Nina is kneeling on the sheets next to her, nervously fidgeting with Lisa’s pillow, watching her friend tap the keyboard on the mattress in front of her; Lisa is stretched out on her belly, her white sundress pulled up a little, revealing the backs her knees, the soles of her bare feet facing the ceiling, her legs crossed at the ankles, as she plays with the laptop at the foot of the bed. She is holding her glasses in her hand, revealing her wide almond-colored eyes.
Nina wasn’t sure what to wear — what do you wear for this, to start off? Lingerie? Underwear? Nothing? — so she opted for her pink, very feminine peasant blouse and a new pair of loose- fitting blue jean shorts.
She feels very warm and can feel a flush beginning on her face. She touches it reflexively and looks at the screen to see if it is obvious. The image of the two of them, Lisa’s face close to the cam as she taps on the keyboard, her black hair glossy and smooth, resting halfway down her back, and Nina next to her on her knees, her softly curled brown hair brushed back and falling to her shoulders. Her face is definitely a little red, she decides, but it’s not that noticeable. She touches her face again and is slightly amused at the image on the screen doing the same.
“I guess so.”
“OK,.” Lisa makes a couple of authoritative taps on the keyboard. “Your sign and your birth year are your name. Libra, right?” She waits for Nina to nod, and then continues.
“That’s what I punched in for you. You can change it later if you want.” She lowers her legs so they are splayed across the pillow behind her. Nina can’t help gazing briefly at her; her tiny dancer’s feet with toenails painted red, her calves, the muscles in of her knees; her eyes following her legs to the place where her bare thighs disappear into the hem of her dress.
It hits her that this is the first time in her life that she has looked at Lisa, her best friend since grammar school, and through high school up to now, in anything resembling a sexual way.
Lisa’s voice makes her jump. “Nina? Pay attention. There’s going to be a quiz after this.” This is a time for nervous laughter, something the two of them do all the time, but this time Nina just looks at her straightfaced. She is a little too nervous for nervous laughter.
Lisa goes on. “There’s going to be dozens of messages, some cool, some dickish. There’s no way to respond to them all, so just pick one or two and follow them. Or just ignore them and do what you want. They’ll send credits – tokens – anyway.”
Nina fumbles for her words. “How soon do I get, well, naked?” It’s the first time she has acknowledged this part out loud to Lisa. Her face flushes a little again but at the word “naked” for some reason it causes just the tiniest surge in her pussy. There’s something about the word. She’s always felt that, at least a little.
She thinks of the two of them, sneaking glances at the sexy parts of her mother’s romance novels, nervously reading aloud passages about the heroine standing “nude before her lover, her breasts heaving as he pulled her body closer, her passions erupting in their embrace…”, not realizing the poor quality of the writing, only imagining the maiden’s nakedness being taken in by the eyes of the swarthy hero and feeling that tiny twinge, that little surge, that she feels now.
And, of course, later on, discovering pages on the computer, seeing women and men, real women and men, naked and –
“Whenever you want.” Lisa interrupts Nina’s reverie as she shifts the laptop to eliminate herself from the picture. “You want to tease them for a while but you don’t want them to get sick of waiting and move on to someone else.” She turns to Nina. There is a different look in her eye, and she hesitates before continuing. “Let me know when you want me to turn it on.”
Nina nods and looks again at herself on the screen. Her heart is pounding.
# # # # # # # # #
You’re making way too much of this, she thinks. Lisa’s been doing this for a month and she’s been fine with it. One of the few secrets either of them has kept from the other, and that was only for a few weeks, until last week, when, on the way to school, Lisa pulled her father’s car over to the curb and said “Nina, I have to tell you something.”
Her first thought was that Lisa was pregnant, since she had described in detail about a month ago how her boyfriend had slipped out of his condom and came inside her. It was interesting because every time she had had sex before — she has been with three boys since her eighteenth birthday, six months before, it had been with protection and this was the first time she had actually felt a man’s cum inside her; it was worrisome because the last thing she wanted to do before graduation was get pregnant.
Instead, she confessed to Nina that she had been working on a webcam site, making some money, and thought she might want to try too. Nina was a little surprised, since the two of them usually shared everything — descriptions of Nina spying on her brother masturbating in his bedroom, Lisa confessing to masturbating with a hairbrush, the two of them describing their losses of virginity (Nina’s was just last month, on the night of her eighteenth birthday, and it hurt like hell) — and Nina was shocked that Lisa would do something so out there, so public, and not tell her.
“It’s…exciting,” Lisa said. “I seriously think you’d like it. I know you.”
Exposed out there? People watching you? Nina shook her head. “I don’t think so. What if someone from school, or the neighborhood, or, ugh! — my brother — sees me?”
“They block your area from your cam. I guess someone could hack it, but it’s not likely. And if they do, who’s going to admit it?”
Lisa looked over at her best friend and pictured her on a computer chair, or a couch, or a bed, caressing herself. She felt her cheeks turn red at the idea. “I don’t think so,” she said again.
But the idea sounded new, and interesting, and, to use a decrepit word, naughty, and if germinated in her brain for days, creating daydreams and midnight fantasies until finally she told Lisa she’d give it a shot. Why not? Naked. That word again. People watching her; looking at her. Uncovered. Nude. Bare. Just her out there, her and her body, for better or worse.
Yes. Maybe she could.
So they decided it meet here this evening, in Lisa’s bedroom, the same place where they used to talk about pop stars and boys in their class and do homework and read her mother’s salacious novels and first discovered and giggled at porn sites on the computer.
Yes. Yes. Maybe she could.
# # # # # # # # #
Even now, fully dressed, Nina is hyper-aware of the nude body beneath her clothes, the round, pink-nippled breasts hidden by her shirt and bra; her flat, pale belly; the slightly-trimmed dark pubic hair hidden in her shorts.
She glances over at Lisa and imagines her in front of the cam in front of a largely unseen audience, playing with and rubbing her milk chocolate colored nipples, her fingers snaking into her bare pussy, her eyes widening as she penetrates herself…
Oh, my God, she thinks. The only time she’s seen her naked is after gym class, in the shower, or changing clothes; certainly not sexual things, but somehow, right now, she seems to remember every detail of her friend’s body. Her thoughts about her friend embarrass her a little and her cheeks grow a little warmer.
Suddenly, almost without warning, a tickling sensation develops in her pussy. It begins to feel warm and moist. She knows the feeling and it disconcerts her a little.
Not here, of all places!
She shakes her head to focus. The figure on the screen, her cam looking back at her, looks like someone else, almost: someone older, someone hotter, someone willing to show her undraped body to a group of strangers. This is not her.
She takes a breath. Well…maybe it is.
“Ok, let’s go.”
# # # # # # # # #
Within ten minutes Nina has lost track of the names popping up on the screen and the comments. Up in the top right-hand corner of the screen it says there are 16 people in the room.
She is still dressed, unsure if she should be relieved by that or disappointed.
“Not bad,” Lisa says. She’s moved over to the left, still on the bed, but just out of camera range. “If they invite you to look at them — about half of them do, the other half are 50 year olds saying they are 25 — you can click ‘view’ next to their names.
Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes … not.”
The dialogue box on the right side of the screen rattles off comments.
“Hey bb.”
“Show pussy.”
“Wanna see my dick?”
“Good morning.”
“Good evening.”
“Got a bf?”
“Show pussy.”
All Nina has managed is a few “hellos” and one or two “thanks” when the bell rings to indicate tokens have been sent.
“I didn’t expect it do be this fast paced,” she says.
Lisa shifts a little on the bed. “I know. Just calm down and set your own pace. Basically this is your room and you make the decisions. Do things when you want to do them. But, like I said, don’t let them wait too long. There are nearly twenty people here waiting to see you undress.” Lisa laughs and takes a breath. “And one girl here.”
Nina glances at her friend and back to the camera. She takes a breath and slowly pulls her top up, revealing her stomach. Even that small movement, that tiny reveal, causes her nipples to tighten under her thin bra. She slips her right hand up under the blouse and begins to caress her nipples through the delicate material.
The tickling feeling of touching and rubbing her breasts has always caused a strange series of aches in her; a vague but unmistakable yearning and nameless desire. In response to this she lifts the blouse over her head, drops it next to her, and begins to tease her tits with her fingertips. She sees on the screen that her nipples are only barely hidden by the nearly transparent bra.
The computer begins to chime rapidly, more tokens being sent from behind the screen.
“There you go, bb.”
“Let’s see those tits.”
“Show pussy”
“Hit my cam.”