Chapter 2: The First Reply
The card was a cold, smooth rectangle against her thigh through the thin cotton of her nightgown. She had transferred it to the pocket almost without thinking, a prisoner moving a contraband tool from one hiding spot to another. The night pressed against the windows, heavy and complete. Kazui’s light under his door had winked out an hour ago. The only illumination was the faint, city-bleed from the sky, painting the living room in shades of gunmetal and gray.
Her phone was a black mirror in her hand.
The revulsion from the videos was still there, a physical memory that tightened her throat. But beneath it, like a stubborn weed cracking through concrete, was that other thing. The calculation. The terrible, clarifying arithmetic of her own worth. Mr. Omer had seen her as a sum of parts. Now she was starting to see herself that way.
Her thumb hovered over the screen. She opened a new message window. Carefully, she typed in the number from the card. The digits felt significant, like inputting a code to a vault containing a different version of herself.
What did she even say?
Her fingers, moving with a will that seemed detached from the knot in her stomach, began to tap.
Mr. Omer. This is Orihime Kurosaki. From the meeting today. I would… like to understand more about the project. The script details.
She read it over. It was sterile. Professional. The kind of email she’d send about a venue’s fire code. It gave nothing away, yet it gave away everything. By sending it, she was admitting the idea had not been laughed off, burned, forgotten. It had been placed in a drawer, considered.
Her finger trembled over the send button. The blue light of the screen hollowed out her face in the dark. This was the threshold. Once this electron flew through the night, to Sudan, to that sweating man in his too-tight shirt, there was no pretending this was a passive fantasy. It would be a negotiation.
She pressed send.
The whoosh sound was deafening in the silence. A wave of immediate, vertiginous regret followed, so intense she almost gagged. She threw the phone onto the cushion beside her as if it had shocked her. What had she done? She scrambled for it, fumbling, but it was too late. The message was delivered.
No reply came. The minutes stretched. The silence amplified every small sound: the hum of the refrigerator, the creak of the building settling, the frantic drum of her own heart. He was seven time zones away. It was the middle of his workday, perhaps. He was with another woman, showing her the same storyboards, naming the same shocking price.
She spent the night on the couch, drifting in and out of a thin, anxious sleep, clutching a cushion to her stomach. She dreamt of warts growing on her own skin, of being smothered by damp, rolling flesh that smelled of spice and medicine.
—
The morning light was merciless. It streamed through the faded floral curtains, exposing every dust mote, every worn patch on the rug. Kazui was already in the kitchen, gulping down milk straight from the carton. He didn’t look at her.
“You look like shit,” he muttered, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Bad sleep,” she murmured, her voice gravelly.
He slammed the carton back in the fridge. “Whatever. I’m late.”
He shouldered his backpack and was gone, the door shuddering in its frame. The condemnation in his absence was as potent as any words.
Alone, the apartment felt different. Charged. She made coffee, the routine movements anchoring her. The phone sat face-down on the counter. She didn’t touch it. She showered, the water failing to wash away the sleepless grime behind her eyes. She dressed in her office armor—the tight white shirt, the knee-length skirt, applying lipstick with a hand that refused to stay steady.
Just as she was about to leave, her phone buzzed. A single, dry vibration against the Formica.
It wasn’t a text message. It was a notification for an email. Her personal Gmail. The sender was a jumble of letters and numbers. The subject line was blank.
He had her email. Of course he did. It was on the company website, right below her smiling, innocent photo.
Her coffee churned in her stomach. She clicked it.
There was no greeting. No signature. Just a single line of text, and a link.
As requested. The creative vision. Review at your discretion.
The link was short, ominous. A private file-sharing service she didn’t recognize.
She was going to be late for work. It didn’t matter. Nothing in that fluorescent tomb mattered compared to this. She sank onto the sagging couch, the cushion still warm from Kazui’s weight. She clicked the link.
It opened to a password prompt. A second email arrived instantly.
Password: Bella2024
The alias. The future year. Her breath hitched. She typed it in.
The page loaded. It was a PDF. The first page was a title slide of sorts, in a bland, corporate font: “DESERT FLOWER – Treatment & Visual Concepts.” Below it, in smaller text: A Jabir Omer Production.
She scrolled.
What followed was not a script. It was a series of storyboards, crude but explicit digital drawings. And lists. The drawings showed a woman with vibrant orange hair and a generously curved body. The face was a blank oval, but the body was meticulously, unmistakably hers—the heavy, full breasts with their large, darkened areolas and prominent nipples, the fleshy curve of the hips, the soft swell of the belly. They had been copied, it seemed, from the very Instagram photos she’d posted, the swimsuit shots from years ago, now rendered in soulless digital lines.
In the drawings, she was in various settings: a cheap-looking bedroom, a bathroom with cracked tiles, the backseat of a car. And with her, in every frame, were men.
The list on the following pages detailed the “principal cast.” Names like “Mohammed ‘The Bull’ Hassan,” “Abdul ‘The Mountain’ Farouk,” “Khalid ‘The Anaconda’ Ibrahim.” Next to each name were… specifications. Measurements. Descriptions.
Height: 190cm. Weight: 165kg. Notable distinguishing features: Extensive seborrheic dermatitis across upper back and shoulders. Hyperpigmented genital region.
Height: 178cm. Weight: 158kg. Notable distinguishing features: Pronounced abdominal panniculus. Recurring fungal rash in intertriginous folds. Uncircumcised, with significant phimosis.
Height: 185cm. Weight: 172kg. Notable distinguishing features: Profuse sweating (hyperhidrosis). Multiple, raised sebaceous cysts on inner thighs. Coarse body hair coverage 95%.
It was a clinical inventory of grotesquery. Each entry was a vivid, repulsive echo of the videos she had forced herself to watch. This was the “creative vision.” She was to be the pristine, innocent foil, the “flower,” amidst this deliberate, unhygienic decay. Her value was in her contrast. Her perceived cleanliness against their documented filth. Her “natural beauty” against their calculated, market-tested repulsiveness.
A low, wounded sound escaped her, there in the empty living room. It was the sound of a final, naive illusion being stripped away. This wasn’t about art, or loneliness, or being understood. It was a chemical reaction. She was the appealing reagent that, when combined with these other, vile elements, would produce a specific, profitable product.
Her finger swiped up, faster now, nausea rising. The storyboards grew more explicit. Close-up frames. Angles that focused on the juxtaposition of her smooth skin against rough, blemished hands. Suggested sequences where her expression of shock or reluctance was the central focus.
The final page was a single, bullet-pointed list titled “Logistical Requirements for Female Talent.”
• Full body depilation NOT permitted. Natural state preferred. Pubic hair, underarm hair must be untrimmed.
• No breast augmentation or surgical alterations. Natural sag and weight are key visual assets.
• Talent must provide own ‘innocence’ archetype wardrobe: white cotton underwear, simple nightdresses.
• Psychological preparation for scenes of simulated distress and overwhelming physical contrast is advised.
They wanted her untrimmed. They wanted her natural sag. They wanted to film her armpit hair, her thick pubic bush. They were ordering her authenticity like sides of beef. Her body, in its most intimate, unkempt reality, was the commodity.
She hurled the phone across the room. It thudded against the armchair and fell to the rug, screen glowing relentlessly. She bent double, head between her knees, fighting for air. The images were tattooed on the inside of her eyelids. The lists, the cold medical terminology.
She should delete it. Delete the email, block the sender, burn the card. Tell her boss the client was a predator.
But she didn’t move.
The silence stretched. The sun climbed higher, a beam of it landing on the framed photo of Ichigo on the bookshelf. His smile was static, frozen in a time when his eyes saw her. Now they just looked through her, from whatever hotel room in whatever city.
Slowly, she raised her head. She stood, walked over to the phone on the rug. She picked it up. The screen was still open to the PDF. She didn’t close it.
Instead, she swiped back to her home screen. Her thumb moved, by ingrained, addictive habit, to the familiar pastel icon.
Instagram opened. Her feed was a blur of sunlit beaches and artfully plated food. She went to her profile. Her own face smiled back, surrounded by little red hearts. She tapped the DM icon.
A list of unread messages scrolled, a cascade of male usernames.
Hey beautiful. Damn, that smile.
You are absolutely stunning. Would love to get to know you.
Your husband is a lucky man. Does he know how perfect you are?
For years, these messages had been her secret fuel, tiny hits of warmth in the cold. She would blush, sometimes type a hesitant thank you, sometimes even a flirty you’re too kind! It felt harmless. A game.
Now, she read them with new eyes. They were the same species of thing as Mr. Omer’s offer, just a different point on the spectrum. They were all evaluations. Appraisals of the same product. The only difference was the price tag and the level of degradation required to earn it.
Her finger hovered over the keyboard. The hollow, calculating feeling from last night returned, colder now, hardened by the morning’s grotesque revelations.
She typed a reply to the last message, from a man whose profile showed a gym-toned torso. Thank you! That’s so sweet of you to say. Sometimes I don’t feel so perfect.
She hit send. It was a feeder line. A throw.
Almost instantly, three little dots appeared. A reply popped up.
Impossible. You’re a goddess. Any man who makes you feel less should be fired.
She stared at the words. Goddess. Mr. Omer had used the same word. Here it was, cheap and easily given, worth less than the electricity it traveled on. But it still, traitorously, sparked a faint, familiar warmth in her chest.
She looked from the glowing, flattering DM to the browser icon where the PDF of “Desert Flower” still lay open.
Two different markets. The same product.
She didn’t delete anything. She placed the phone carefully in her purse, next to the business card. She walked to the door, straightened her skirt, and went to her monotonous office job, the storyboards and the lists and the sweet, empty compliments swirling in her mind together, a toxic chorus defining her worth.
The door clicked shut behind her. On the couch, in a patch of sun, her laptop sat closed. Inside, the trail of DMs from strangers was still scrolling, endless, waiting.
The phantom buzz of her phone in her purse was a constant, itchy distraction through the morning’s spreadsheet haze. Every formula she typed felt like a lie. The numbers blurred, replaced by the clinical bullet points from that PDF. Natural state preferred. Her knuckles whitened around her mouse. Around her, the office clattered on—printers whirring, the low murmur of another pointless conference call, a laugh that sounded like broken glass.
She slipped her phone into her lap under the desk.
The email thread with the jumble-of-letters address was still open. A cowardly impulse took over. Typing felt safer than calling. Words could be measured, denied.
I have reviewed the materials. If this were to proceed, what are the formal terms? A contract?
She sent it before she could reason the question away. It was a hypothetical. A professional inquiry. That’s what she told the tightening knot in her chest.
The reply was faster than she expected. A new email, another link. This one was labeled “Aqd_Bella.pdf.” The Arabic script in the filename was a series of harsh, unfamiliar angles. She downloaded it, her heart hammering against her ribs.
The document that opened was dense. The body text was entirely in Arabic, a flowing, right-to-left script that was utterly incomprehensible to her. It looked official, with stamped seals and formal columns. Her eyes, desperate for an anchor, skittered over the symbols until they caught on the only things she could parse: numbers.
A figure was listed in a box near the bottom: 15,000,000.
Her breath caught. Fifteen million. It was an absurd, monumental number. For a dizzy second, a wild, illogical hope flared. Was this some kind of elite, secretive market? Were her specific… attributes… really worth that?
Then she saw the currency code next to it, small and almost dismissive: SDG.
It wasn’t dollars. It wasn’t yen. She highlighted the code, right-clicked, and searched. SDG to JPY. The conversion page loaded.
Sudanese Pound.
The result loaded. The air left her lungs in a quiet, defeated rush. It was barely anything. A pittance. A little over thirty thousand yen. Less than she made in a month. For everything described in those storyboards.
The grandeur of the number was a cruel joke. It was local coin. It was the price of a used television, or a nice dinner for a large family in Khartoum. For her, it was the monetary value of her own obliteration. They weren’t just buying her body; they were pricing her dignity at flea-market rates.
“Kurosaki-san?”
She jerked, slamming her knee into the desk drawer. Her manager, Tanaka, was hovering by her cubicle partition, his brow furrowed.
“The quarterly summaries,” he said, his voice flat. “They were due to accounting an hour ago.”
“Oh. Yes. I’m… they’re almost finished. A system lag.” The lie came out smoothly, coated in office polish.
He nodded, not believing her, but not caring enough to push. “See that they are.”
He walked away. She stared at the contract on her screen. The beautiful, alien script now seemed mocking. It was a wall, hiding all the legalese that would bind her, all the clauses that would undoubtedly exploit her. She understood nothing except the price.
And it was nothing.
A new notification popped up, overlaying the PDF. It was a DM from the gym-toned torso. Thinking about you, goddess. What are you wearing?
She looked from the contract’s fifteen million Sudanese pounds to the glowing, hungry question. Two different kinds of bankruptcy.
Her fingers moved back to the email. She typed, the keys clicking softly under the office din.
I need to consider this. The terms are… significant.
The send button glowed. A second later, a third email arrived. No text. Just another link. This one opened a video file, already playing.
It was a clip, grainy, from what looked like a handheld camera. One of the men from the list, “The Mountain,” was in a similar cheap room, performing a crude, solitary act. It was a test shot, a demonstration of the “contrast” they desired. The visual was blunt, meant to overwhelm.
She slammed the laptop lid shut, the sound like a gunshot in the quiet cube farm. The phone in her lap vibrated again. It was Kazui.
Out tonight. Don’t wait up.
She didn’t reply. She sat very still, the phantom sounds of the office receding. Beneath her desk, her thumb traced the edge of the business card in her purse. The contract, unreadable and binding, waited in her closed laptop. The video waited. The DMs waited.
All of them waited for a version of her she wasn’t sure lived here anymore. The price for her was set. It was almost nothing. She stared at the closed laptop, knowing exactly what was inside, and wondered if that’s what she had become.
She stared at the closed laptop, knowing exactly what was inside, and wondered if that’s what she had become.
The silence after Kazui’s text was a solid thing. She opened the laptop again, its glow a guilty rectangle in the dim apartment. The Arabic contract was still there. She couldn’t read it, but the numbers were a language of their own. Fifteen million SDG. She copied the entire block of text, the beautiful, menacing script, and pasted it into a translation website.
The page churned. For a moment, it was just gibberish, disconnected nouns and verbs. Then it resolved.
The clauses were blunt. "Producer shall provide talent with all necessary male performers for scenes." A sub-clause followed. "Performers shall be sourced locally from approved municipal shelters in Khartoum and Omdurman, with all associated health and hygiene being the sole responsibility of the performer, not the production."
She read it again. Sourced locally from approved municipal shelters.
Homeless men.
Not actors. Not even the repulsive, but named, "Mountain" or "Anaconda" from the list. Those were just archetypes, stock images. The reality would be men plucked from shelters, given a meal and a few pounds, and directed towards her. The clinical descriptions of their conditions—the fungal rashes, the cysts—weren’t casting notes. They were just… facts. The baseline. She was the variable. The imported novelty.
A cold, sharp laugh escaped her, startling in the quiet room. She was being conned. The grand "international production" was a sordid, low-budget exploitation flick, using the most vulnerable men possible to save money. The price wasn't just an insult; it was a diagnostic tool. It was what Omer believed her desperation was worth.
She should feel rage. Pure, cleansing fury.
Instead, a darker, more complicated feeling spread through her veins, warm and shameful. There was a twisted validation in it. It was honest. It stripped away every last pretense. This wasn't about art, or breaking taboo, or even her loneliness. This was a purely economic transaction of flesh and degradation. She understood it perfectly. In a strange way, it felt more real than the hollow compliments in her DMs, more real than Ichigo's absent-minded check-ins from Berlin or Denver.
Her phone lit up with another notification. The gym-toned torso. You're so quiet tonight. Playing hard to get?
She looked from the phone’s glow to the translated contract on the screen.
Playing. That’s what it was with the DMs. A game with no stakes, no consequences, no weight. This contract had weight. It had a specific, foul gravity. It promised to leave a mark.
Her fingers, moving with a calm that felt borrowed from someone else, navigated back to her email. She drafted a new message to the jumble-of-letters address.
I understand the terms. I want to meet. To discuss logistics in person.
She gave her number. She hit send.
The reply was almost instantaneous, a text message to her personal line from an unknown number. The English was broken, the tone shifting from corporate to something more casual, more possessive.
Yes. Good. You see opportunity. Come tomorrow. The Oasis Lodge. Room 114. 3pm. We talk. No office.
She knew the Oasis Lodge. It was a budget motel by the industrial highway, a place for truckers and day-rate affairs, its sign permanently missing the 's' so it read 'Oasi Lodge'. It was the perfect venue for the contract she’d just read. A place with no illusions.
She didn’t reply. She just stared at the address. This was the threshold, more final than sending an email. This was agreeing to cross town, to walk into a specific room with a numbered door.
She spent the next morning in a fugue state. At work, she processed invoices without seeing them. Her coworker, Mika, leaned over the partition.
“You okay, Orihime? You look a million miles away.”
“Just tired,” Orihime said, forcing a smile that felt plastic. “Kazui kept me up.”
“Teenagers,” Mika sighed, rolling her eyes. “Mine just grunts. It’s like living with a disinterested bear.”
The normalcy of the conversation was a surreal backdrop to the images cycling in her mind: municipal shelters, cracked motel tiles, the smell of industrial cleaner and sweat.
She left work early, claiming a headache. She took the train in the opposite direction of home, towards the city’s frayed edges. The landscape changed outside the window; sleek apartments gave way to warehouses, then to the wide, concrete mouths of highway on-ramps.
The Oasis Lodge was a two-story, L-shaped building of stained beige stucco. The parking lot was cracked asphalt, glittering with broken glass. A flickering neon ‘VACANCY’ sign buzzed like a dying insect.
Room 114 was on the ground floor, near the rusting ice machine. She stood before the plain brown door, her heart a frantic bird in her chest. She could still leave. She could turn, walk back to the train, and this would just be a strange, dark afternoon she’d never speak of.
She raised her hand and knocked, the sound absorbed by the thick, dead air.