"Okay," she says.
"Lock your door tonight."
"I always lock my door."
"I know." A beat. "Lock it anyway."
Quiet. I can hear her breathing. Then: "Declan."
"Yeah."
"Thank you. For watching."
I look at the file. The beginning of something I'm going to take apart until I understand it completely. She is not going to be frightened in her own home if there is anything I can do about it.
There is always something I can do about it.
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 Iwant. 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?"
