I, who had seen Neely’s fat red worm of a penis in uncomfortably close quarters, couldn’t suppress an involuntary gasp at the intimacy of all that naked flesh. The left robe flap rode farther up as he wriggled into position, exposing one fleshy white buttock squished flat on the table and a deeply creased overhang of white side belly covered with straggling hairs. He reclined back, leaned onto his left elbow, bent his right leg into a triangle for stability, and tilted his lap a few degrees toward the camera, almost as if posing for it, though it was obvious he didn’t know it was there. Last of all, his face appeared: a giant moon shape, dappled and flushed, with an expression that was at once anxious, eager, and revoltingly childlike.
My stomach flipped over as his features became fully visible to the camera eye, surreally recognizable, like all celebrity faces. Once that face was onscreen, juxtaposed with that body—all in dramatic close-up and lit with improbable artistry by a bedside lamp—I could almost feel the shock waves rippling through some invisible crowd, as if the video had already gone viral and I was only a single viewer among millions.
From the background came a quiet knock. “I’m coming in, Mr. Neely,” said Amanda from offscreen in her gentle, breathy massage-therapist voice. “Are you ready?”
“Ready,” he replied, dick in hand.
The video ended. It was less than three minutes long. I stared in shock. I had almost forgotten where I was and that I was alone.
A text came, reminding me that I wasn’t alone at all. Not anymore.
You can probably guess where it goes after that.
Then: Trust me now?
I grabbed my keys.
Downtown on a Saturday night at last call was never my favorite place to be, and tonight was no exception. The days of stumbling down a piss-soaked stretch of Sixth Street with Jason and a couple of comedy buddies drunkenly mocking the drunk girls in platform heels and micro-minis who tripped over the curbs were long past. Now I felt that anyone who chose Austin’s miniature version of the French Quarter, cordoned off on weekends to create a dreamscape of hammered pedestrians, tour buses, and Bible-wagging street preachers, was equally perverse. After paying what I felt to be sufficient dues at the notoriously rough open-mic at Fondue Freddy’s, I’d avoided downtown clubs whenever possible.
The dreamscape was in full effect tonight. Though the Red River venues had quieted after midnight, per city ordinance, the bar bands and jukeboxes of Sixth Street still sent out a soup of clashing beats audible several blocks away. Taxis, their windows rolled down to air out the sodden drunks inside, blared world music at every stoplight; even the loaded pedicabs emitted strains of jam bands and hair metal, rhythms to keep their stoned drivers mashing the bicycle pedals. I had no trouble finding a place to park; there were never enough cabs and always plenty of drunks vacating their parking spots at this time of night. Eager to avoid sharing the streets with them, I took the first open spot I saw and walked toward the address Amanda had given me.
As I approached, I recognized the area, an urban living district whose paved pedestrian walkways were lined with olive oil boutiques and manicure places I could afford only with a gift card. Just a few blocks from the squalid circus of Sixth Street, it looked like a different world. Amanda’s building had gone up before I left, during the first big tech boom. Its copper siding had at first been visible from almost any part of town, a blinding pinkish-gold beacon in daylight. In the five years I had been away, the siding had tarnished to the respectable auburn of a Lincoln penny, but it still looked like money to me. The single people I knew lived in rundown student apartments—mine was a converted nudist compound from the sixties whose walls always felt uncomfortably moist—or divvied up dilapidated cottages in the five-year floodplain. I wondered just how Amanda paid the rent here, her own tech job more than a year gone. The security guard buzzed me in without looking up, and I took the elevator to the eighth floor and knocked.
Amanda opened the door in a T-shirt the mottled-gray color of botched laundry, looking not just wide awake, but wired. Without a word, she waved me in, and I stepped past a narrow kitchen with a granite bar. The living room, half swallowed by the black night outside the curtainless floor-to-ceiling glass windows, was just large enough to hold an entertainment system and an L-shaped sectional sofa. Everything was in perfect order, from the coordinating throw pillows to the perfectly straight rows of Blu-rays on the shelf above the TV—mostly rom-coms and action movies, to my surprise. Outside, a wraparound balcony glowed with a ghostly concrete pallor, and the pale pink limestone of the capitol’s dome reared up in the distance.
She shut the door behind me. “Amanda—” I said, but she was already talking.
“Shall we celebrate?” she said. “I have some nice wine I’ve been saving. I wish I had champagne.”
“But how—”
“Neely’s gone for good.” Her back to me, she rummaged through the cabinets in the narrow kitchen, calling over her shoulder, “I knew he’d go slithering back to L.A., but I wanted to wait until I was sure before I contacted you.”
“How did you know?”
“I have my ways.” She produced two wineglasses from the back of a cabinet, blew into them to clear the dust, and set them down on the bar in triumph. “Anyway, it was only a matter of time, once he saw what I had on him.” She closed the cabinet. “What we had.”
“The video? How did you—” I was still standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, unwilling to take my seat until she came out of the kitchen.
“Isn’t it perfect? Once I figured out that he likes to order up a massage whenever he’s in a hotel . . . I just knew he would try something. I knew his MO, you know?” She reached up to a wine rack on top of the refrigerator, pulled out a bottle of red, checked the label, and put it back. “As a matter of fact, a lot of people do. You just have to be in the right online forums, understand the coded language. Nobody wants to call him out in public because he’s so universally adored.” She rolled her eyes. “But this guy, trust me, he does this all the time. Like, every chance he gets. And service workers are less motivated to keep it quiet than comics are.” Having pulled out a few more bottles of wine, she finally located one that pleased her and set it on the countertop next to the glasses. Then she said, “Corkscrew, where are you?” and started opening and closing drawers with the same jittery energy.
She eventually found one. “Give it to me,” I said to get her out of the kitchen faster. I opened the wine and poured it, then swiftly grabbed both glasses so she’d follow me to the sofa. “Now sit down and tell me everything. From the beginning.”
“Okay.” She perched on the short side of the L as I took a seat on the long side. “But first—” She leaned forward, brandishing the wineglass. “To having each other’s backs.”
“To having each other’s backs,” I said, trying not to betray my impatience as I clinked my glass to hers and drank. “So . . . entrapment. I’m more of a lead-pipe woman myself. In the study.” I laughed nervously at my own joke.
“I should really be toasting my former employers at Runnr,” she said, ignoring me. “These Silicon Valley types pride themselves on large-scale vision, but they have poor day-to-day management skills. And shockingly short attention spans.” She giggled. “It took the admin ages to get around to changing my passwords and revoking my access.”
“Access to what?”
“Everything.” She raised her eyebrows. “User data, code—half of which I built from
