were all parting like the Red Sea for a man coming in from the outside.
Carrie raised her cup.
It was him, the man in the webcam shot. He wore a look of expectation on his face as he looked around, his gaze going from table to table.
Her stomach fluttered.
There was no way to tell that this was the man on the video, but he was as attractive as the picture. Tall, but not too tall, with an average build. When he looked in her direction Carrie glanced down, but not before she saw those soulful brown eyes.
She took a sip. She still hadn’t made up her mind what to do. He was good looking, but he was new and terrifying and had come into her life in the most cosmically fucked-up way she could imagine.
She glanced up and her heart stopped. He looked directly at her. Their gazes actually locked, like in a book or an old movie.
Fighting away the shakes, Carrie pushed away her tea.
You don’t have to speak to him. You don’t have to look at him. Just walk past him.
But she didn’t. She raised her chin and looked at him, and he walked towards her.
‘Maggie?’
Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and she felt silly nodding at him.
So much for playing the vamp when you meet him. See? Not Maggie.
A smile came across his wide mouth as he pulled out the chair opposite hers.
In the moments after he took his seat, they simply sat regarding one another. He looked perfectly comfortable in the silence while Carrie wanted to squirm.
Close up, she could see the lines around his mouth and a few flecks of grey in his hair. He was about her age, maybe a couple of years older, and definitely someone she would have given a second glance if they had passed one another on the street.
He didn’t look like someone who spent all day looking at naked pictures on the Internet.
Then again, she didn’t look like someone who took them.
‘I’m surprised you came,’ he said, his gaze sliding over her face.
‘So am I.’
He leaned forward and folded his arms in front of him on the table. ‘I knew it was you. As soon as I spotted you, I knew. You look like a woman who’s wearing dirty things under her clothes.’
‘Do I really?’ She was genuinely surprised, and suspicious. He seemed so … sly.
‘When I first contacted you, I was expecting someone a little wilder, someone who would scare me off,’ he said. ‘I never would have done it if I’d thought you would react the way you did. I almost cancelled. I didn’t want to be the asshole that made you do something you didn’t want to do.’
Once again, his gaze moved downwards.
Curious.
Interested.
A long-forgotten fluttery feeling came over her: the blossoming pleasure of being admired by a good-looking man.
By the time his attention turned to her face, she was hot all over and she knew her cheeks showed it. She looked at the table top and wrapped her hands around the paper cup in front of her. After a moment’s silence, she realised he was waiting for her to speak.
She took a sip to wet her mouth and then looked at him. ‘Do you have a name?’
‘Brendan, and … Maggie isn’t your real name, I take it?’
‘No, and I don’t want to tell you my real name yet.’ She looked him straight in the eye as she spoke. She couldn’t help how defensive she was getting. ‘Not yet. For now, you can call me Maggie.’
He leaned back and grinned. ‘Well, Maggie, I’m going to get a cup of coffee and hope you’re still here when I come back. And then I think we should get out of here.’
‘I don’t think we should,’ she said with a scowl. ‘I don’t know what you were expecting, but –’
‘No, you misunderstand me. I just meant we should take our coffees and get out of this noisy little hole in the wall, head down the street to the park and get to know one another.’
Brendan stood over her. Carrie hated to look up at anyone and so she didn’t. She simply took another sip.
He chuckled, a delightful rumbling sound that ran right through her. ‘Can I get you another one?’
She hugged her cup between her hands and shook her head. ‘No, thank you.’
After he’d moved away, she lifted her chin and took a second look. He looked so normal, like any other man, and so far he had been nothing but sweet to her. The very act of speaking to the barista and slipping his debit card into the machine seemed out of place as she thought of how he had come out of the masturbatory haze of her blog. Tingles sparked along her arms and down her back, and she felt ashamed of her shyness in the face of a man who had seen so much of her from afar.
His slight swagger as he moved down the counter to wait for his drink painted a more accurate picture of confidence. The video had proved that. He had filmed himself fucking the woman because he had wanted to be seen. Perhaps it had started off as a private thing, but somewhere along the way he had decided to give it to the world to get off to.
Just like me, she thought.
Curiosity burned through her anxiety as she watched him and, in spite of herself, she wanted to know more. So she rose from the table and collected her things and met him at the door as he took his cup filled with ice and red liquid.
‘You can relax,’ he said as soon as they were out in the daylight together. ‘I know you’ll take it with a grain of salt, but I just want to talk. No expectations.’
‘Good. I don’t want you thinking I’m some kind of prostitute.’
‘I was thinking the complete opposite, actually.’
He led the way along a sidewalk busy with students hobbling like hunchbacks between campuses for coffee and lunch. A step behind him, Carrie let her gaze move over him and wondered if the back was as nice as the front when he was stripped down.
‘It’s funny how all these months I’ve been visiting your blog, getting myself off two or three times a day, and you were just a few steps away all this time.’
‘I don’t find it funny.’
‘No, I don’t expect you would, hiding in plain sight like that.’ He peered at her as they trotted along. ‘You’re very skittish, aren’t you?’
‘I’m cautious.’
‘Are you a virgin?’
Carrie stopped dead. ‘Because I didn’t immediately invite you for a fuck, you assume I’m a virgin?’
‘That
