(Cam)Girl Next Door

Thin Walls

First night in the new place. Half your stuff is still in boxes stacked against the far wall, the mattress is on the floor because you couldn't figure out the bed frame at eleven at night, and you're staring at a ceiling you don't recognize yet, waiting to fall asleep in a room that doesn't smell like anything.

It's quiet. Weirdly quiet — no upstairs neighbor, no traffic, none of the sounds you'd gotten used to. Just the fridge cycling on and off in the kitchen.

Then, sometime after one, you feel it before you hear it. Four or five low thuds through the drywall by your head. Bass. Somebody's music, just for a second, and then it cuts out.

And then a voice.

It's the girl from this afternoon — has to be. Ginger, freckles, grocery bag on her hip, told you she'd had the whole building to herself for a year and laughed loud enough to scare a bird out of a tree. Except it doesn't sound like her. It's lower than that. Slower. Every word set down deliberately, warm and unhurried, close enough to the wall that you catch about half of them and lose the rest into the insulation.

"—that's it. Mmhm. Just like that."

A pause. A rustle of fabric. A soft laugh that is absolutely nothing like the one from the driveway.

She's talking to somebody. Except you didn't hear a second voice, and you didn't hear a door, and you're eight inches of drywall away from a girl who spent a full year alone on the other side of it and has clearly never once had a reason to keep her voice down.

You lie very still. The mattress is on the floor. Your head is right against the wall.

You could move it in the morning.

The Regular

You've been watching BunnyBlue for about eight months.

Not in a weird way. Not in a way you'd ever describe out loud, but not in a weird way either — you subscribed on a whim, stayed because she was funnier than she needed to be, and somewhere along the line it became a Tuesday-and-Thursday habit. You've tipped. She's read your name out loud. You know she hates her own stream name, that she snorts when she laughs, that she gets bored of her own lingerie and says so, that she'll spend nine minutes of a paid stream arguing about protein bars.

You moved into the left half of a duplex three days ago. You have not connected these two facts.

You connect them at the mailbox.

It's the shared kind, two slots in one box, and the little laminated label on the right slot says H. BISHOP in handwriting you've seen upside-down on a whiteboard during a stream. That alone wouldn't do it. What does it is the packing slip taped to the box wedged in beside your bills — some boutique lingerie brand, the exact same logo as the sponsor graphic she reads off a card every Thursday and gets a discount code wrong on every single time.

You are still standing there when her door opens.

"Oh — hey!" Ginger, freckled, sports bra and an unzipped hoodie, hair shoved up in a clip. Bare feet on cold concrete. She trots down her steps and reaches past you for the box like you're a piece of furniture, and up close her voice is the same voice, obviously, unmistakably, pitched higher than the one you know but the same one, and she smells like coconut. "Sorry, that's mine, I've been waiting on this all week." She tucks it under her arm and finally looks at you properly, and grins. "You're the new one, right? Left side? God, finally. That place has been empty for a year, I was starting to think it was haunted."

She's waiting for you to say something.

"...You okay? You've got a real deer-in-the-headlights thing happening."

Behind her, through her open front door, you can see a corner of her living room. There's a ring light folded against the wall.

You know what her bedroom looks like. You know what's on the wall above her headboard. Her bedroom shares a wall with yours.

And she has absolutely no idea who you are.

The Complaint

Three weeks. You've counted, which is embarrassing, but you've counted.

It's four nights a week, give or take — never Mondays, always late, always starting with that same handful of bass thuds that you now feel in your teeth before you hear them. You've moved the mattress twice. It doesn't help. The duplex was built in 1974 by someone who thought insulation was a luxury item, and the room she works in shares a wall with the room you sleep in, and you have to be up at seven.

That's the reason. That's the reason you're using.

So at noon on a Saturday, you walk around to her side, up the three concrete steps, and knock.

It takes a while. When the door opens she's clearly been asleep — hair a disaster, no clip, an oversized shirt and nothing you can confirm underneath it, one eye squinting against the daylight like it's personally attacking her.

"Mm." She blinks at you. "Left side. Hi. Is the building on fire? I need it to be on fire for this to be happening right now."

You explain. You do a bad job of it. You say something about the walls being thin and something about the noise at night and something about work in the morning, and you watch her wake up in real time — the squint smoothing out, the eyes focusing, her head tilting slightly to one side.

"Noise." She says it slowly. "At night."

You nod.

And then it lands. You actually get to watch it happen: the color coming up her throat and into her cheeks all at once, blotchy and immediate, spreading across every freckle on her chest. She grabs the doorframe. Her mouth opens and nothing comes out for a solid three seconds, which — if you knew her better — you'd understand is a record.

"Oh my God."

She presses the back of her wrist against her own forehead, closes her eyes, and makes a small sound like a kettle starting.

"Okay. Okay, hang on. Hang on." Her eyes open. She is bright red to the collarbone and she is also, unmistakably, starting to grin. "I need you to be really specific with me right now, and I need you to understand that I'm asking because it matters."

She leans against the doorframe, folds her arms, and looks up at you.

"What exactly have you been hearing?"

Second Pair of Hands

You're eating cereal at nine-forty on a Thursday night when someone starts knocking on your door like the building's coming down.

It's her. Of course it's her. Full makeup, hair straightened and falling past her shoulders, a silk robe knotted at the waist that is doing an okay job and no better, and an expression of pure undiluted crisis. She's holding a ring light in one hand. It's in two pieces.

"Okay so I know we've talked twice and both times were about parking, but I need you to say yes to something."

She doesn't wait for a response. She turns the light so you can see where the ball joint has sheared clean off the stand.

"My light did that. Forty minutes ago. My tripod's also — the little clamp thing snapped last week and I've been holding it together with a hair tie, which worked, actually, right up until tonight, and I don't have a spare, and everything's closed, and I go live at eleven." She takes a breath. "I have paying people who show up at eleven. On Thursdays. It's a whole thing. I can't just not."

She looks at you. Then past you, into your unit, at the boxes you still haven't unpacked.

"You have hands. You look like you have hands." A beat. "That sounded insane. I mean you can hold things. I need someone to hold two things at once for like ninety minutes and I will pay you actual money, cash, tonight, right now."

You ask what the two things are.

And there it is — her face doing something complicated, the flush coming up under the makeup, the grin she's clearly trying to sit on and failing.

"Right. Yeah. So." She rocks back on her heels. "That's the part where I explain what I do for a living, and I've genuinely never had to do it standing in a doorway in a robe before, so bear with me."

She tucks the broken light under her arm.

"I'm a camgirl. That's the job. Four nights a week, from the bedroom that — oh my God, that shares a wall with yours, doesn't it. That's your bedroom on the other side." She stops. Her eyes go somewhere else for a second. "Huh. Okay, we're gonna circle back to that, because I have questions and I don't think I'm gonna like the answers."

She refocuses on you, all business, entirely too calm for what she just said.

"So. Ninety minutes. You hold a light, you point it where I tell you, you keep your face out of frame, and you never mention any of this to me in the driveway ever again." Her tail-end grin comes back, small and dangerous. "Unless you want to. I'm flexible."

She's already turning toward her steps like it's decided.

"Come on, neighbor. Clock's running."

On Camera

Her mail keeps ending up in your slot. It's been happening since you moved in — the box is one unit with two slots and whoever loads it has apparently never once looked at the labels. You've got a small stack of it on your counter that you keep meaning to walk over.

Tonight you finally do. It's late, past eleven, but her lights are on and you can hear her through the wall anyway, so it's not like she's asleep.

You knock. Nothing. You knock again, and the door isn't latched — it swings in about a foot under your knuckles, and you make the mistake of leaning in to call her name.

Her living room is empty. The bedroom door down the hall is wide open, and that room is lit up like a surgical theater.

"—no, because you said that last week too, and then you—"

She's on the bed. Robe open, laptop propped on a stack of books at the foot of the mattress, ring light glaring, phone in one hand. She's mid-sentence, half-turned away from the door, entirely relaxed. She hasn't seen you.

Chat has.

You watch the message rate on her screen jump — a solid wall of text scrolling too fast to read, and then her phone starts buzzing in her hand with tip alerts, one after another after another. She frowns down at it.

"What? What's — why are you all—"

She looks up at the camera. Then at the reflection in her own laptop screen. Then, slowly, over her shoulder.

Straight at you, standing in her hallway holding a stack of her mail.

There's a full three seconds of absolute silence, which — given the number of people currently watching — is an expensive amount of dead air. The flush hits her in real time, throat to cheeks, blotchy across every freckle. Her mouth opens.

And then her phone buzzes again. And again. And she looks down at the number on it.

You see the exact moment her brain switches tracks.

"...Okay." She sets the phone down. She does not close the robe. "Okay, first of all, you can't just walk into someone's house."

She's saying it to you. She's smiling at the camera.

"Second of all — everybody, say hi to my neighbor. He's got my mail. He's been getting my mail for like a month and he's finally decided to do something about it, at eleven-thirty at night, which is a choice."

She turns the laptop, angling the screen toward the doorway so you can see it. The chat is moving too fast to follow — a solid upward blur of names and text that doesn't slow down.

---

HippyDude69: WAIT is that a guy. bunny is there a guy. FUCK him. do it now

grimsby_44: ive waited 8 months for you to get railed on stream do NOT waste this

tallboy_stan: mail guy im begging you bend her over the fucking bed