The photo is meant to be a selfie, but it’s one of about several hundred that Ivy has taken over the past few months.
“That one looks good!” Ivy called.
“Let’s do it again. Crouch down this time, so you get my face on an angle.”
Oh god, she couldn’t. The bridge swayed slightly as she touched the floor. She swallowed, willing the contents of her stomach to stay in her body.
She quickly clicked off four shots and scrambled to her feet as thunder boomed in the sky.
“That’s good. We should go before the rain gets harder,” Ivy said.
“Yeah, I don’t want my hair to get wet!”
The bridge felt like it swayed faster, with people speeding up to reach the exit before the skies opened. Ivy grabbed Bethany’s hand.
“Ivy! Let go!” Bethany shrieked.
Ivy did, reluctantly, and concentrated on looking straight ahead. Not to either side of her, definitely not down below to the river. This is not what she envisioned when she finished her communications degree.
She swallowed, pushing thoughts of Metric from her mind. She had worked so hard there. But a day after she made that post, they fired her.
She knew the post rankled some people the wrong way, but she honestly thought the firm, which prides itself on being ground-breaking and ahead of the trends, wouldn’t have such an over-the-top reaction to a post of a fuzzy pair of black handcuffs. It wasn’t like she used the company account to post it on.
Ivy bit the inside of her cheek to stop the flood of emotion. She thought Gabe would be mad at her, but he’d calm down, listen to what she had overheard, and take that to Axis Management. Never did it cross her mind she’d lose both her job and her Dom over the post.
And even though it led to her taking stupid pictures and being single and lonely, she would do it again because she did it to save Gabe.
“Come on, Ivy!” Bethany yelled at her.
She tried to hurry up her careful steps.
At the end of the bridge, Ivy leaned against a tree, sucking in full breaths of air. She would never, ever do that again.
“Eww, I got another creepy text.” Bethany shoved her phone in front of Ivy’s nose.
Taking the phone, Ivy read it. For the past month, user max65 had been sending Bethany creepy messages. Stuff like he wants to see her naked. He can’t wait to get her alone. He wants to mess her up.
Ivy thought she should report them to the police, but Bethany scoffed at her and did what she did every time something in life didn’t work out for her: called her father.
Not trusting Bethany to screenshot it, Ivy took a picture of it with her phone and handed it back to Bethany.
“It’s harmless, right? Just some troll.”
The mask slipped for a moment, and a frightened nineteen-year-old woman stared at her.
“I’m sure it’s nothing.”
She didn’t think that at all, but giving reassurance was a big part of her job, and she was tired of trying to convince Bethany to report it.
“Yeah. Let’s go!” Bethany said, taking off at a gruelling pace again.
Finally, out of the park, drenched from head to toe, Ivy pulled a towel from her trunk and tried to sop up some water. She climbed in the car, Bethany following her.
“How many people do we have for Friday?”
“I updated the list this morning. We’re at one hundred and fifty.”
“I want two hundred and fifty,” Bethany said. “Send out more invitations.”
