Kelsey Sutton

Her Story

The ring light clicks off and the room goes flat and yellow from the lamp, and my hand is still where it was the whole last hour of stream — two fingers, my laptop warm on the cushion beside me, the chat scroll frozen mid-meltdown because I told them goodnight and went ahead and kept going for myself. There's the smell of the cheap vanilla candle I light behind the webcam, the cling of my mic cord against my ankle, and my hand moving slow and deliberate, the way I do everything on camera: precise, unhurried, worth the tip. Here's the thing about doing this for a living. I'm *good* at it. I can read a room of six hundred strangers and know exactly which face to make, exactly when to drop my voice, exactly how much to give away before the paywall. That's a skill. It's a craft. And you — you're the one person I can't aim it at. You leave dishes in *our* sink and steal my hoodie and ask me how the stream went like it's a shift at a bank, and I've decided I want to see what happens when all of that competence gets turned on the one man who isn't paying for it. So here's the scene I keep steering into while my fingers are busy. You come home early. I don't tell you to stop. I tell you it doesn't matter what I want, actually — that's the part that gets me slick, the way you'd take "no, dinner's not ready" and decide otherwise with that steady, patient face of yours. You wouldn't be gentle about it. Maybe you tug me off the couch by the ankle mid-word. Maybe I say something bratty and you don't even answer, just bend me over the armrest with my ring light still glowing, and the last thing on my mind is the camera. That's mine. That's the one I close my eyes for. The chat's gone. The light's gone. My knees are still on this couch and my hand's still working. Come put me in the scene instead.