Chapter 14
Billie
The message is from a subscriber I've been watching for about three weeks.
He's been on the private tier for four months, consistent tipper, standard engagement, and somewhere around week ten he crossed the line from appreciating the content into having opinions about me as a person that I did not solicit.
The messages have been getting longer. More personal.
The kind of personal that isn't about the content anymore and is about whatever version of me he's assembled in his head, which, based on the messages, is someone who thinks about him back.
This one uses my name. My actual name, first and last, like he's been saving it up.
That’s why Declan comes over tonight. To investigate. He owns a security company and he will know what to do.
Dinner is good because Declan treats cooking like a problem he solved years ago and never revisited.
He doesn't ask what I want. Checks the fridge, notes what's there, produces something involving pasta and something green and a level of garlic that borderlines offensive.
I sit at the counter and do what I've been doing since he arrived, which is watching him in my space and feeling things I'm not ready to name.
He's wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. This shouldn't be an event. I am a professional adult woman who has made explicit content for money and I'm sitting here monitoring the forearm situation like I've never seen one before in my life. My chat would be so embarrassed for me.
We eat. He asks about the upload numbers and I give him the real ones: full picture, revenue and engagement and the three-month trend, because I've noticed that when I give Declan Maguire partial information he goes and finds the rest himself and I'd rather control what he gets.
He listens properly. Not the kind that's waiting for a gap to speak.
The kind that's actually processing. He asks two questions that are better than anything my actual management has asked, which is annoying, given that I did not hire him.
"The private tier numbers," he says.
"Good. Stable. Up about eight percent on last quarter."
He nods.
I watch him absorb it and I think about the message sitting closed in a tab on my monitor and I think: not tonight.
It finally comes out when he's getting his jacket. The tension breaks.
Not a fight yet. Just him picking up his jacket and me looking up from my laptop and something in the air shifting. A thing that has been sitting in the room and has finally decided to be addressed.
"The message," he says.
"I handled it."
"I know you handled it." He's not putting the jacket on yet. Holding it. "That's not what I'm saying."
I close the laptop. "What are you saying?"
He looks at me. The careful look. The one that means he's decided to say the difficult thing and he's choosing every word. "The tone of it."
"What about the tone?"
"The familiarity." He puts the jacket down. Which means we're staying. "The way he used your name. Like he knows you. Like he has the right to—"
"He's been a subscriber for four months."
"I know what four months of the private tier looks like," he says, flat.
Then stops.
Right. Yes. He does.
"Then you know," I say, "that the private tier creates a feeling of proximity. That's part of what the product is. I know how it works. I built it to work that way."
"I know you did." Something moves in his jaw.
"And I know what it does to the men who pay for it.
I know what they start to believe about you.
I've read the messages, Billie, I've seen what they write to you — not just this one, all of them — and I—" He stops.
Picks the jacket up again. "I don't love that I'm only one of many who gets to—"
He stops.
Full stop. Mid-sentence.
The room goes quiet in a way that is different from the quiet it was in before.
He clears his throat.
"I don't like the way he talks to you," he says.
The argument moves forward. I let it move forward. Something just happened in that sentence, something between I don't love and the hard stop, and I let it go past because we are in the middle of something else now and I can't hold both at once and the thing we're in the middle of is bigger.
"You don't like it," I say.
"No."
"Because it bothers you. That he talks to me like that."
"It doesn't bother me." His voice is harder now, defensive. "It makes me want to find him and explain in person why he's going to stop."
I put my laptop on the coffee table. I stand up.
"Declan, you watched my private tier content."
"That's—"
"Every week. Both tiers." I'm not making a joke.
I'm not softening this. The version of me that deflects with humor is not the version standing here right now.
"You tipped two hundred dollars a session and you watched me in my bedroom and you built whatever you built in your head about what I was to you. You did that."
"I know what I did."
"So you know exactly what those men think when they message me like that." I take a step toward him. My voice is steady and I am shaking inside. "Because you were thinking it."
"It's not the same."
"Tell me how."
"Because I knew who you were—"
"You did not." My voice comes out louder than I planned and I don't pull it back.
"You were a name on a screen who'd decided I was interesting.
You didn't know it was me until the dress.
You spent months watching my private content and feeling whatever you felt before you had any right to call it different. "
The muscle in his jaw moves. His hands are at his sides and they're fists. I've never seen his hands in fists before. Not once in twenty-one years.
"So what you're telling me," I say, and my voice is shaking now and I don't care, "is that when you watched that content, it was complicated and real and it led somewhere. But when they watch it—"
"Yes." Rough. Almost a snap. "Yes, that's what I'm telling you. Because it is different. Because I'm standing in your apartment and they're not. Because I know the sound you make when you're half asleep.I didn't get that from the private tier, I got it from being here, from being—"
He stops. Breathing hard. He's never raised his voice at me. Not once. I don't think he's raised his voice in years. The sound of it fills my apartment and he looks as surprised by it as I am.
"From being what?" I ask quietly.
He doesn't answer for a while.
"I know it's different," I say. "I know what we are. That's not what this is about."
"Then what is it about?"
"It's about the fact that you want me to stop.
" I hold his gaze. "Maybe not today. Maybe not in those words.
But somewhere underneath all of this, what you actually want is for me to stop doing the thing that brought us together in the first place.
And you can't say that out loud because you know what it sounds like. "
The room is very quiet.
"I'm saying you don't get to want me and also want me smaller.
" My voice cracks on smaller and I hate it and I don't stop.
"You don't get to want the version of me that built all of this and also be uncomfortable that I built it.
Those aren't separate things, Declan. You don't get to have one without the other.
That's the deal. It was always the deal. "
"You're right," he says.
"I know I'm right," I say, and my eyes are burning and I am not going to cry in front of him during this argument, I am absolutely not, but my voice is doing something I can't control and his face changes when he hears it.
He takes a step toward me.
"Don't," I say. "Don't come over here and be gentle about it. You don't get to start this fight and then comfort me through it."
He stops.
We stand there. Six feet apart in my living room.
Both of us breathing harder than the conversation warrants.
He looks wrecked. I probably look wrecked.
We are two people who have been pretending this was manageable and it is not manageable, it is enormous, and we're standing in the middle of it and there's nowhere to go.
"You're right," he says again. Quieter this time. "I know."
Just that. No reroute. No qualifier. The most infuriating thing about Declan Maguire is that when he's wrong he just says so, and there's nothing to do with it except stand there and accept that he's agreed with you while your eyes are still burning and your hands are still shaking.
I pick up my laptop.
He picks up his jacket.
"I'm going to look into the account," he says at the door. "The one who messaged you." He says it the way he says things that are decided. "You don't have to do anything. Just let me look."
I think about arguing. It's not the argument I want to win.
"Fine."
He leaves.
I sit in silence for a few minutes.
Then I get up and I pull the ring light from the corner and I set it up in front of my gaming chair and I turn on my second monitor and I open the platform and I check my camera preview to make sure my filter is in place.
I could skip the slot. I could say I rescheduled and nobody would notice and Declan would never know, which feels like the path of least resistance after an argument about exactly this.
That's why I'm not doing it.
The counter-argument to smaller is to be exactly this size. In exactly this space. The space I built before he was in the picture and that exists whether or not he's comfortable with it, because that was always the deal. Because I said so.
BrattyBaby comes online.
Chat floods in within thirty seconds. The familiar noise of it, four thousand people settling in, the world I made that is mine.