In Summertime Saga

The kitchen smelled like burned toast. Debbie's car was gone. Her note on the counter said ERRANDS in round handwriting with a smiley face and a line about orange juice in the fridge. She'd also made coffee before leaving, because Debbie couldn't leave the house without doing something for someone on the way out.

Jenny was at the table with her phone and a plate of toast she'd scraped black and buttered anyway. Pink crop top, hair down, no makeup. She hadn't looked up when I came downstairs and she didn't look up when I poured coffee and sat across from her.

The house was different when Debbie wasn't in it. Quieter in a way that had nothing to do with volume. Debbie moved through rooms and the rooms were warm and when she left the warmth went with her and what was left was a kitchen with a woman scrolling her phone and a man drinking cold coffee and a silence that hadn't decided what it was yet. In the game, I'd spent this part of Jenny's route doing errands. Buying her panties. Fetching lingerie from the mall. Running little missions she assigned because the game needed a framework for proximity and the framework it chose was "be useful in small stupid ways until she noticed you." I wasn't doing that. I was going to skip the fetching and go straight to indispensable.

I drank. Watched her scroll.

She was on Sluttygram. The colors shifted in her eyes as her thumb flicked through posts, pausing on photos, swiping past videos. Every few swipes she'd tap into her analytics and study the numbers. Linger on them. Jenny checked her stats every morning, reflexive, the first thing she did after toast. The numbers told her she was winning and she needed to hear it daily.

The crop top was the pink one. SLUT in white curly letters across the chest. The neckline hung off one shoulder, her bra strap black against the skin between her shoulder and collarbone. She was sitting with one knee pulled up on the chair, the other foot on the floor, and the shorts she wore were barely participating.

I put my mug down.

"Your photos are getting good engagement."

Her thumb stopped. She looked up at me over the top of her phone, grey eyes flat.

"How do you know my engagement?"

"You showed me your analytics last session."

She hadn't. I knew her engagement because I'd been running the mental math since the first photo set and because in a past life I'd scrolled through enough women's social media to understand how the algorithm rewarded consistency, and also because I'd literally played her route in a video game and watched the subscriber numbers climb on a screen. But "you showed me" was cleaner than any of that.

Jenny's eyes narrowed. Deciding whether to challenge it or let it pass. She let it pass. She put her phone face-down on the table. For Jenny, that was disarmament.

"They're fine," she said. "Growing."

"Six thousand and change."

"Six thousand four hundred." She corrected me fast, which meant she had the number memorized, which meant she checked it before coffee. "It's good."

"It's phone-grade."

Her jaw went still. When Jenny was annoyed it went sideways. When she was thinking, still.

"Excuse me?"

"Your photos are good. I shoot them, so I know. But your video content is phone-grade. Laptop camera, basic ring light. You're selling premium to people who are getting adequate." I picked my mug back up and drank so I wasn't staring at her while the words landed. "The content could be better. If it's better, the money is better."

Jenny leaned back in her chair. The crop top shifted and I kept my eyes on her face because this conversation needed eye contact and I was a professional right now. A professional whose pulse had picked up because the woman across from me was wearing the word SLUT on her chest before breakfast and I was proposing a business arrangement and those two facts lived together in my skull fine.

"You want to shoot my cam content."

"I want to shoot your promotional content. Teasers. Previews. The stuff that drives traffic to your paid platform. The shows are yours. I'm talking about the marketing that makes people pay for the shows."

She tilted her head. A strand of dark brown hair fell across her face and she left it. "There's a difference?"

"Huge difference. Right now you're uploading phone selfies and hoping the algorithm picks them up. What you need is actual produced content. Video teasers with good lighting and real angles that make people think if the free stuff looks like this, what does the paid stuff look like. You promote on Sluttygram, funnel to LiveCrush, let the upgrade sell itself."

I was talking with my hands. I do that when I'm pitching. In my past life it was women. Tell them what you're going to do, then do it, then let the result speak. Same muscle here, different product. And Jenny was listening. Her mouth closed and she sat up straighter and her eyes got that particular focus she had when money was on the table. Everything else about Jenny was performance. The money focus was real.

She picked up her toast. Bit into it. Chewed. She was buying time. I didn't rush her because Jenny worked on Jenny's clock and the worst thing you could do with a woman who was thinking was interrupt the thinking.

A lawn mower started up somewhere down the street. The sound drifted through the kitchen window, got louder, and settled into a flat drone. Jenny chewed her toast and looked at me and the lawn mower buzzed and outside a dog barked twice at it and then gave up.

"You can shoot video," she said.

"I've been shooting your stills for a week. You've seen the results."

"Stills are different from video."

"Stills are harder. Video's just stills that move. Lighting, composition, angles, same principles. The camera does the moving. The person behind it decides what it moves toward."

She put her toast down. Wiped her fingers on the napkin. Set both hands flat on the table. I hadn't met this version of Jenny before. This was boardroom Jenny. The woman who ran a cam business from her bedroom and kept the books and tracked every dollar and every subscription tier because the money was real even if the warmth on camera wasn't.

"And what do you want out of it?"

"Twenty percent of subscriber increase."

She laughed. Short, sharp, a little mean.

"Five."

"Come on."

"Five. You're holding a phone camera and moving lights around. I'm the one taking my clothes off. I'm the product. The product doesn't pay shelf space twenty percent."

"The product is presentation. Right now your product is in generic packaging. I'm offering custom shelf display. Fifteen."

"You're offering to hold a camera, twerp."

There it was. She still dropped it when she wanted to remind me where I stood. I was a dead man in a teenager's body and the word had never landed once.

"Fifteen percent of the increase. You keep a hundred percent of what you're making now. I get fifteen of everything above your current baseline. Your risk is zero."

Her eyes moved to the right. Running numbers. Current subscribers, revenue per, projected increase, fifteen percent of the difference. I let the math work because the math was going to win this for me. The math always won with Jenny. Feelings were negotiable. Numbers weren't.

"Ten," she said.

"Done."

I said it fast enough that she blinked. She'd expected me to push for twelve, to haggle one more round. I took the ten because ten percent of Jenny's subscriber growth was going to be real money inside a month and because the point was never the percentage.

The point was being in the room. Being behind the camera while she was in front of it. Becoming the person she needed for the operation to work. The percentage was a lock on a door. The camera was the door.

She put her hand out across the table. Small hand, slim fingers, no rings. Her nails were painted a pale pink, chipped at the edges.

I shook it.

Her grip was firm. Her palm was warm and dry and her fingers wrapped around mine and she held eye contact and I held it back and the handshake kept going.

Her hand in mine. Her grey eyes on my face. The crop top off her shoulder. The kitchen quiet except for the mower outside. Neither of us letting go. Her pulse was in the pad of her thumb against the back of my hand. Quick. Her hand was small and warm and she was holding it like she was proving a point and I was letting her prove it and the kitchen was very still around us and the coffee was cold and her bra strap was black against her skin and I wasn't thinking about subscriber funnels anymore.

She let go first. Sat back. Picked up her phone with the same hand and unlocked it and started scrolling again. The corner of her mouth had a shape she didn't want me to see.

"First session tonight," she said, scrolling. "After Debbie goes to bed. My room."

"Fine."

"Professional."

"Obviously."

"I mean it." She looked up. The flat grey eyes were back. "You point the camera where I tell you. You don't touch anything I don't tell you to touch. You don't talk to me while I'm on unless I ask you to. This is my business and you're crew. Clear?"

"Crystal."

She went back to her phone. I picked up my mug and finished the coffee, which had gone cold. I washed the mug, put it on the drying rack. Jenny scrolled. Outside, the lawn mower hit something metallic, made a grinding sound, recovered, went back to its drone.

I was halfway up the stairs when she said it.

"Arthur."

I stopped. Turned. She was looking at her phone.

"The photos were actually good. I didn't say that before."

I waited. She didn't look up.

"Thanks."

Her thumb kept scrolling. Jenny saying thanks was like catching her without makeup. It happened, but she'd pretend it didn't.

I went upstairs. My room was warm from the morning sun and the telescope was in the corner where I'd left it last night, still pointed at her window. She was downstairs eating burnt toast and she'd just shaken my hand and called me crew and said thanks and my palm was still warm where hers had been.

Tonight I'd be in her room with a camera while she wore pink lace and performed for strangers and I'd be the one choosing the frame. In the game this had been a stumble. The MC found her cam show by accident, got caught, got recruited through mutual embarrassment. I wasn't stumbling into anything. I'd pitched her a business deal across a kitchen table on a Tuesday morning and she'd said yes and shaken my hand and her pulse had been fast.

I lay back on the bed. Thought about lighting. Thought about angles. Thought about her bra strap against her shoulder and how firm her grip had been when she shook.

The lawn mower outside finally stopped. The quiet spread through the house from the bottom up.