The dorm room was a shoebox with two beds, a desk, and a window that looked directly into another shoebox. I’d been assigned a random roommate at the start of the semester — Sloane Kessler, film major, blonde, quiet, with a habit of staying up until 3 AM editing something on her laptop.
I’d thought she was harmless. I’d thought she was just dedicated to her craft. I’d thought the camera she kept on her desk was for class projects.
I was wrong.
It started with small things. My shampoo bottle moved. My drawer was slightly open. I found a hair tie on her bed that wasn’t mine. Then, three weeks into the semester, I borrowed her laptop to print an essay — she’d left it open, logged in, the screen saver cycling through thumbnails.
Thumbnails of me.
Sleeping in my bed. Showering through the frosted glass of our shared bathroom. Changing after gym class, my back to the window, unaware that the camera was positioned perfectly in the windowsill.
Three weeks. Forty-seven files. A folder called “Project.”
“You recorded me,” I whispered, sitting on her bed with her laptop open, my hands shaking so hard I could barely scroll. “For three weeks. While I slept. While I showered. And you saved it all. In a folder called ‘Project.’ With subfolders. ‘Morning.’ ‘Night.’ ‘Shower.’ You’re a film major, Sloane. Is this what they teach you? How to spy on your roommate?”
Sloane didn’t speak. She was standing behind me — I’d heard her come in, had been too frozen to close the laptop. She just leaned down over my shoulder, her cheek brushing my neck, her hand reaching past me to close the laptop with a soft click.
“If I report you,” I breathed, my voice trembling, the room suddenly too small, too hot, too full of her presence, “you get expelled. Arrested. Your life is over. Your scholarship. Your future. Everything. But if I don’t, you’ll keep watching me. You’ll keep recording. You’ll keep collecting me like I’m some kind of specimen. Like I’m your project. Like I belong to you.”
She turned my face toward her with a hand on my jaw. Her mouth found mine. A kiss that tasted like pixels and obsession and the exact moment when a victim realizes she’s not afraid anymore — she’s something else entirely. Her tongue slid against mine, her hand sliding from my jaw to my throat to the hem of my gray t-shirt.
The laptop made a sound — auto-save complete. The blue light pulsed in the darkness.
Sloane pulled back just enough to look at me. Then she reached into her hoodie pocket and pulled out her phone. She opened the camera. Pressed record. And set it on the desk, facing the bed.
“Now you’re not just my roommate,” she whispered, her hand sliding under my t-shirt, finding my breast, my nipple, pinching with a precision that made my back arch off her bed. “You’re my favorite scene. And I want to see exactly how you look when you know you’re being watched.”
She made me come on her bed, her fingers inside my sleep shorts, her mouth on my breast, the phone recording everything — my face, my sounds, the way my body shook when she found exactly the right spot. I came with the blue light pulsing in the corner of my vision, with the knowledge that this was being saved, that I was being collected, that I was becoming part of her permanent archive.
After, she made me watch it back. We sat on her bed, her arm around my shoulder, the phone between us, and I watched myself come apart in high definition. I looked different than I expected — wilder, hungrier, completely undone.
“You’re beautiful,” Sloane whispered, her thumb tracing my jaw as we watched. “More beautiful than I imagined. And I’ve imagined a lot.”
I should have reported her. I should have packed my bags. I should have run.
Instead, I asked her to play it again.
We still share that dorm room. Sloane still records — but now I know where the cameras are. Now I pose for them. Now I perform. And every night, after the lights go out, we watch the footage together and she shows me exactly what she sees when she looks at me.
She’s making a film for her thesis. It’s called The Subject. I’m the star. The professor says it’s “deeply intimate.” Sloane says it’s “just the beginning.”
She’s right. We’re moving into an apartment next semester. Two bedrooms. But we only use one. The other is her editing suite. And sometimes, when I’m feeling brave, I sit in the director’s chair and I tell her exactly how I want to be filmed.
