The email arrives at 12.23 p.m.
She knows this because she has checked her inbox approximately every four minutes since half past nine, with the perseverance of someone who has posted a letter and then stood vigil at the letterbox. When the notification finally appears she stares at it for a full ten seconds before she opens it, the way you pause before unwrapping something you badly want, to make the wanting last just a little longer.
Subject: Re: It's Lizzie
Lizzie,
I've been thinking about you since I woke up this morning, hoping to hear from you again. Unfortunately I was working earlier and so I couldn't reply any sooner. I hope the wait didn't feel too long.
First things first: don't apologise for writing honestly. You told me yesterday that no-one had ever encouraged you to do that. Consider this me, encouraging you... Write honestly. Always. Especially to me.
I want to address the cheating question, because I can hear you wrestling with it between every line and I think you deserve a straight answer from me rather than a careful one. What happened yesterday was real. I'm not going to pretend it was nothing, and I don't think you'd respect me if I did. I also can't tell you what it means for your life or your marriage because that isn't mine to tell. What I can tell you is this: whatever this is, I will never be careless with it. Or with you.
There'sone thing that I've already learned about you in this brief moment that we were together yesterday and now again in your email: you always seem to think about others first before thinking about yourself. That is so completely, stubbornly, magnificently you. But haven't you forgotten yourself completely in the process? Was it cheating? Or was it you finally reclaiming that part of yourself that had withered away after years of neglect?
I'd like to keep talking to you, if you'll let me. Not just email. Is there a way? Some form of chat that would be feasible for you? I understand there are complications. I don't want to make things harder. But I find I'm not quite ready to go back to a world where I don't know how you are doing.
Michael
She reads it four times.
Then she sits back and looks at the ceiling and does something she hasn't done in a very long time, which is smile without immediately having a reason to stop.
She begins to type.
Over the next hour the emails go back and forth with the rhythm of a conversation... quick, warm, overlapping almost, each one arriving before she's quite finished composing her response to the last. She tells him that her spreadsheet is essentially her whole personality at this point and that she has begun to feel a personal relationship with the product codes. He tells her that there are worse relationships to have, given recent evidence. She laughs, alone in the flat, and the sound surprises her slightly, like a piece of herself that's been moved back to where it always used to be.
Then he asks again, without pressure, whether there might be a way to chat more directly.
She chews her lip.
The problem, she writes, is that my husband monitors my phone and he has a habit of looking over my shoulder on Instagram. Not because he thinks I'm doing anything. He just likes to know. It's hard to explain.
You don't have to explain it, Michael writes back. I understand the type.
I know I shouldn't have to be secretive. But I don't want... She stops. Tries again. I need somewhere he won't look.
She thinks for a moment. Then: I've got a Facebook account I haven't touched in about four years. He's never been on Facebook, thinks it's for people's mothers. I don't think he even knows the password.
Then Facebook it is, Michael writes. I'll find you. What's the name on the account?
Lizzie Hartwell. There's a photo of roses at a Brighton flower show from about 2019.
Give me ten minutes, he writes.
The friend request arrives in eight.
His profile photo is outdoors somewhere, with bushland behind him, the particular quality of antipodean light, squinting slightly against the Sun with an easy, uncurated smile. She accepts the request. The chat window opens immediately.
There you are, he writes.
Here I am, she types back, and it feels, absurdly, like arriving somewhere.
They chat for twenty minutes, easy and warm, the same intensity as the emails but more immediate, more like being in the same room. And then he writes:
Can I ask you something?
You keep asking me that before you ask me things, she writes. You know you can just ask.
I know. I like giving you the option to say no before you know what you're saying no to. A pause. Would you want to do a video call again?
She looks at the chat window for a moment.
I don't know, she writes honestly.
That's a perfectly good answer. We can just do this.
It's not that I don't want to. She thinks about how to say it. It's that yesterday you couldn't see me. And I could just be... anyone. Just a voice. But if you see me...
Then I see you, he writes. Yes. That's rather what I'm hoping for.
What if I'm a disappointment?
The reply comes without any pause at all.
Lizzie. I've spent the last twenty-four hours thinking about the woman who told me the truth about her life without flinching and then went straight back to her spreadsheet. I have a very clear picture of who you are. A video call is not going to disappoint me.
She reads this twice.
Also, he adds, I showed you everything yesterday. It seems only fair that you show me at least your face, doesn't it? With a winking smiley.
She laughs despite herself.
That's emotional blackmail, she writes.
It's a completely reasonable point presented calmly, he replies. Very different.
She looks at the screen for a long moment. Outside the window the February sky has made good on its earlier promise as there is actual, tentative sunlight on the rooftops opposite, thin and watery but present.
All right, she writes. But I want to be clear that I'm only showing you my face. Nothing else.
Nothing you're not comfortable with, he writes immediately. We can just talk. I mean that.
Okay. She takes a breath. Calling you now.
His face appears.
She'd seen him yesterday, of course, but something about the directness of the call, the mutual visibility of it, makes it different. He raises a hand in the same unhurried wave as before, and she lifts hers back, and for a moment they are both quiet.
"Hello," he says.
"Hello," she replies with obvious embarrassment about her appearance after having been told for years she wasn't attractive.
He looks at her for a moment with an expression she can't immediately name. Not appraising. Nothing like the way Don looks at her when he looks at her, which is mostly with the eyes of someone scanning for differences. Don's observing her slower and more deliberate than that.
"Lizzie," he says.
"What?"
"You're beautiful."
She blinks. She genuinely doesn't know what to do with the words... they land in a place that has been empty for so long that the sound echoes.
"Don't," she says, not unkindly.
"I mean it. You've got these eyes that look like... I don't know. Like you're thinking three things simultaneously and feeling a fourth one. And your smile is..." He shakes his head slightly, as though editing himself, "... mesemerising. I just want you to know that. I wanted to say it plainly and look at you while I said it."
"No-one's said anything like that to me in... I can't remember when," she admits. She looks away from the camera for a moment, collecting herself. "Don doesn't... he's not..." She stops. "He hasn't said anything like that in a very long time."
Michael's expression shifts. Something in it becomes very still.
"How long?" He asks.
She thinks about it. Actually thinks, casting back through the years, looking for evidence.
"I honestly couldn't tell you," she says. "Years."
"Years?" He says the word quietly, to himself almost. Then he looks directly at the camera. "Lizzie, you should be told that every single day. You should be..." He hesitates. "You should be worshipped. That's the only word that fits. Every single day. I don't know how someone looks at you and finds anything other than that.
She presses her lips together hard. She will not cry again. She has cried enough for one forty-eight-hour period.
"You have to stop," she says, and her voice is not entirely steady. "I don't know what to do when people say things like that."
"Learn," he replies simply. "You've got time."
They talk for a long while after that, about Melbourne, about the data entry, about the repetitive structure of their respective days, about books and what the sky looks like from their different windows, about the particular agony of loneliness which is different, he says, from simply being alone, and which she understands in her bones. The conversation moves in the unhurried way of people who have agreed, tacitly, that there is no rush, that wherever this is going they are in no danger of arriving too soon.
And then, gradually, by increments so small she can't identify the precise moment it begins, the temperature of it changes.
It starts with her saying, almost casually, looking slightly off-camera: "I keep thinking about yesterday afternoon."
"Do you?" He says. Not really a question.
"I shouldn't. I know I shouldn't."
"Why shouldn't you?"
"Because..." She gestures vaguely. "Because it means something happened. And I'm not sure I'm ready to deal with what it means."
"Tell me what you keep thinking about."
She looks at the camera. She feels the heat arrive in her face and decides, somewhat recklessly, not to look away from it.
"You," she says, "the way you just... sat back down... and started touching yourself... as though it was nothing. As though being that...," she searches for the word, "that open, that unguarded,... was just a completely ordinary thing to offer someone. And yet I knew that it wasn't."
"For the right person it is," he says.
"And the way you looked at the camera," she says, quieter now, "I don't think anyone's ever..." She stops.
Tell me.
"I loved watching you... masturbating...," she says, in a voice just above a whisper, because if she says it quickly and quietly enough perhaps the guilt and the wanting will cancel each other out. "I loved it. I didn't expect to. I thought... yesterday, beforewe got connected, with those other men, I thought this is what it is, this is the reality of it, cold and stupid and disgusting. And then... "She shakes her head. "You made it something else entirely."
He looks at her for a long moment.
"Would you like me to?" He proposes.
"Yes," she says even before he's finished, and feels herself flush scarlet. "Sorry. Yes."
He smiles, that good, slow smile, and reaches off camera for a moment, and when he sits back the light around him has shifted slightly, warmer, more private somehow.
He undresses quietly, without theatre, in the same unhurried way he does everything, and she watches, and she feels the warmth move through her in a long, slow wave, and she is aware that she is frightened and aware that she is more alive than she has felt in years and aware that these two things are not in contradiction.
And then he is there, simply there, completely, gorgeously naked, with an incredible erection, and she sees what she's doing to him and the breath goes out of her completely.
"Oh," she says softly, involuntarily, the way you say it when something is more than you'd allowed yourself to expect.
"Yes," he says, with a quiet certainty, "that's the effect that you're having on me."
She closes her eyes for one second. Opens them.
"I'm..." She doesn't know how to finish it.
"I know," he says gently, "I can see it in your face. You don't have to say it."
"I want to say it." She takes a breath. "You have such a beautiful penis. And I adore how one of your balls hangs slightly lower than the other. And... I'm very..." The last word comes out barely audibly. "Aroused."
The way he responds is so unexpected, so entirely contrary to every experience she has had of men being told what they want to hear, that it almost undoes her. He doesn't lunge toward it, doesn't weaponise it, doesn't perform triumph. He simply looks at her with an expression of such genuine tenderness that she feels it somewhere behind her sternum, somewhere that has nothing to do with the body.
"Oh, thank you," he says quietly. "I'm glad. You deserve to feel that. You deserve to feel all of it."
And something inside of her... some last remaining wall, some final barricade she'd raised and told herself wasn't important... crumbles.
She isn't fully aware of deciding to do it. It is more that the decision was made at some level below conscious thought, made perhaps at three o'clock last night, or last Tuesday even when she was washing the already clean mug, or years ago on some ordinary Wednesday when she understood that something essential was slowly being taken from her and couldn't find the words to say so.
She tilts the laptop down. It takes only a moment.
She lifts her skirt.
For the first time his composure appears to fail when he notices that she's wearing nothing underneath and that her pussy is glistening with threads of transparent essence. For just a second she offers him a glimpse of her small, pink labia that sit so snugly in between her thick, dark-haired outer lips.
She tilts the camera back up.
Her heart is slamming. Her hands are shaking. She looks into the camera with an expression she imagines must be indistinguishable from pure panic.
Michael looks back at her.
"You are," he says, and his voice is low and very careful, as though handling something precious, "absolutely extraordinary."
"I can't believe I just..." she starts.
"You are a true work of art," he says, "and I feel privileged... blessed even, that you wanted to share so much of yourself with me."
She exhales a long, unsteady breath.
"I'm keeping the camera here," she says, gesturing to her face. "I'm not... I can't... not yet..."
"I know," he comforts her. "Stay exactly where you are. Just... stay with me."
"Okay," she whispers.
The soft glow of Michael’s kitchen lamp is a warm, steady beacon. On the screen, he is completely unashamed, his body a landscape of relaxed muscle, hairless skin and soft light. He’s leaning back in his chair, one hand digging into the curls of his thick pubic hair, the other moving slowly, deliberately, up and down his hard, curved cock. His eyes are fixed on the small window that holds her image, his expression one of intense, patient focus.
Lizzie’s own body is a study in contrast. She’s in her simple cotton dress, the fabric bunched around her hips. Her camera is angled up, showing only her face, her flushed cheeks, and the wild tangle of her hair escaping its clip. Beneath the dress, hidden from his view, her legs are spread, her feet planted firmly on the floor, and her own fingers are buried in her incredibly wet slit.
She watches him like she's under his spell. The way his thumb smears the bead of fluid from his tip, the way his hips give a little involuntary thrust, pretending to be fucking her. He’s not performing for her; he’s sharing this with her.
"Your eyes are so beautiful right now, Lizzie," his voice comes through the speakers, a low, intimate rumble. "Are you touching yourself for me?"
She can’t speak. Her throat is tight with a mix of shame and exhilaration. She just nods, her bottom lip caught between her teeth. Her fingers move in slow circles over her clit, the direct contact sending sparks of pleasure through her. The hair there is a secret, a wild, untamed part of herself Don has always complained about, but with Michael it feels like it’s the most natural thing in the world. It sends a jolt of arousal so powerful through her that she gasps, her hips jerking against her hand.
"Tell me what it feels like," he urges, his voice growing huskier. "Tell me... how you feel..."
She finds her voice, a small, breathy thing.
"Wet..." she whispers. "And... hot. I feel so hot for you, Michael..."
He groans, a deep, guttural sound of pure pleasure. His fist tightens around his shaft, his strokes becoming faster, more purposeful.
"See how hard I am for you, Lizzie. So hard watching your face... dreaming of that breathtaking pussy of yours"
He’s close, she can see it in the tension in his shoulders, in the way his breath hitches.
She matches his pace, her fingers rubbing her clit frantically, the pressure building to an almost unbearable peak. She’s no longer just a face on a screen; she is a body feeling, a body wanting, a body about to explode. She watches his face, sees his eyes squeeze shut, his mouth fall open.
"Come with me, Lizzie," he gasps. "Come for me!... Ah!... Ah!... Ah!!!..."
His words are her undoing. Her orgasm crashes through her, shyddering, a violent hurricane that rips a cry from her throat. Her back arches, her toes curl, and she feels a gush of wetness coat her fingers as she pulses and clenches around nothing. At the same time, she watches Michael’s body tense, a thick, white ribbon of cum pulsing from his cock to land on his stomach.
For a long moment, the only sound is their ragged breathing. Lizzie slumps back in her chair, her limbs feeling like liquid. She slowly pulls her hand from under her dress, her fingers glistening in the dim light. She shows them to the camera, her own arousal, a salty, intimate secret.
Michael is smiling at her, a soft, sated, beautiful smile.
"Oh my goodness,..." he says, his voice full of warmth. "My beautiful Lizzie." And for the first time, looking at her own flushed, happy face in the small corner of the screen, she almost believes him.
She is aware of her own breathing and his voice and the distance between them that seems, in this particular light, at this particular hour, to be a technicality rather than a fact. She is aware of the spasms in her vagina and the heat of the afternoon and the winter sunlight that has now crept fully across the rooftops and is pooling on the sill outside her window like something that arrived just in time.
She keeps the camera on her face. She keeps her eyes open.
She lets herself be seen.
They are both quiet for a moment.
It's the good kind of quiet, the kind that doesn't need filling. He is looking at the camera and she is looking at the camera and somewhere in the space between them, across the fibre optic cables and the ocean and the curve of the Earth, something has passed between two people that neither of them has felt before, not with this completeness, not with this quality of recognition, as though they have been looking for the specific shape of the other person for a very long time in various wrong places and have found it, absurdly, on a random sex chat site on an ordinary wirking day in February.
"Michael,..." she says.
"Lizzie..."
"I don't quite know what to say..."
"You don't have to say anything..."
"This is..." She shakes her head slowly. "You know what's strange? The age thing. The distance thing. It all just..."
"Doesn't matter," he says. "No. It doesn't matter at all." He looks at her steadily. "What matters is that you're real and I'm real and whatever this is, it's real."
"It is," she says quietly. "It really is. This... This is it."
He raises his hand to the camera then, a gesture both absurd and entirely sincere, and presses his fingers to the glass. She lifts hers and does the same, and they are both smiling and both slightly tearful and she thinks she has never in her life felt less alone.
"Tomorrow?" He asks.
"Tomorrow," she says.
He blows a kiss. She catches it, a reflex, genuinely involuntary, and then laughs at herself for it and blows one back. His smile is the last thing she sees before the call ends.
The screen goes dark.
The flat comes back.
And then the fear arrives, right on schedule, like a second person entering the room.
She sits for approximately thirty seconds in the wreckage of the warmth, and then she is moving... quickly, with the focused efficiency of someone who has done something they cannot undo and needs to manage the evidence.
She goes to her Facebook chat list and deletes the conversation. All of it. She goes to her browser history and removes it, every visit, clearing the cache as well, because she has seen Don do this on his own laptop and she knows it exists to be done. She checks and checks again, navigating through every menu she can find, looking for traces of the afternoon.
Then she closes the laptop.
She goes to the bathroom. She runs cold water over her face, an old trick for the blood that's still running high, and washes her pussy over the bidet. She looks at herself in the mirror for a moment... flushed, eyes too bright, evidence written plainly in her face... trying to compose it back into something that might pass for a normal Tuesday.
She changes her underwear, bundling the old pair quickly to the bottom of the laundry basket.
She wipes the seat of her chair.
She is back at her laptop, spreadsheet open, column G, when she hears the outer door.
The lift. The key. The coat.
"What a fucking day...," Don grumbles, from the hallway, which is so far outside his usual register that it takes her a moment to process it. She's already sussed that he's lost big time at the betting shop.
"I'm sorry..." she says, her voice coming out perfectly level, a small miracle.
He appears in the living room doorway, already loosening his tie, already turning towards the couch, already mostly absent.
"The news is on," he says, which is not directed at her and doesn't require a response.
"Right," she says.
He settles into the sofa. The television fills the flat with its familiar noise. She goes to the kitchen and stirs pasta and watches the water boiling and thinks about a pair of hands pressed to opposite sides of a screen twelve thousand miles apart, and the particular way he'd said "you are absolutely extraordinary" as though it were not a compliment but a simple statement of observable fact.
What have I done, she thinks.
And then, beneath it, quieter and more frightening and entirely honest:
I'm going to do it again tomorrow.
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