Cera #2
He keeps scrolling. Next comes a platinum wig, short, with a blunt fringe, nothing like my own long, dark hair and nothing I would choose in a hundred years.
Then a tube of red lipstick lands in the cart, because he knows I don't own lipstick and never have. I’ve been a Chapstick loyalist since birth.
"I know you don't normally wear make-up, but do you have any at all? Like the basics? If not, we need some liquid liner and a smoky shadow."
"How do you know more about make-up than I do? No, I don't have liquid liner and a smoky shadow, whatever the hell that is."
"Darlin', I've helped enough of my friends with drag shows that I could make anyone look like Tammy Faye Bakker."
"I'm not doing all of that, Locke. Stop it."
"Let's order it, and then we can decide. Mmm-k?"
I shake my head but stop protesting. He's on a mission, and there's no convincing him otherwise. Let him think he's solving a problem by making me his next drag persona.
"Cover the perfect little beauty mark above your lip," he says, nodding at my upper lip. "It's cute, it's distinctive, and distinctive is the one thing you do not want to be." He adds a tube of concealer, powder, then a set of "Deep-As-The-Ocean Aqua" colored contacts.
"Colored contacts, Locke? Really?"
"We're going all in, girl. Hold on for the ride."
He taps to place the order before I realize what he's doing. Thank goodness he is a Prime member and can return it all when he comes to his senses.
"Two-day shipping," he says, and kisses my cheek, and tells me he loves me. Just like that, he has planned an entire alter ego and what he thinks is a realistic plan for me in my dire straits. It isn't, but I'm done telling that to deaf ears.
He pulls up OnlyFans and tells me we can sign up together.
He gets as far as naming her Masked_Maiden and spinning up a fresh Gmail to match, masked_maiden@.
That's when I deliver the hard stop. He can have his fun dreaming and scheming and ordering an entire costume.
But he is not creating an account for me, VPN or no VPN.
He reluctantly puts his phone down, but I notice he didn't close the tab.
After we finally move on to his upcoming trip next month to India for three weeks, and finish the entire bottle of wine, we both call it a night. Once he leaves me alone in an apartment that is too quiet, I realize his pushiness is exactly what I need right now.
And I seriously consider a Murphy bed in his apartment. Just not an OnlyFans account.
The box has been sitting on my counter for three days.
I walk past it to make coffee. I walk past it to not make dinner. Tomorrow, I tell myself. I'll open it tomorrow, and every tomorrow the same, while the savings number ticks down at the back of my skull like a meter in a cab I can't afford to be riding in.
On the fourth day, the third company finally answers. They have decided to go in a different direction. They're always going in a different direction, and the direction is never mine.
So I open the box. What the hell? Trying it on to see if I really can conceal my identity doesn't mean I'm going to do it.
The wig is softer than I expected. I pin my own hair flat and pull it on at the bathroom mirror. The platinum, blunt cut swings against my jaw, and a stranger looks back at me. I paint my mouth red, clumsy the first time and better the second.
I prop my phone against the soap dispenser and follow a tutorial through eyeshadow I have no business attempting. As instructed, I start with a neutral base, smoky outer corner, and a dark line hugging my lashes.
The first pass makes me look like a glamorous raccoon. I blend it back from tragic to almost intentional, drag liquid liner across each lid in unsteady little dashes, and by the time I finish, the eyes do not quite match. It doesn't matter. Neither of them looks like mine.
I've never worn contacts, but there's a first time for everything.
I pull the first one from its bubble pack and slide it over my eye, and it stings like sandpaper until I blink the tears back. When I look up, one eye is brown and one is a deep ocean blue.
"Holy shit," I whisper at my own reflection. It takes me several seconds before I can steady my hand for the second.
Finally, I press concealer over the small mark above my lip until it vanishes, until the last familiar thing about my own face is gone.
Then I tie on the mask.
The strangest thing happens. I brace to feel exposed, and what arrives is the opposite.
I feel hidden, and hidden, it turns out, feels a great deal like safe.
The woman in the mirror is not two months from broke.
She never got a lowercase apology on a sticky note.
She doesn't get left or get used until she is empty, and then set out with the trash.
This woman holds every card, because no one can find her, and no one can know her, and no one can take a single thing from her that she hasn’t chosen to hand over.
I think I could get used to her.
I carry her to my desk, open the laptop, and finish setting up the account Locke started last week on my sofa.
I type it slowly.
Masked_Maiden is born.
Out past this screen is a whole city of strangers who will hopefully pay to want her, and not one of them will ever reach me.
I hit "go live."