod without thinking, already leaning forward in anticipation of her pushing the dildo inside her, all but drumming my fingers on the desk in impatience.

She notices my stance, and stops short. Her legs remain parted, but she stares me down, though it takes me a minute to realize what she’s doing and meet her eyes through the computer screen.

“Do you want to watch me, kitten?” she asks, and there is an edge to her voice that was not there before, bringing me up short.

I give a hesitant nod, then nod a bit more firmly. I can hear my heart drumming in my ears so loudly, I almost wonder if she can hear it too.

“You have to learn to be patient,” she informs me. The dildo rests against her thigh almost obscenely, and I can practically feel the weight of it against my own thigh, making me squirm in my place.

“I’m sorry,” I push out, turning the edges of my lips up in an apologetic smile. “I just…really want to see.”

Her face softens, and I let out the breath I didn’t know I was holding.

“I know you do, kitten. That’s why you’re going to have to do as I say.”

I nod, again, hard enough to nearly choke myself with the tuck of my chin, over and over.

“You keep your hands where they are. Like I’ve tied them down,” she says. I flex my fingers in place, imagine the ropes she might wind around my wrists, anchoring them to the desk, wrapped around the legs of the furniture, a knot where I can’t see it.

“You stay on your knees, kitten,” she goes on, and I’m suddenly aware of them, the bend of the joint and the way the bone presses into the carpet, carpet that seems so soft when padding barefoot across it, but is now much firmer, seemingly rocky under my weight.

“I want you to watch me.” Her legs are parted wide, but my eyes go to her face, half-shrouded in the darkness that has fallen over her room. It’s night where she is too, and the lamps are offset enough that only the barest pools of light lap at her toes and the tips of her hair.

“I want to watch you,” I say, and it’s like an admission, a confession, my hands pressed to the hard surface of my desk, my wrists burning with the imagined scrape of rope against tender skin.

“I know you do. You have for a long time, haven’t you?” The dildo is in her hand again, and she lets it rub along the length of her labia, the skin catching against the rubber and tugging along—her cunt moves like a mouth, like lips twitching into a smile just before they are kissed. My tongue feels like liquid against my teeth.

We’ve gotten off together before; I know her face when she comes. But this is different, and I find myself searching her expression for each twitch of muscle and brush of her hair over her forehead. Her fingers are long and graceful; they guide the rubber cock to her slit, pushing just enough that the labia parts and the head inches inside.

“I’ve wanted you to watch me,” she says, as though the thread of conversation is still strung between us, thin and wavering like it’s running full with electricity. She lets out a small moan as the dildo moves farther inside her, and I squirm again, finding my cunt against my calf and pressing down to chase some form of release.

“Keep your hands there, kitten,” she says, arching an eyebrow though her mouth is slightly agape and she is panting just a little.

“Y-yes,” I agree, nodding again, my pinky cramping all of a sudden, as though it knows it’s not supposed to move yet needing that movement for no reason at all but to distract me.

“Yes what?” she presses, and I swallow, almost gulp, my heart ringing in my ears once more.

“Yes, Mistress.” The word sounds funny on my tongue, and I shake my head a little, embarrassed.

“That’s a good girl,” she says, then moans again.

The embarrassment dissipates almost immediately, evaporates like alcohol met by heat. I find myself leaning in, getting close enough to the screen that the image blurs slightly, taking her with it.

“Do you know why I call you?” she asks. I’m amazed at her ability to talk: she’s pumping the dildo with a slow but steady rhythm, and she’s wet enough that it must almost be squirming in her hand, alive.

“No,” I reply honestly; I’ve never understood it. There are a few clients like her, who seem to me to be interesting, attractive people who could likely find any girl to strip and fuck in front of them. This woman, though, shocks me even more.

“I like you,” she says, but with a slight lingering over the last word, so that I know she is going to keep talking. “You’re quite different, you know.”

I watch her hand clutching the dildo; she has pushed it fully inside of her, and is drawing it out at a leisurely pace. It is slick with her juices.

“I am?” I ask finally, biting at my lip, though I do remember she told me not to—it’s a habit, a nervous one. My heart is beating so hard, I’m sure my skin is quivering over it on my chest, at my pulse points, making me vibrate on the cam.

“Look at yourself. Tell me you aren’t.” She is fucking herself harder now, just a little, and a little grunt emits from her nose with each deep plunge of the dildo. I am wet under my skirt, my own cunt throbbing with need.

I know instinctively not to disagree, but, moreover, I realize she is right: if she is paying attention to me, there is something special. Not only that, it’s indicative of something larger than her, larger than me.

I moan, leaning closer to the desk, my fingers pressing hard but my wrists still where she assigned them, my imaginary bonds keeping me in place. I wish they were actually there, wish the harsh rub of the fibers was what kept me in place outside this sudden burst of heavy, needy obedience.

Her moan catches the end of mine, as if we share a brain, body, voice. My eyes pop open with the desire to see all of her, to not miss a second. The dildo is now slick, her cunt full and purple, and I can see her knees trembling ever so slightly. I want to fuck myself, but the only relief I have is baring down, rather futilely, on the side my calf, where only the slight pressure gives me any sensation at all. I can feel my own cunt pulsing, grasping at the nothing in the air, and whine just as she all but explodes, her ass rising up off the chair with her orgasm, her hand still working the dildo hard and deep inside her.

Her cunt shines, and I lick my lips, imagining the taste of her on my tongue. Her face contorts with the sensations, and then irons out, sweet, like she might fall asleep right there with her body exposed to me and the camera, as if she is perfectly safe before me. She is—of course she is.

“You’d clean me up, if you were here,” she says after the silence, punctuated only by both our rapid breaths, has gone on long enough.

“Y-yes, Mistress.” I still fumble over the word, even as it feels more natural on my tongue. I want to whisper it in her ear, I want to sit at her feet and purr like a kitten with her fingers in my hair. I don’t notice the hard floor under my knees anymore; I am absorbed in the electricity that is flowing through me, the dampness of the skirt between my legs, and her gaze upon me.

“I like you there,” she goes on, setting the wet dildo aside. “I like you watching; I like that you want it but can’t have it. Do you like it too?”

I nod before I’ve even formed the thought in my mind, but know she is right. She is plucking the knowledge right from my brain, with only the way her eyes stare through the camera and into me.

“I’ll call again, kitten,” she says. “Next time, I want you to start on your knees.”

I open my mouth, but the screen goes black. Now the only sound is my heart slamming in my ears, my breath coming in gasps out of my slack-jawed mouth.

Unsteadily, I get to my feet, shut down the program. Some nights, I work well into the morning. Tonight, it is not even midnight. I stand before the computer, in the confines of my little space, and rub my wrists, which feel bruised. I stare at them, wishing the purple to the skin, yet only able to imagine the coarse sensation of rope rubbing a path, endless circles, keeping me in place.