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“Lights,” I said, after fumbling at the wall for a switch and remembering that it didn’t exist. The recessed lighting around me blazed to life.
The artificial voice said, “Thelightscommand will turn the lights in your immediate vicinity on or off. You may also turn specific rooms’ lights on or off by name. Would you like to try that now?”
“No,” I croaked, realizing for the first time that I had on only my sleeping t-shirt and a pair of gray cotton panties. I had reached the door: the small screen right next to it had a video feed from the hallway, where I saw a middle-aged woman in khaki shorts and a white polo shirt. She had a camera bag slung over her shoulder.
I frowned, my heart suddenly racing as my mind woke up enough to remember the details of this appointment. I reached my finger out toward theTalkbutton under the screen, then hesitated, trying to figure out what sort of attitude to take. The photographer, Selecta had made very clear, worked for them. Remembering Mrs. Covenant in Harristown and how badly she had fucked up my life simply for not answering the door, I resolved to show as much eagerness as I could—to become a good SA associate member, to take advantage of the privilege of platinum level, to do whatever it took to make this work.
Did I actuallyfeelthat way? Of course not. If I meant to game the system, though, and get as much subsidy as I could, I would have to start here, with the Selecta photographer, despite the embarrassment involved.
I pushed theTalkbutton.
“Hi!” I said. “I’m really sorry… I just woke up. Can you—”
The photographer interrupted me, her voice gruff.
“Leah Rundin?” she asked.
“Yes?” I replied in the most pleasant voice I could muster. I tried hard to keep down my reflexive rudeness, to match this Mary Smith’s own lack of manners.
“Leah, sweetie,” the photographer said, looking straight into the camera, “I have a busy day. Go ahead and let me in, please.”
Thepleasesounded like an afterthought.
“But—” I started.
Mary interrupted again.
“I don’t care what you’re wearing, sweetie. Do you remember what kind of pictures we’re taking this morning?”
I felt the heat flash into my cheeks. The woman’s brusque tone of voice and the frank way she looked at me through the screen, as if she could see me as well as I could see her, made my heart quail.
“I… I guess I’ll just cancel… I mean…”
“Leah,” the photographer said, “you don’t want to do that. You’ll be out on your butt in a few days if you don’t fulfill the qualifications for this place. Go ahead and let me in.”
I swallowed hard. Then I reached for the door handle and opened it.
Mary looked me up and down with such assessing eyes that I wanted to put my hands up to cover myself: my t-shirt’s fabric, I knew, was thin enough that she could see my nipples, which had to my dismay gotten inexplicably stiff. It simply didn’t help that I had agreed to this ‘intimate’ photoshoot: something about the photographer’s gaze and what it said about Selecta Arrangements’ platinum level made me feel I had gotten myself in over my head.
“We’ll start in the living room,” Mary told me. “Go ahead in there and take your clothes off.”
CHAPTER4
Christian
Leah R, the platinum email had told me, would have her nude photoshoot at ten.
Here’s a New Modesty dropout you won’t want to miss!the anonymous, relentlessly cheerful author of Selecta’s marketing communications announced.
The novelty of getting to tune in live to girls’ sessions with the Selecta photographer had worn off on me within the first week of bumping my SA subscription up to platinum level. I couldn’t deny that the girls they chose (or, as the anonymous author usually put it, ‘curated’) for platinum represented some of the hottest young women I’d ever had a chance to date, or that getting to see them that way could very quickly make me very horny—rock hard and ready to spend a good deal of money on a glamorous date with a lovely lady.
The fact that putting me into that state constituted, quite clearly, the intention of the platinum-level curators, though, helped the charm wear off after a few days and a few dates. As a guy whose own job involved trying to get people excited enough about a product—movie projects, in my case—I could see through Selecta’s marketing strategies very easily. I admired them, but I’ve never enjoyed feeling manipulated, despite my skill at manipulating others.
Not that I blamed them, any more than I felt bad about my work: like me, Selecta had a product very much worth selling.
I’d never felt that more strongly than I did with Leah R. Something about her smile in her profile picture, a photo obviously taken from her old New Modesty profile—how her green eyes somehow conveyed both innocence and confidence—drew me in immediately. I hadn’t had time over the past week even to open the marketing emails, but my morning meeting had just canceled and I had frankly gotten progressively hornier throughout the last few days.
Out of sheer lack of time I had just ended my arrangement with Dawn, a lovely girl from Oregon, the previous week. She, the first girl I had sponsored at platinum level, had taken it well—Dawn had been new to the kind of submission I asked for, but she had quickly admitted she liked the way I took the lead.
