My girlfriend Beth Chancey and I are in a long-distance relationship. Free Wi-Fi became our best friends, and whenever we managed to squeeze in time together, it was always full of treasured and personal moments. Although we did make visits to our different towns, it was so infrequent that regular communication via phone was all we had most of the time.
I would get off from my job as a bartender at night and call her. She would often wake up, and we would have phone or cam sex.
Some people will never understand the allure of such a dynamic. This has always been one of my favorite kinks, embarrassing as it may be to admit. Something about the sultry tone of my woman’s voice, as we explored our fantasies, tied elements of a relationship together.
“What are you wearing?” I asked her one night as I heard her deep exhalations on the other end.
“Why aren’t you worried?”
“W-wait, what?”
“I asked you why aren’t you naked?”
Her reiteration of the question sounded so phonetically different from what my ears had heard originally, but I pushed my misunderstanding to the side and we lost ourselves in the teasing, the flirtation, and the indulgence.
“I won’t tell anyone,” she said as the noise of her blankets rustling over her naked form smothered me in waves of sound.
“What do you mean?”
“About what you did, silly.”
*
I thought about her words the next day as I mixed drinks and eagerly awaited for my shift to end.
I went home and immediately called her.
“I’m a bit unsure as to what you meant when we last talked,” I said.
“Oh. I thought you enjoyed it. I don’t remember saying anything as much as I moaned.”
“That part was amazing. No, I meant…my secret. Do you mean our role-playing? Your tone didn’t indicate that. Should I feel guilty about something within our…world, our fantasy life? I can tone it down if you want me to. Maybe I’ve been too forward or aggressive lately.”
She started laughing for what felt like ten minutes until she cleared her throat and began speaking again.
“No,” she said. “That’s not what I intended at all. How about we both get naked and discuss this further?”
The lizard part of my brain could do nothing but give in.
As her gasps of pleasure seemed to fill my body with a near-electrical burst, in between the sudden emanations of bliss she said something that sent a chill through me.
“You killed that boy at summer camp,” she said. “Twenty-two years ago. You and your gutter friends thought it would be funny to have him climb the tree since you stole his favorite pair of pants when he was asleep and put them on top of the tree limb. You watched, laughed, and mocked him as he scaled the tree, and then you threw stones at him until he fell off. I know you reflect on it a lot, but it’s not with guilt so much as it is the fear that someone will find out about it, or one of those buddies will make a mistake and confess to it.”
I stopped. I wiped the sweat from my brow and chewed on her words. Alarming as they were, she was right.
No one but my three friends and I knew about it.
Or so I thought.
For the first time, I hung up on her.
* I texted all of my friends involved in that incident.
“Do you know Beth? One in Ohio?”
The question was direct and without any obvious intent. Two of them responded within a day with the obligatory question marks followed by a “no.”
My mind had created a conspiracy where she had fooled around with some of my friends, but that admittedly did not make any sense. I had never given her the names of any of my childhood pals, let alone introduced her to any of them, so it did not logically add up that she would have somehow found them.
I began to do my research on the victim, the boy who had died at the hands of my social circle. Us.
It was something that I was always afraid to look into, for both emotional and pragmatic reasons. I selfishly did not want a cyber trail connecting me to the tragedy.
I found out his name by looking up the boy’s demise on the encrypted and poached internet of a cafe near my house.
What I found left me haunted.
The boy’s full name was Philip Chancey.