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And, really, if she was mobbed up, why would she need to get so inventive to make a living?
"Pretty chicks with a side hustle can still be the enemy," McCoy's voice declared, making me turn to find him standing in my doorway, shaking his head at me.
"I realize that," I agreed.
"Did you even check out her social media?"
"Heading there now. I think it's a long shot though."
"Come on, Huck. It's suspect. She's got a car phobia, but moved out here where she would need a car. It's just suspect. Worth a deeper dive than Remy did. Just in case. I don't feel like getting another tooth knocked out because we weren't as prepared as we could have been."
As a whole, morale had been decent. I mean, considering we were all walking around with part of us aching that had never bothered us before.
It had been a hell of a year since we'd slipped on our cuts, and got this chapter going. I had to understand if the men wanted a couple months that didn't involve bloodshed and bruises. They'd certainly earned it.
"We will deal with our guest later tonight. Then we will have a little break," I assured him.
Of course, as it would turn out, I was just talking out of my ass when I said that.
Because life had other plans for us.
And, it seemed, Harmon.
Chapter Three
Harmon
Patrick was up to his old tricks again, it seemed.
The one thing they didn't really say about joining the gaming community, being one of the few girls toward the top of the gaming channels, was that people would feel like they owned you.
I'd been prepared for the rampant sexism—some things never change—like when guys who heard you liked to game, they felt the need to rapid-fire quiz you on every infinitesimally small detail about said game and its history, things they would never expect a fellow guy to know, things they'd probably needed to Google themselves, to take you even half as serious as they took the male gamers.
But, once I got myself past that, earning my place and the respect that came with it—at least for the most part—then came the guys who thought they had a right to have access to you, to get answers from you, to demand things from you, just because they consumed your content.
I guess I didn't understand it because I'd started out as a fan as well, as everyone usually did. I found game streaming channels when I was in my early twenties, finding them soothing, using them to help me calm down on hard days.
But I'd never felt like any of the content creators owed me. I never felt like we had some kind of "connection" just because I watched their channel.
I guess that kind of shit always came back to the patriarchy, though. Men who thought they had a right to you and your time just because they wanted it.
I'd actually banned Patrick—whose avatar was a picture of Patrick Star from SpongeBob—from my Patronage-Only because I thought that was why he'd been so pushy. He'd had the highest package for a while, which meant he got to game with me on occasion. And it had just started to get too weird. So I'd banned him from that site while claiming I had no idea why he couldn't be a part of it anymore.
It seemed to simmer him down for a few months.
I still saw him in the comments section, but he kept his comments on the game instead of on me.
Then I woke up to check the comments on my new video to find him talking about how pretty my lips were.
And, as you can imagine on the internet full of the world's most vile male specimens, all the comments in reply to his were about what I could do with my mouth. It spiraled even worse from there, making me need to delete Patrick's original comment to try to make it stop.
It didn't seem to matter that I had never seen these people, that I never would see these people, it still felt skeevy to see those things about me. It was like being catcalled just without the immediate danger of possibly being raped and murdered for my rejection.
-- That asshole.
That was the response I'd gotten from KitKatTalksBack, my only real friend in the gamer sphere, who responded when I'd messaged her about Patrick.
- I know. I've tried blocking him, but he just keeps making new profiles. It's obnoxious.
-- I know it sucks for the algorithm, but you can turn your comments off.
Kit played the same games I did. That was how we'd "met" originally, in a thread about our favorite game and the book series it was based on.
I liked most of my viewership. And since I lived by myself in the middle of nowhere with no actual friends, interacting with these online people was the most socialization I got in my life. It was my lifeline in tough times. So I was willing to deal with a couple creeps to keep that small connection to the world.
