The bar had always been pretty fucking low, but I still thought less of myself as I hovered over the thumbnail of a chick with tits bigger than her head and actually, literally, licked my lips with anticipation.
‘BadBeaver69.’
It wasn’t even a website for porn. She bobbed around in a sea of nerds vying for an extra view and won me over by a goddamn landslide. I clicked her face and watched the chat light up with heart emojis and that flushed orange one with its tongue sticking out.
The girl herself was drop dead gorgeous and even more stunning in motion. She stared at the camera with her sparkling blue eyes and licked her lips sensually. Her fingers guided themselves slowly over her body, pulling lightly at the hems of her silk shorts, prompting a surge of imagination to my brain and blood to quite a different area.
My adam’s apple worked up and down as I gulped. The urge to free my throbbing manhood and go enthusiastically to town was strong, but the idea felt wrong somehow. My balls ached and I wondered why on Earth I’d chosen then to develop a conscience about such things.
There was a tiny square of gameplay tucked up in a corner of the screen, presumably in compliance with the site’s rules, but I didn’t see a controller in the girls hands. Instead, she was beckoning me towards the monitor and mouthing something, light from her LEDs twinkling in her lip gloss.
“Give me five dollars and I’ll say your name baby,” she moaned softly.
“Pfft,” I snorted, hovering over the donate button. “I’m not that desperate.” But clearly I was, because I couldn’t refrain from hitting the button and filling out my information.
“You couldn’t be anymore lame,” I scolded myself aloud.
I okayed the transaction and went back to staring at the girl with my mouth agape, practically drooling as I waited and prayed for her to notice my donation.
“Ooo,” she cooed as a sound effect played, “thank you for the donation, Jonathan Wade.”
A shiver tingled up my spine as she winked at the camera and blew me a kiss. Not from arousal, mind you. I’d noticed something in the picture change when her eye fluttered shut. The effect was brief but my attention certainly wasn’t wandering.
It was as though two images had been layered one on top of the other, and for that one split-second had been knocked out of sync. Others in the chat had spotted it too.
GargleBlaster272827: Dafuq was tht? U using a filter?
BodyPillowEnjoyer420: Uhhh Beaver? You good???
Slutforcandyxxxx: Yooo u ugly af!
BB69Loverman: Please tell me that was just a glitch…
The girl- if it even was a girl- basked in the glow of her screen for a moment with an unreadable expression, before the feed cut out abruptly.
Users in the chat continued to debate, some expressing anger at being scammed out of money while others fought desperately to defend her. Personally, I just felt like my penis had been led astray and exited the stream with a new floppy friend.
I pushed away from the desk and stretched. My stomach had been letting out a series of weird growls, so I headed off to burrow around in the kitchen for scraps. I returned with a plate of microwaved garlic bread and tore off a chunk as I sat back in my seat. I frowned at the monitor that should have been idling on my desktop wallpaper.
There was a video playing. It was dark, but occasional passes of light flitted over what was clearly the interior of a moving car. The engine hummed and the camera shook with every bump. I wiggled the mouse and realised that my cursor was locked away in the upper left corner.
Though bare-bones compared to the streaming website’s, there was a chat function here as well, alight with frantic chatters wondering what was going on.
I tried hitting ‘alt+F4’, but it appeared in the text box displayed as a string of blinking characters. The thought of yanking the cord straight out of the wall occurred to me, just as the camera swung around to face what looked like a house.
“If you can see this,” a woman’s voice said from out of sight, “it means you saw. 116 of you sad sacks of shit caught a glimpse of the real me. I know it wasn’t any of your faults, you were all just sitting with your cocks out doing what you do best. It’s just… I’d prefer to remain anonymous, is all.”
She set the camera atop the dashboard, ensured the house was framed perfectly in its center, and popped open the driver’s side door. The woman, BadBeaver69 I presumed, appeared a moment later illuminated in the headlights. She spun to give us a quick wave; her body as incredible as ever in a tiny yellow sundress that left nothing to the imagination, but her face was concealed under a cheap plastic beaver mask.
Something silver glinted in her right hand.
She turned back toward the house as the front door opened, a beam of yellow light falling on her from inside. A scrawny man filled the doorway with a laptop balanced on one arm and an astonished look etched into his face. Beaver rushed him without missing a beat, taking him by surprise and plunging the thing she held deep into his gut. Once, twice… a dozen times- I lost count.
My heart hammered against the walls of my chest and my mind creaked with the load it was buried under. It has to be fake, I thought. It has to be. But no matter how hard I wracked my brain, I just didn’t understand how it could be.
Beaver returned a few minutes later, both hands caked in sleeves of red that extended all the way up to her elbows. Her fingers were twisted around the matted hair of a decapitated head swinging madly in her grip.
“That was Henry Thompson, he’d donated 200 dollars to the channel.” She said sweetly as she settled back behind the camera. There was a sick thump that I imagined was what a head being thrown into the back seat of a car might sound like. “A real shame. Let’s see, who’s next?” After a short pause she let out a “Hmph” and moved the camera back into the passenger seat.
The car purred into motion again.
“116 people… well, 115 now. It might take me a while to get to all of you, but don’t worry! I’ll be reading your name out eventually.”