Just Between Us (The Kings)

After the prank,my day continued to be an absolute clusterfuck.

The artist interview turned out to be a dud, so the shop would still be short-staffed until I could fill the chair. Given the influx of tourists, that undoubtedly meant longer hours for everyone. Sylvie had bent Luna’s ear about me being a man-size child, and Luna had taken it out on me the rest of the afternoon with heavy sighs and eye rolls. She even ordered Momma Faye’s Barbecue for dinner without asking me if I wanted any.

Admittedly, that stung a little.

At the end of the night, I also had to turn away a group of young women celebrating a bachelorette party. They were all visibly intoxicated, and I refused to give them matching finger tattoos of a cartoon penis wearing a top hat.

First of all, finger tattoos fade, and they fade fast—I would know. Secondly, while the design was funny as hell, no one gets inked at King Tattoo drunk or high or otherwise incapacitated.

The decibel of shrill, unhappy screeching that occurred when I broke the news that they’d have to come back sober was deafening. In fact, my head was still throbbing.

All in all, it had been a shitty day.

Karma is such a bitch.

Well into the evening, my thoughts had wandered to the mysterious woman from the morning. I felt like a grade-A asshole for how that whole scene had shaken out. She was the unwitting victim of my childish impulse, and I couldn’t help but let the guilt wash over me in the quiet comfort of my truck as I pulled into my driveway.

I lived on the outskirts of Outtatowner, and my neighborhood was a quaint mix of dated historical houses and newly built luxury summer homes. It was close enough to town that I could pop into the tattoo shop whenever I needed to, but far enough that I could take off on a run and get lost for a while.

I pulled my truck down the long driveway as my house came into view. My smile pulled up at the corner. The cobalt-blue home sat on a bluff that overlooked Lake Michigan. It had a rounded arch-top front door and flower boxes overflowing with blooms beneath the dormered windows. The white picket fence was a detail I’d added after I moved in, and it still made me smile.

No one expected a man often described as scary or imposing or menacing to live by the lake in a cute blue house with a picket fence—and yet there we were.

I fucking loved that house.

I unlocked the door to let myself inside and allowed my keys to skitter across the shiny white quartz of the kitchen island. The windows had been left open, so the soft lake air wafted in. I sucked in a lungful and listened to the quiet hum of my home.

It was a place where I could shed the stress of the day and take a quiet break from chiseling away at the daily expectations of others. I rolled my shoulders and let out a groan. Tattooing meant long, weird hours hunched over random body parts, contorting to get the angles just right.

If the knot in my lower back was any indication, I’d be sore in the morning. I may only be in my thirties, but damn if I wasn’t starting to feel the effects of a physically demanding job.

I needed a drink, maybe a good lay—anything to dissolve the tension in my body and help me forget the fact that it seemed like the lives of everyone around me were barreling ahead full steam and I was merely treading water.

My eyes flicked to the ring light tucked into the corner of my living room. For the past few years, my personal life had veered into a strange and wonderful direction that shocked even me sometimes.

I swiped my hand across my eyes and opted for a shower before hunkering down on the couch. Too worn out to create any new content, I grabbed my phone to check my messages.

I tapped the Pulse app—a subscription-based social media platform where millions of users bought and created content. You could find anything from fitness programs to musicians sharing exclusive music to any kind of virtual sex work you could imagine.

When I had first downloaded the app, one local offering was people employing “cuddle partners” to fill the intimacy gaps in their relationships. Naturally, as a joke, I had signed up as Lee Sullivan so his email inbox would be flooded with information regarding local cuddlers who were only there to help him reach optimal intimacy.

Trouble was, in order to actually receive the direct messages, users needed to be verified through the app.

To get around it, I roped Lark, the woman who later married Lee’s brother, to vouch for me. When she needed my help out of a jam, she reluctantly agreed to pretend to be a personal reference for me. With her fake referral passing all the checks, I signed up for the site and directed all cuddle DMs straight to Lee’s stolen email address.

I swore Lark to secrecy.

The plan was flawless.

Well, except for the small detail that Lark was still under the impression I was so lonely and motherless that I required a cuddle partner. Her pitying glances and soft smiles were worth knowing Lee wouldn’t be able to escape the incessant flood of direct messages.

To this day I would still get the giggles thinking about the confused look on Lee’s face when hordes of professional cuddlers were offering up their services.

A few sleepless nights later, I doomscrolled my way into discovering that the content from Pulse’s creators was severely lacking in depth and authenticity. After one too many videos of pasty men with warbling voices promising women the best night of their lives, I decided to give it a try.

For the ladies, obviously.

Women didn’t need these men fumbling around and posturing. The comments themselves spoke volumes. In my lived experience, women really didn’t need a man at all. Sometimes they just needed a little confidence boost to fully bloom.

On a whim I recorded myself, shirtless but without revealing my face, intimately role-playing a conversation with a fictional woman and simply asking about her day.

I was direct.

I was confident.

I was flirtatious.

I was me.

It didn’t take long for a few messages to trickle in. Some were compliments stroking my ego, while others were thanking me for speaking the way they wished their partners would. About a year ago, one user in particular slid into my DMs, hell-bent on busting my balls.

She was biting and witty but had piqued my interest.

My content shifted to me talking directly to her in my mind, and that was when things really blew up for me. Every woman on that app felt as if I were speaking directly to them. It was personal. Intimate. I was speaking to a singular woman . . . but I was the only person who knew that.

Once those videos went viral, everything changed.

Initially, making intimate partner content was a fun way to blow off a little steam. My alternate persona, Mr.Right.Now, became a safe space for women, and a few men, to have someone with a calm, deep voice ask about their day or role-play a bit of confident, postsex aftercare. I hadn’t planned on it being the cash cow it turned into. No one knew about the money I made from Pulse and how that money was my ticket out from under my father.

It was fun. Harmless.

Nothing about the prerecorded video clips were overtly explicit, and I never got fully naked.

Nah . . . the spicier content I saved exclusively for the one woman who refused to be impressed by me.

My jaw clenched in anticipation as I swiped up to open my notifications. My gaze flicked to the most recent private post I had sent directly to her inbox.

Unread.

Damn.

Bummed she hadn’t seen it yet, I scrolled up through the private message history I shared with MsBlackCat. She was the unexpected delight who’d popped into my direct messages to bust my balls.

MsBlackCat: Why?

One word. That was all it took and I had been utterly intrigued.

Mr.Right.Now: Why what?

MsBlackCat: Just why? Why do this? You know that no real man talks like this, right?

Mr.Right.Now: Some of us do. Maybe you’re just dating the wrong men.

Normally I never answered direct messages, but her gruff and dismissive message caught me off guard and actually made me laugh. When I checked her profile, I found that since she’d created her profile, she had never created any content of her own and only ever left one comment.

One.

And it was to me.

Plus, I had always been too playful to let a half-hearted dig go unchecked. That was probably why I had chosen to poke back.

MsBlackCatdidn’t respond after my jab. Not until three days later when I posted a new video speaking to her and intentionally referencing a real man. She filled my inbox with her familiar snark.

MsBlackCat:Really? No real man I’ve ever met orders me around and leaves with his balls still attached. You’re ridiculous.

Mr.Right.Now: You’ve got it all wrong. It’s not about him ordering you around. It’s your partner being in control so you don’t have to be. You should try it sometime.

MsBlackCat: Being told by some strange man on the internet how to touch myself? A man who won’t even show his face? Please.

Mr.Right.Now: I like when you say please . . . if you ask nicely I can give you what you need.

MsBlackCat: Let me guess . . . I can pay extra to have “exclusive access” to your private content? As if I don’t know every sad sap viewing it thinks it’s just for her.

I smiled. There was no pulling one over on that one.

Mr.Right.Now: If you wanted a free access code, all you had to do was ask nicely.