She stared at them, memorizing the angles her limbs were taking. Her facial expression balanced between defiant and receptive; the half-smile she had in a few of them. She remembered Nico was making that same facial expression as he looked at her from over the camera body.

Later, in the mirror as she was washing her face, she looked up from the basin and stared at her reflection in the bright bathroom light, and kept staring until the soap got in her eyes.

Performance

Performance

“Was he ugly?”

Lara straightened her back and looked at Tess across the small, round table. She seemed to be deciding what to say.

“No,” Lara said. “He was fine. I’m like, not into men like that, but y’know — it could be worse.”

“Sure,” Tess said.

“He’s got a beard, glasses. He looks like Professor Harrison.”

Tess looked down at the table into her half-full, tepid cappuccino, then back up at Lara. Around them in the midday coffee shop, people their age were looking into their laptops or hunched over binders full of papers.

“How much is he paying you?” Tess said.

“Six hundred,” Lara said. “Three times what I used to get from camming in a week. He said he’s lonely, he hates his job, can’t get laid, and doesn’t want to bother trying anymore, wants to stay inside with his books, so he’ll want to see me like, once, twice a month.”

“You have, like, pepper spray, right?” Tess said, lowering her voice.

“Yeah,” Lara said, not lowering hers at all. “And a knife. If he tries anything, he’s gonna lose an eye or something.”

“Okay, good,” Tess said.

“I’m not worried,” Lara said. “He’s as gentle as a lamb.”

Tess wrinkled her nose.

“Sure,” she said. “But, you know, I’m worried about you.”

“Don’t be,” Lara said. “I think this is gonna be fine. Less time-intensive than camming.”

Tess looked back down at her cappuccino, realizing she wasn’t going to finish it. In the two years they had known each other, it seemed to Tess that Lara had never once noticed the anxious, motherly attachment Tess had for her. In fact Lara had been aware of it from the start.

“What did you tell him your name is again?”

“Kitty,” Lara said. “He didn’t like that, so I told him it’s short for Katie.”

“Katie,” Tess said slowly.

“It’s, like, not my name, but I could see it,” Lara said.

Tess tilted her head to the side and narrowed her eyes slightly. “Sure,” she said.

♒