The apartment was a two-bedroom in a quiet neighborhood, the kind where mothers felt safe leaving their daughters with tutors while they worked night shifts at the hospital. My mother had hired Sloane six months ago — “She’s brilliant, Elena. Top of her class. She’ll get you through calculus.”
Sloane was twenty-six. A graduate student in mathematics who wore cardigans and glasses and had a habit of explaining derivatives with a patience that made me want to scream. She came Tuesdays and Thursdays. She sat at the kitchen table. She never touched me. She never looked at me for longer than necessary. She was the most boring woman I’d ever met.
Until I found her stream.
It was an accident. A wrong click. A Reddit thread about “hidden cam streams” that led to a site that led to a thumbnail that made my heart stop. The woman in the thumbnail wore a mask — a black lace thing that covered everything except her eyes and her mouth. But the tattoo on her shoulder was unmistakable. A phoenix. The same one I’d seen when Sloane’s cardigan slipped off her shoulder last Tuesday.
I clicked. I watched. I couldn’t stop.
She was Vixen_Dark. A cam performer with fifty thousand followers. She streamed three nights a week from a room that looked exactly like our guest bedroom — because it was our guest bedroom. The same bed. The same curtains. The same lamp that my mother had bought at Target.
And tonight, while my mother worked a double shift, I’d sat on the couch with Sloane’s spare phone — the one she’d left on the coffee table, unlocked, stupid — and I’d found the app. The stream. The archive. Three months of footage.
“You’re Vixen_Dark,” I whispered, looking up from the phone as Sloane walked into the living room in a silk robe, her blonde hair wet from a shower. “My calculus tutor. My mother’s friend. And you’ve been streaming this while I sleep upstairs. While my mother works night shifts. While you pretend to grade my homework at the kitchen table and tell me to ‘focus on the variables.'”
Sloane didn’t speak. She just walked closer, her robe falling open slightly, revealing the phoenix tattoo, the black lace underwear, the body that fifty thousand people had paid to see. She sat on the couch armrest beside me and leaned in until her cheek brushed mine.
“If I tell my mother,” I breathed, my voice trembling, my heart hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat, “she’ll fire you. She’ll call the police. She’ll tell the university. She’ll never speak to you again. But if I don’t, you’ll keep doing this under her roof. You’ll keep streaming while I do my homework upstairs. You’ll keep pretending to be my tutor while strangers watch you touch yourself in our guest bedroom—”
She turned my face toward her with a finger under my chin. Her mouth found mine. A kiss that tasted like WiFi and sin and the exact moment when a secret becomes a weapon. It was slow, exposed, completely devastating — her tongue sliding against mine, her hand sliding from my jaw to the zipper of my college hoodie.
The stream notification pinged. A laptop on the coffee table — her streaming laptop, still open, still live — showed a new subscriber alert. The chat was scrolling. “Is that a new character?” “Who’s the girl on the couch?” “Vixen, are you doing a collab?”
Sloane pulled back just enough to smirk. Then she stood up, walked to the laptop, and adjusted the camera angle. It was pointing directly at the couch. At me.
“They think this is scripted,” she whispered, walking back to me, her robe falling open completely, her body bathed in the blue light of the screen. “They have no idea you’re real. They have no idea that my student’s mouth tastes like fear and peppermint. And they’re about to pay a lot of money to watch me prove it.”
She made me come on the couch, her hand inside my hoodie, her mouth on my breast, the laptop streaming everything to fifty thousand people who thought this was “premium content.” I came with the chat exploding, with donation alerts pinging, with Sloane’s whisper in my ear: “Smile for the camera. They tipped fifty dollars for that moan.”
After, she didn’t turn off the stream. She just sat beside me, her arm around my shoulder, and read the comments aloud while I hid my face in her neck.
“Best stream ever.” “Who is she?” “Make her a regular.”
Sloane looked at me. “Well? Want to be a regular?”
I should have said no. I should have called my mother. I should have run.
Instead, I looked at the camera and waved.
I’m Vixen_Dark’s co-star now. We stream Tuesdays and Thursdays — the same nights she used to tutor me. The chat loves us. They call us “the professor and the pupil.” They don’t know that she actually teaches me calculus during commercial breaks. They don’t know that my grades have never been better. They don’t know that when the camera turns off, she carries me to the guest bedroom and shows me exactly what she does during her solo streams.
My mother still works night shifts. She still thinks Sloane is the best tutor I’ve ever had. She has no idea that her daughter is a cam star. Or that the “study sessions” she pays for are now generating enough income to pay her rent.
Sloane says we’re going to buy a house next year. A place with a proper studio. She says I’ll be the star. I say she’s already the star. She says we’re both wrong — the camera is the star. And it loves us equally.
