The Customers at My Calling Center Kept My Photos

I inherited my uncle’s calling center when I was twenty-six. He had run the business in the neighborhood for a decade: eight booths lined up along a narrow room, a dark wooden counter, and an orange neon sign that flickered every time it rained. When he left it to me, the first thing I did was repaint the walls and change the chairs. The second was learning how to use the system.

The management software was simple. From the counter computer I could see each booth’s time counter, charge for minutes, block or open a session. What I didn’t know at first was that I could also see the customers’ screens in real time.

It took me three months to figure that out. One Tuesday night, with no customers and nothing to do, I was going through the menu options when a grid appeared with eight small boxes, each one representing a booth. Only three were active. I clicked without thinking, out of curiosity, and booth number four’s screen filled my monitor.

The man in booth four was someone I knew by sight: he lived two blocks away, owned a hardware store on the corner of Lavalle, and I had served him dozens of times. What was on his screen was a porn movie.

A woman on her knees was sucking a huge cock with both hands, saliva dripping down her chin, her made-up eyes full of tears. A brutal close-up, no cuts, no music: only the wet sound of mouth on the glans and her muffled moans every time he shoved her all the way to the back of her throat. I watched the hardware store owner’s hand, from the angle of the booth webcam I could also activate, going slow up and down beneath the desk. His pants were open. His dick was out, swollen and red, and he worked it with a closed fist without hurrying, setting his rhythm to match the woman on the screen.

I closed the window immediately. I stood up, went to the bathroom, splashed water on my face, and sat back down. My heart was racing, though I didn’t really understand why. It had been two seconds of someone else’s screen. It was nothing major.

But I opened the grid again.

***

I didn’t do it every night. I told myself it was wrong, that it was an invasion of privacy, that if anyone found out I could get into trouble. But temptation was more persistent than guilt. I started slowly: a quick look here, a few more seconds there. I learned to move behind the counter without lifting my eyes in any obvious way, while on the small monitor no one else could see, the grid stayed open.

Most of the men who came to the calling center at night jerked off watching porn. Not all of them, but enough to surprise me. There was one who came in with his own headphones and always chose the back booth, the one farthest from the door; he would pull his pants down to his ankles as soon as he shut the door and wouldn’t pull them back up until he came. There was another who came every Thursday without fail, never asked for more than twenty minutes, and used every second: he’d come in with his dick already half hard, sit down, and in less than a minute he was already working himself with his right hand while his left clicked video thumbnails. There was a young guy, a student of something, who sometimes watched and sometimes wrote in a notepad he took from his pocket; he’d write things while still moving his hand beneath the desk, and I didn’t understand what he was jotting down but I imagined it.

At first I limited myself to watching without processing too much. They were distant screens, moving figures, sound that didn’t reach the counter. It was voyeurism, I knew that. But I told myself the software technically allowed it and that no one was being harmed.

Until I saw what they did with my photos.

***

I have an account on a social network where I upload pictures now and then. Not provocative photos, just normal things: me at the beach last summer, me at a gathering with friends, me behind the counter smiling with a cup of coffee in my hand. Nothing I thought was especially striking.

One Friday night, with four booths occupied, I opened the grid as I usually did. I quickly checked the first, the second, the third. The fourth stopped me.

It was one of the men from the neighborhood. Mid-forties, graying hair, came two or three times a week. I knew him from greeting him as he came in and left, from charging him for minutes with the same smile as always. What was on his screen was my social network profile.

My photos. Mine.

He was looking at my photos and, at the same time, he had a small window open on the left with a video playing: a woman who looked like me — brunette, medium-sized tits, the same slightly crooked smile — getting fucked from behind over a kitchen table, with the guy grabbing her by the hair. And the graying-haired hardware store owner had his cock in his hand. Fully out, rock hard, pressed against the edge of the desk, and he was stroking it slowly with two fingers and his thumb while staring straight at my beach photo, the one in the black bikini from last summer. He licked his palm, spat on it, kept going. I saw the strand of spit shining on his fist. I saw the vein along the shaft swell.

It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing. When I did, I felt something start in my chest and move slowly down to my stomach and from there keep going lower: a warm, strange pressure, a definite throb between my legs that I couldn’t name at that moment but that made me clamp my thighs together under the counter.

He was jerking off to my face. To my body. He was going to come thinking about me.

I didn’t close the grid. I kept watching him. I saw how his hand sped up, how he spread his knees under the booth desk, how his neck went taut. I saw him grab paper napkins with his free hand just before. And then I saw the exact gesture: his mouth open without sound, the brief tremble in his abdomen, the white spurt landing on the crumpled napkins and on his own fingers. He came while looking at the photo of my black bikini. It took him about a minute to breathe normally again. Then he calmly cleaned everything up, pulled up his zipper, washed his hands in the booth’s little sink, and came out to pay me for the minutes as if nothing had happened.

“Good evening,” he said, his voice a little hoarser than usual.

“Good evening,” I answered, handing him his change without my hand shaking.

When he left, I went into the back bathroom, leaned against the closed door, and slipped my hand inside my pants. My panties were soaked. I touched myself from above, circling quickly with two fingers over my swollen clit, and came in less than two minutes, muffling my voice against my own shoulder so the other customers wouldn’t hear me from the booths.

I told myself it was disgusting. I told myself that the next day I’d tell him I preferred he didn’t come back.

I didn’t tell him anything.

***

Over the following weeks I paid closer attention. I discovered he wasn’t the only one. There were at least three men from the neighborhood who had sent me friend requests from fake profiles — names I didn’t recognize, generic profile pictures or ones blatantly stolen from the internet — and who used the local booths to look at what they didn’t want to look at from home.

I discovered that some of them downloaded my photos. They saved them to USB drives alongside other kinds of files. One night I saw, on booth seven’s screen, a folder open on the desktop. My name was written in the title of that folder. Of course, without a surname, just my first name among other folder names that were clearly porn actresses’ names.

The guy in booth seven opened my folder. Inside there were twenty-three photos of me. Twenty-three. They were organized by number, renamed. He started flipping through them one by one, stopping longer on some: the terrace one with the wine glass, the black bikini one, one where I was crouching to tie a shoelace and my ass was outlined inside my jeans. On that last one he stayed for about five minutes. He enlarged it to full size, framed on my ass. And from the webcam above I watched him pull out his dick, spit on his hand, and start masturbating with his eyes fixed on that photo.

It was a thick dick, with a purplish glans, and he gripped it with his whole fist and worked it up and down in long strokes, pressing his foreskin down on every pull. Every so often he let go of the cock, licked two fingers, ran them over the glans, and grabbed it again. He was focused. He was taking his time with my ass on the screen.

I stayed watching that image for a full twenty seconds without moving. Then twenty seconds more. Then I lost count.

When he finished — a long release that stained the mouse pad and part of the keyboard, which he wiped up with toilet paper he’d brought himself in a backpack — I had wet panties again and nipples hard, showing beneath my T-shirt.

I went to the bathroom, sat on the edge of the sink, and tried to sort out what I was feeling. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t shame, though maybe it should have been. It was something else. Something concrete and hot that settled in the center of my body and wouldn’t leave.

I pulled my jeans down to my knees. I spread my legs right there, sitting on the edge of the sink, and shoved three fingers inside. I was so wet they slid in on their own. With my thumb I made quick circles over my clit while the three fingers drove deep, imagining the purplish cock of the guy in booth seven, imagining how tight he got looking at my ass, how he came thinking about putting his dick in me from behind. I came biting my lip until I drew blood. Then I washed up, fixed my clothes, and went back to the counter with a calm face.

They like me, I thought. That’s what’s happening. They like me and jerk off to my photos in secret because they don’t dare do anything else.

That night I closed the place forty minutes later than usual. I couldn’t quite explain why.

***

I started dressing differently.

Not all at once or in an exaggerated way, but slowly, as if it were something that had naturally emerged: a shorter skirt on Monday, a blouse with a little more cleavage on Wednesday, platform sandals on Thursday. I wore my hair down, when before I always kept it tied up so it wouldn’t bother me while I worked. I replaced neutral colors with clothes that fit me tighter. I started wearing push-up bras. I stopped wearing panties on certain days, knowing my skirt covered me just enough when I bent down to pick something up behind the counter.

The difference was immediate and left no room for doubt.

The place started filling up at hours that used to be dead. Thursday nights, which had once been quiet, began bringing in faces I hadn’t seen before. Some regulars started coming more often. No one made inappropriate comments, no one crossed any visible line. But the place filled up, and I knew it. And in some way that was never verbalized, they knew I knew it too.

Behind the counter I moved slowly and consciously, aware of every gesture. When someone paid, I’d lean forward a little more than necessary to hand back the change, letting the neckline open. When someone asked about prices or available minutes, I’d turn toward him before answering, take an extra second before speaking, run my tongue over my lower lip without hurrying. Small things no one could point to as intentional, but things I calculated precisely.

At night, after the last customer left and I pulled down the metal shutter, I opened the grid and checked the browsing histories of the sessions the system kept for twenty-four hours. I counted the jerking off. I counted how often my face appeared. I counted how long it lasted.

That was when it was hardest to justify to myself, because in those minutes I could no longer tell myself I was doing it by accident or from passing curiosity. I was doing it because I wanted to. Because there was something about that image — men who knew me by sight, men who greeted me normally, men who asked if there was time left with the same old voice — pulling out their cocks in silence behind a booth door to empty themselves thinking of me, that I found impossible to let go of.

Almost every one of those nights, after closing, I ended up with my hand inside my panties behind the counter, coming with my feet braced on the edge of the bottom drawer, biting my wrist so I wouldn’t moan.

***

There was one night I remember particularly well.

It was a Tuesday in October, late. Two customers were left: the graying-haired man in booth four and a stranger who had come in an hour earlier and asked for ninety minutes without lifting his eyes from the floor. I was behind the counter with an open book I wasn’t reading at all.

I opened the grid.

The stranger in booth two had my profile open in one tab. In another tab, nearly full screen, was one of my photos: the one from last summer, me sitting on a terrace with a glass of wine, smiling at someone outside the frame. He had zoomed it in so much you could see every fold in the fabric of the dress and the shimmer of the wine in the glass. In the lower right corner, small but active, there was a video I recognized: an amateur porn scene, a woman sucking cock on her knees on a balcony similar to the one in my photo.

The stranger had his dick out. It was long and thin, with a pronounced upward curve, and he was working it with his left hand while with his right he zoomed in on my face in the photo. On my mouth. On my smiling lips. He was using my mouth — the mouth in the photo, the mouth he would never have — to finish in his hand in a two-by-two-meter booth five steps from where I was breathing.

And he was close. You could tell by the rhythm, by the hand that was no longer moving all the way up, by the brief tremor in his thigh beneath the desk.

I stood up.

I walked to booth two slowly, as if I were going to ask him whether he needed more time or wanted to add minutes. I knocked with my knuckles before opening, as I always did with everyone. He minimized everything with a sharp movement, barely managing to cover himself with the shirt tail. He looked at me with a slightly flushed face, tense neck, broken breathing.

“Should I add time?” I asked in the same voice I always used, completely neutral.

I held his gaze for two seconds longer than necessary. I knew perfectly well what I had interrupted. I knew he had been about to come thinking of me and that now he had to do it with my recent voice in his head and my real face — not the one in the photo, the face of the woman who had just knocked on his door — fresh behind his eyes.

“No, thanks,” he said, almost voiceless.

“All right,” I said, and closed the door.

I went back to the counter. Sat down. My hands were cold and something in my chest was beating too fast, and something between my legs was beating even faster. I waited two minutes before opening the grid again. The screen for booth two took another minute to show what it had shown before.

When it did, I kept watching for a long while. He had taken out his dick again. He had gone back to my photo. And he was jerking off more urgently than before, his hand moving insanely fast, his face distorted. He lasted thirty seconds. He came with his mouth open against the shoulder of his own shirt, in silence, with semen splashing in thick streams over his dark pants and onto the mouse. One long spurt, two shorter ones, a final thread hanging from the glans.

I had my hand under my skirt, two fingers inside me, moving them to the rhythm of the stranger’s fist in booth two. I came exactly when he came. It was the first time I synchronized my orgasm with a customer’s. It wasn’t the last.

I’m the one on that screen, I thought. I’m the one out here watching. I’m the one who just came with him.

All three things at the same time.

***

I don’t know exactly what that says about me. I’ve thought about it many times since then and I still don’t reach a clean conclusion. What I do know is what I felt: a mixture of control and something darker than control, something that had to do with being desired without anyone knowing I was watching them too, that I was coming with them too.

They thought they were alone in those booths. They thought the woman at the counter was reading, or looking at her phone, or thinking about something else. They didn’t know I had access to every screen. They didn’t know I’d spent weeks building, without quite intending to, a map of which cock got hard to which photo of me, how long they took to come, how often they came back.

And at the same time, I was the object of what they did. I was the image on the screen, the photo saved in the folder with my name written among brackets, the face that appeared at the exact moment a stranger ejaculated onto a mouse in an hourly-rented booth.

That triple position — watcher, watched, and also the one jerking off while watching them jerk off to me — was what I couldn’t let go of. It was awkward to name and completely impossible to ignore.

***

I started uploading photos to the social network more often. Not provocative photos, I still resisted that. But thought-out photos: one with the afternoon light hitting me just right, one from an angle I knew worked, one in which the green dress I wore that Sunday looked better than I expected, outlining my tits and waist and showing the line of my thighs.

I uploaded them and waited. That’s the exact word: waited. I posted a photo and in the following days I paid attention to the grid, checked which screens opened which profiles, noticed if anyone new started appearing among the regulars at night, counted how many new jerks off that one specific photo gave me.

It was an experiment, though I didn’t like calling it that. It was a game I played alone, without anyone on the other side knowing there were rules.

There was an afternoon I posted a photo at six o’clock: me bent over in the garden, in shorts, planting something, the camera slightly above me. You could see all my cleavage and you could guess, in the shadow between my thighs, something I knew could be guessed. At nine that night one of the regulars — the mustached guy, the one who never asked for more than twenty minutes on Thursdays — came into the place and went straight to the back booth. From the grid I saw him open the social network almost immediately. I saw him zoom in on that photo. I saw him pull out his dick in less than thirty seconds. He came in exactly four minutes, timer in hand, with his eyes locked on the shadow between my thighs.

I smiled with my back to the booths, looking at the wall, my hand already slipped inside the waistband of my pants.

No one saw me smile.

***

This story doesn’t have a dramatic ending. There was no confrontation, no moment when someone discovered what I was doing or when I revealed that I knew what they were doing. It remained a secret shared without anyone ever agreeing to it: kept in silence behind screens lit up in booths with the doors closed, behind hard cocks wrapped in hasty fists and a soaked pair of panties under a dark wooden counter.

What changed was me. Or, more exactly, what I thought about myself and what I was capable of feeling.

It took me a while to admit it, but what I experienced wasn’t shame. It was curiosity. It was something like power, though not exactly that either. It was the specific, strange sensation of having something others desired without being able to ask for it, without even knowing that I was there in that equation too, watching from the other side with two fingers inside myself.

The calling center is still open. The eight booths work just fine. The management software is still installed on the counter computer, with the grid accessible from the main menu if you know where to look for it.

And I still wear my hair down.