MONEY SHOTS by Richard Kovitch

She still has the tape. She wrote this week to say she still watches it. I didn't reply. There's nothing left to say and communication will
simply encourage her to contact me again. She isn't the sort of person you'd want to give false hope to. I've seen her flip out at the
smallest things. She'd confront complete strangers without a moment's hesitation. She attacked a guy in a bar once without provocation.
Something inside her was broken.

I never had a copy of the tape and I only watched it once. It was pretty raw. Handheld flickers of flesh and linen. It felt right at the time.
Hotels have that effect on me, encourage me to shut reality out, indulge a few fantasies. But like so much excess it hollowed me out, left
me reeling when the end days came. I remember them well. I left her screaming bloody insults in the street. I stopped calling. Eventually,
so did she. A tremendous weight lifted. I could breathe again. I moved on.

I knew she'd made other tapes with different men because she showed them to me. She filmed everything, obsessively documenting her
life in motion and sound. It proved to her life was happening. She kept a diary in which she wrote up the intimate details of her conquests.
I flicked through it once. It didn't feel right. Bad grammar, bad karma. I jumped ship before my own write up. Never read your reviews.

How strange that nearly three years later, without warning, she texts to tell me she still has the tape and that she still watches it. There
were no other details. That was all. I didn't know what to make of it. She had no claim on me, and yet I still served her. I couldn't wriggle
free, imprisoned forever in pixels and sound. How could she bare to watch someone fuck her who wouldn't even return her calls?

That evening, on the day her text found me, I was lying on the mattress with my girlfriend. Staring at the ceiling, watching the paint peel,
I prayed the message from yesteryear was a one-off, sent in a depressing stupor simply for the hell of it. But I couldn't be certain, and it
was starting to eat away at me. I had a horrible feeling the past was beginning to catch up with me, and as usual, there was no way I
could stop it.