My grandparents delivered the news to me after the policemen left, sitting me down in their formal living room, their voices shaking and eyes weeping. I had no reaction; I said nothing when they told me. My grandfather repeated the news, looking into my eyes to be sure I understood. I sat there in silence for a full minute, then a wail bubbled up in me, and once I started sobbing, I couldn’t get myself to stop.
I stayed at my grandparents until I graduated from high school, before I moved out. That was when I enrolled in community college, using the small amount that remained from my parents’ life insurance. There wasn’t much left after paying for four burials.
CHAPTER 16: RalphMA35
AGEPLAY: A form of roleplaying in which an individual acts or treats another as if they were a different age. Ageplay is between adults and involves consent from all parties. Typically, ageplay involves someone pretending to be younger than they actually are.4 Pedophilia is not the same as ageplay, but ageplay can be an indicator of pedophilic tendencies.5
10:49 p.m. I smile brightly at the webcam on my pink bed because he hasn’t yet asked me to move. He did ask me to take off my shorts, which I tossed onto the floor.
RalphMA35: do u have something else 2 wear?
I smile. “Sure. What kind of thing do you like?”
RalphMA35: maybe a tshirt. something pink, with ruffles
A pink, ruffled t-shirt isn’t in my closet. Doesn’t sound like anything that even exists. But I know what he wants. He wants a young look. I smile brightly at him and bounce off the bed, move to the white dresser, and pull open the top drawer.
I take a faded pink t-shirt out, one that is thin enough to show my ni**les, and that has a blushing Minnie Mouse on the front of it. I pull it on, exchanging the silk thongs I am wearing for a pair of white cotton panties.
It is not a frequent occurrence, but I occasionally get ageplay clients whose kink borders on pedophilia. It is an issue for me, one that I often lie in bed thinking about. Dr. Brian says that it’s not always that they want a young girl, but rather oftentimes are looking for innocence. They want the initial experience—to be a girl’s first. She doesn’t have to be under eighteen, or under fourteen, or nine—she just has to be untouched. He urges me not to judge a client just because they want me to act innocent: to giggle, and gasp, and tell them that I have never seen a penis.
I agree with him on part of this. Some of the clients, especially the ones who are under-endowed, seem to just want me to be inexperienced—to be ‘wowed’ by everything they say. Some want me to be hesitant, unsure, to give them resistance at first. But differentiating between the different motivations is a tricky minefield and one that I hate entering.
I crawl up on the bed and sit, cross-legged, smiling at the black camera eye. “Is this okay? I don’t have one with ruffles.” I pull my hair into a low ponytail and chew on my bottom lip.
RalphMA35: looks great bb. can we roleplay?
I lean back, resting my weight on my hands, stretching my t-shirt tight against my chest. “Sure Ralph. But I don’t have a lot of experience, so please be patient with me.” I tilt my head to the side.
RalphMA35: okay bb. whats ur name
“What do you want it to be?”
RalphMA35: annie
CHAPTER 17: Jeremy Bryant
Jeremy Bryant knocked on the door, held up the box, and waited for the cursory response. It always took a minute to come, a minute in which his palms sweated, and he wondered. He wondered if this was the day that the knob would turn and he would be face to face with her. Today wasn’t that day.
“Leave it. Thank you.”
Always polite. Always brief. Always that beautiful, lilting voice that seemed to hold so much distance in it. He signed the electronic pad, waved to the silent peephole, and walked the long hall to the elevator.
Once he had waited—out of sight of the peephole—hoping to see her open the door and step outside. He had waited for five minutes, but finally left. He was going to try something different today.
He pressed the elevator button, stepped inside, pressed the “1” button, then quickly stepped off and allowed the doors to close. He flattened against the walls, hidden from view, and waited, his eyes glued to the box in front of the door to apartment 6E.
The minute the elevator car left, making its empty descent, there was the click of a door opening. He tensed. The door opened, a silent movement, then a pale arm and a dark head reached out, grabbing the package and pulling it inside. There was another click, and the door was closed. He leaned back against the wall, quiet, thinking.
Brunette. Pale. It was more than he knew yesterday. He heard the elevator’s exhausted ascent, and then it was opening, a black man in workout clothes getting off. He nodded to the man, stepped into the car, and it carried him back downstairs. Waiting for the car to reach the ground floor, he wondered, as he always did, why she hid. Because hiding seemed most certainly to be why she kept inside. Hiding from who? Or what? Hiding from something, that was for damn sure.
CHAPTER 18
I lean against the front door and eat teriyaki chicken, which came with rice and some steamed-to-death green stuff they called vegetables. I used to have cable, but three months into the service, something broke, and the screen would only display an error message. I called the company, who walked me through four different troubleshooting solutions (none of which worked), before they came to the conclusion that I would need a service call. No thank you. I told them to disconnect the service. Television took time away from camming anyway. As far as Internet goes, Mike remotely logged into my system and set it up so I could steal Internet from my three closest neighbors. I normally use the Internet from “Team Bradley,” which is the apartment to the right of me: it has the fastest connection. But, in the rare instances where it is offline, disconnected, or running slow, I use one of the other two wireless networks available, courtesy of my favorite horny hacker.
With no cable, my biggest form of entertainment is eavesdropping on my neighbors. I lean back, listening to dead silence on the other side of the metal door. Surely someone would be in the hall soon. I hope for the bodybuilder down the hall with the bleach-blond girlfriend. They always have drama-filled conversations. There is a noise, and then the slam of a door. I can tell by the sound that the door bounces a bit, not quite shutting, but the footsteps continue, and by the shuffle of them, and the speed at which they are by my door, I know that it is Simon. When his feet are flush with my door, I speak. Loudly, so he can hear me.
“Your door’s not shut.”