Chapter 44: Silence and Screens
The phone screen glowed against the dark of Eli’s bedroom. Kimora’s face was pixelated just enough to make her expression soft, her smile knowing. She’d propped her own phone somewhere, the angle showing the generous swell of her breasts above a lacy black bra. The background was unfamiliar—a beige wall, a generic hotel painting.
“You look comfortable,” she said, her voice a low purr through the speaker. She bit her lower lip. “Too comfortable. I think you should be a little less dressed.”
Eli’s heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat of guilt and defiant arousal. The scent of Simone’s vanilla lotion was still on his palms from lifting Micah. He shoved the thought away. “Yeah? You gonna help with that?”
“Maybe.” Her fingers drifted to the front clasp of her bra. She didn’t open it. She traced the lace, watching his reaction. “What’s got you all pent up today, Eli? You seem… tense.”
He let out a short, humorless laugh. “Life.” His own hand was still tucked into the waistband of his sweatpants, gripping himself through the fabric. He was painfully hard. “Stop playing with the merchandise and show me something.”
“So demanding.” With a click, the bra came undone. She peeled the cups away slowly, letting her full breasts spill free. Her nipples were dark, already peaked. She pinched one between her fingers, rolling it, her eyes closing briefly. “Mmm. Your turn. Let me see that dick I’ve been thinking about.”
Eli shoved his sweatpants and boxers down to his thighs. His cock sprang free, thick and curving upward, the head flushed a deep purple and already wet. He fisted it, giving it two slow, tight pumps for the camera. Her breath hitched audibly.
“Fuck, Eli. That’s a beautiful cock.” She leaned closer, the camera focusing on her cleavage, then her mouth. She licked her lips. “I wish I could taste it. Feel that fat head on my tongue.”
“You and me both.” The fantasy was visceral. He pictured her on her knees in this very room, her makeup perfect, her mouth stretched wide. He stroked himself in earnest now, his thumb swiping over the slit, spreading the moisture. The friction was good, but it was her performance that fueled him. She was putting on a show, and he was the sole, rapt audience.
“Touch yourself for me,” he commanded, his voice rough. “Let me see that pretty pussy. Get it wet for me.”
Kimora smiled, a wicked, complicit thing. She shifted, leaning back against what looked like a headboard. The camera angle dropped, following her hand as it slipped into the waistband of her leggings. She wasn’t wearing panties. Her fingers disappeared into the dark, curly hair between her legs. She moaned, a soft, genuine sound, as she found her clit.
“So slick already,” she whispered, her eyes on the screen, on him. “Just from looking at you. From hearing your voice.”
“Show me.”
She brought her fingers up to the camera. They glistened in the low light. Then she returned them to her folds, parting herself, giving him a blurry, tantalizing view of pink, swollen flesh. She circled her clit with two fingers, her hips giving a small, involuntary jerk. “Imagine it’s your tongue, Eli. You were always so good with your mouth.”
A bolt of possessive heat shot through him. He remembered. Dorm room nights, her thighs shaking around his ears. He pumped his cock faster, his grip tight and urgent. The sound of his hand moving, the slick noise from her end of the call, her soft whimpers—it built a feedback loop of raw need.
“I’m gonna come,” she gasped suddenly, her movements becoming frantic, circular. “I’m gonna come thinking about you fucking me. About you filling me up. Tell me you want to. Tell me.”
“I wanna fuck that tight pussy raw,” he grunted, the filthy words tumbling out easily. “I wanna bend you over and pound it until you scream. I wanna come so deep inside you it leaks out for hours.”
“Yes! God, yes!” Her body bowed, her free hand clawing at the sheets. Her mouth opened in a silent cry as her orgasm hit, her features tightening then going slack with pleasure. Eli watched, mesmerized, as she rode it out, her fingers working her through the pulses.
Seeing her come pushed him to the edge. His balls drew up tight. The pressure coiled at the base of his spine. “Fuck, Kimora, I’m there…”
“Do it,” she panted, recovering, her eyes heavy-lidded. “Come for me. Let me see it.”
With a choked groan, Eli let go. Thick, white ropes of cum shot onto his stomach and chest, striping his skin. His body shuddered through the release, each pulse wracking him, milking him empty. He kept stroking, more slowly now, until he was soft and oversensitive in his hand.
He slumped back against his pillow, the phone tumbling to his side, the screen now showing his ceiling. His breath sawed in and out of his lungs. The room smelled like sex and his own come.
“Wow,” Kimora’s voice came, tinny and post-coital. “That was… a good way to start my Saturday.”
Eli grunted, reaching for a t-shirt to wipe himself clean. A deep, hollow shame was already seeping into the space the pleasure had vacated. He grabbed the phone, bringing her face back into view. She was smiling, rearranging her clothes, looking utterly satisfied. “Yeah. It was.”
“You should come see me sometime. For real. Not just a digital show.” She winked.
“Maybe.” He had no intention of driving to wherever she was. This was a transaction, a pressure valve, exactly as Marcus had said. The symmetry made him nauseous.
They exchanged a few more empty pleasantries before hanging up. Eli lay in the silence, the sticky residue cooling on his skin. From the living room, he heard the soft scratch of the record player’s needle finding its groove. A melancholy jazz trumpet began to bleed under his door. Simone’s music. She was home, and she was playing her mourning songs.
He should get up. Shower. Face her. But his limbs were leaden.
In the living room, Simone stood before the record player, her fingers resting on the dusty veneer. She’d heard nothing explicit—his door was too solid, his groans too muted—but she’d heard the low murmur of a female voice through the wall. She’d seen the light under his door an hour ago. She knew.
The trumpet wailed, a sound of pure, lonely blue. She hugged herself, staring at the closed door. She thought of Marcus’s efficient, detached fucking. She thought of Eli’s silent breakfast, his averted eyes. The hollowness inside her expanded, a cold cavity where her heart should be.
She walked to the kitchen, poured a glass of water, and didn’t drink it. She looked at the clean pan in the drying rack. The two plates, washed and put away.
Her phone buzzed. A text from Marcus. Still thinking about you. That was next level. When can I see you again?
She didn’t reply. She typed out a message to Eli instead, her thumbs moving before her brain could formulate a reason. She sent it to the wall, to the man hiding behind it.
We need to talk. Actually talk.
The three dots appeared immediately. Then disappeared. A full minute passed. The jazz record spun to its end, the needle clicking rhythmically in the run-out groove.
His door finally opened.
He stood there, changed into fresh sweats and a hoodie, his hair slightly damp. He looked young and tired. He leaned against the frame, his arms crossed, his gaze flat. “So talk.”
The challenge in his voice was a spark on dry tinder. All her planned words—about fear, about loneliness, about the terrifying abyss opening between them—evaporated. What remained was scorched earth.
“Who was in your room?” The question came out brittle, sharp.
He didn’t flinch. “A friend.”
“A friend you had to hide from to video call? At eleven in the morning?”
“You weren’t here,” he said, his voice dangerously quiet. “Remember? You were out. For waffles.”
The air crackled. She took a step forward. “So that’s your move? I go to breakfast, so you get on a sex call?”
“My move?” A harsh laugh escaped him. “You fucked another man, Simone. In a hotel. You came home smelling like him. You think I give a single, solitary fuck about your moral high ground right now?” He uncrossed his arms, his hands clenching at his sides. “You want to talk? Let’s talk. How was he? Was he better than me? Did he make you come harder?”
Each word was a slap. She welcomed the sting. It was better than the numbness. “He was competent. He was… neat. It was fine.”
“Fine.” Eli repeated the word as if tasting something rotten. “My condolences. Glad you got your money’s worth.”
“It’s not about that!” she shouted, the sound startling both of them. Micah, please, stay asleep, she prayed silently. “It’s about you! And your fucking… distance! Your goddamn secret texts and your study groups with your new little intellectual soulmate! You checked out months ago, Eli! You left me here alone first!”
“So your solution was to spread your legs for the first guy with a decent bank account who looked at you?” His eyes were blazing now, all pretense of calm incinerated. “You think I’m distracted? You’re right. I’m distracted wondering when my girlfriend, the mother of my child, became a cheating fucking cliché!”
“I learned from the master!” she fired back, tears of rage blurring her vision. “What do you call what you just did in there? A spiritual consultation?”
“It was a release!” he roared, taking two strides into the living room, closing the distance between them. “It was nothing! It was a fucking biological function with zero feelings attached! What you did? You went on a date. You let him wine and dine you and then you fucked him. You built a whole goddamn parallel relationship because you were bored!”
They were inches apart now, their chests heaving, their breath mingling in the hostile space between them. The sheer, towering magnitude of their betrayal stood there with them, a third, monstrous presence.
“I was lonely,” she seethed, the truth ripped from a place so deep it scraped raw. “You looked at me and you saw a problem to be managed. A item on your to-do list. He looked at me like I was… interesting. Like I was still a person, not just a mom or a med student or your fucking burden!”
The word ‘burden’ hung in the air. Eli recoiled as if physically struck. All the fight drained from his face, leaving behind something shattered and young. He took a stumbling step back.
“A burden?” His voice was a broken thing. “Is that what I am? What we are? Micah and me? A burden on the great Simone Davis and her brilliant future?”
“No! That’s not what I meant—”
“It’s exactly what you meant.” He looked around the loft, their home, as if seeing it for the first time. The crayon drawings on the fridge, the toy truck in the corner, the life they’d built. His shoulders slumped. The anger was gone, replaced by a defeat so complete it was terrifying. “You know what? Fine. You want to be interesting? Go be interesting. You want a neat, competent fuck who doesn’t burden you with his messy feelings? Go get it.”
He walked past her, not toward the bedroom, but toward the coat closet. He yanked his jacket from a hanger.
“Where are you going?” The panic was instant, icy.
“Out.” He didn’t look at her.
“Eli, wait. Stop. We’re not done.”
“We’ve been done,” he said, his hand on the doorknob. He finally turned. The look he gave her was hollow, a stranger’s look. “We just didn’t have the guts to admit it. You go find your interesting life, Simone. I’ll figure out how to carry my burden.”
He opened the door and walked out into the hallway. The door swung shut behind him with a soft, final click.
Simone stood motionless in the silent apartment. The only sound was the relentless, metronomic click of the needle on the finished record, going around and around in the same empty groove.
The click was a tiny hammer on the bone of her inner ear. Simone stared at the door, at the space where he had been, her lungs refusing to work. Burden. The word echoed in the vacuum he’d left behind, morphing from a weapon she’d thrown into a truth she now wore, a suffocating skin.
She moved first to the record player, lifting the needle with a trembling hand. The sudden silence was worse. It roared. She paced the short length of the living room, her sneakers silent on the hardwood, her mind a frantic scroll of every terrible headline, every night-time news brief about accidents and altercations. He was angry. He was reckless. He was gone.
She snatched her phone from the counter, her fingers finding his name in her recents. She pressed call. It rang.And rang. Her pacing tightened, a caged orbit around the couch they’d found together at a garage sale. The leather was cracked where he always sat.
“Come on, Eli.Pick up. Pick up, you asshole.”
It went to voicemail. His voice, cheerful and recorded weeks ago, was a cruel joke. You know what to do. She hung up before the beep. She called again immediately. Her thumb left a smudge of sweat on the screen.
The engine of his ten-year-old Corolla was still ticking, cooling in the dim light of the parking garage beneath their building. Eli sat in the driver’s seat, his forehead resting against the steering wheel’s worn leather. The silence was a solid thing, pressurized. Her word rang in the hollows of him. Burden.
His phone, face-up on the passenger seat, lit up. SIMONE. The vibration was a frantic insect buzz against the cloth. He watched it. The light painted the shadows of the dashboard a sickly blue. He didn’t reach for it. He focused on the mechanics of breathing, dragging air in through his nose, holding it, letting it seep out through his teeth.
He imagined her in the loft, hovering by the window, her braids a mess from where she’d nervously touched them. He saw the panic in the line of her shoulders. A part of him, a dark, bruised part, was glad for it. Let her worry. Let her feel a fraction of the fucking weight he carried.
The phone went dark. Then, seconds later, it lit up again, buzzing with a persistent, angry urgency. SIMONE. His thumb twitched. His chest was a cage of conflicting impulses: to punish, to comfort, to scream, to crumble. He breathed in again, the garage air tasting of concrete and exhaust. The sound of his own breath, loud in the closed car, was the only anchor.
He saw Micah’s face, sleepy and trusting over breakfast. He saw Simone’s expression in the hotel-room morning, detached and already gone from him. The phone flashed a third time. Her persistence was a spike of fear cutting through the anger. Something cold uncoiled in his gut. What if she wasn’t just calling to fight? What if something had happened?
With a grunt that was more pain than decision, he snatched the phone. He swiped to answer but didn’t bring it to his ear. He placed it on the dashboard, hitting speaker.
“What.” His voice was flat, drained of all its earlier fire, scraped raw.
Her voice burst through, tight with relief and immediate, rekindled fury. “Where the fuck are you? You just walk out like that? In the middle of everything?”
“You said everything that needed saying.” He stared at the stained concrete wall ahead. A drain pipe dripped methodically. “You got more? Add it to the list.”
“Don’t you do that. Don’t you shut down on me now. You walked out! You left!” He could hear the slight tremor beneath the rage, the fear she was trying to outshout.
“You left first!” he shouted, the sound exploding in the car, making him wince. He lowered his voice, forcing it into a brittle calm. “You left for a hotel room. You left for churro waffles. You checked out. So I’m checking out. It’s a mutual fucking departure.”
“We have a son asleep in that apartment, Elijah! You don’t get to just disappear into the night because you’re mad! That’s not how this works!” Her anger was morphing into something sharper, more desperate. “Are you in your car? Are you driving? If you’re driving upset, pull over. Right now.”
The maternal command, the pre-med student’s clinical concern, it grated against the open wound of burden. “I’m parked. I’m sitting. I’m breathing, which is what you’re supposed to do when your girlfriend tells you you’re a weight around her neck.” The drip from the pipe was syncopating with his heartbeat. “Was that the plan? Wear me down until I just… floated away?”
“Stop it. You’re twisting it.” A beat of silence. He heard her swallow. “I’m scared. Okay? I’m scared you’re going to do something stupid. I’m scared you’re going to see her.”
The unspoken name—Aaliyah—hovered in the static between them. It was a confession. Her fear was real, and it was about loss, not just principle.
“Maybe I should,” he said, the words leaving him before he could cage them. “Maybe I should go find someone who looks at me like I’m interesting, too. Seems to be the theme of the season.”
“Don’t.” The word was a plea, stripped bare. “Please don’t. Eli, just… come back. We can’t do this on the phone. We can’t do this while you’re… wherever you are. Just come home.”
Home. The word had a geography—the couch, the screeching record needle, the ghost of Marcus’s cologne on her coat, their son’s soft snores from down the hall. It was a battlefield. It was the only place he had.
He looked at the drip. He counted three falls. “And say what, Simone? What’s left? You showed me what you do when you’re lonely. I showed you what I do when I’m hurt. We’re even. We’re squares. What’s the next move?”
“I don’t know!” she cried, and the sound was ragged, full of tears she was choking back. “But it’s not this. It can’t be this. Just come back. We’ll… we’ll figure out the next move together. Or we’ll sit in the same room and hate each other quietly. But don’t be out there.”
The fight was leaving him, seeping out into the car’s upholstery, leaving a profound and terrifying fatigue. He was so tired. The video call with Kimora felt like something that had happened to another person in another lifetime. It had given him nothing. This, this horrible, gutting connection, was all there was.
“I’m in the garage,” he said, his voice hollow. “Bottom level.”
A sharp, shaky exhale from the speaker. “Okay. Okay. Come up.”
He ended the call. The screen went black, reflecting his own exhausted face back at him. He didn’t move. He sat in the echoing quiet, the memory of her fear a tighter bond than any promise they’d ever made. He put the keys back in the ignition. He didn’t turn them. He just sat, listening to the drip, waiting for the will to move.