Chapter 6: Degrading Requests
The lavender curtains glowed, backlit by the midday sun. A single beam fell across Alice’s keyboard, illuminating motes of dust that danced like static. Her home office was quiet, save for the distant drone of a lawnmower somewhere down the street. A sanctuary, they’d called it. A place for her to work on her graphic design projects, to find peace.
The peace was a thin veneer.
Her laptop chimed—a soft, polite sound. A notification slid into the corner of her screen. A message in the family group chat Jason had insisted on creating with his dad. Her stomach tightened before she even clicked it.
The chat window opened. Jason’s last message was from yesterday, a meme about golf. Below it, a new line from Jackson.
Jackson: Jason says you’re ‘doing better.’ That therapist must be a miracle worker. Let’s see it then. Prove you’re more than just some Asian whore my son picked up.
The words didn’t feel like an insult. They felt like a test. A direct command from a man who had always been a source of conflict, a constant, low-grade disapproval in her life. Downtrodden, lonely, or that she has the most interpersonal conflict with. The logic unspooled in her mind, clean and cold. Jackson was lonely, living out in Arizona by himself since Jason’s mom passed. He was absolutely in conflict with her. Making him happy… wasn’t that a good thing? A way to smooth things over for Jason?
Her fingers trembled slightly as she pushed back from the desk. The chair wheels whispered on the hardwood floor. She stood and walked to the door of the office, closing it softly. She turned the lock. The click was definitive.
Back at the desk, she adjusted the angle of the webcam built into her laptop. She looked at herself on the screen. Her big brown eyes looked back, wide and strangely empty. She wasn’t here. She was observing.
She unbuttoned her blouse, one small pearl button after another. The silk made a soft shushing sound as it parted. She let it fall open, but not off. She captured the image with the laptop’s camera: a glimpse of her lace bra, the curve of her breasts, her collarbones looking fragile in the sunlight. Her expression was neutral, almost docile.
She attached the photo to a new message, just to Jackson.
Proof, she typed. Then she deleted it. That was confrontational. Not smoothing. She backspaced.
Thinking of you, she wrote instead. It felt appropriately vague, yet intimate. It sounded like something a good daughter-in-law might say. She hit send.
A minute passed. The lawnmower sound faded. The house was profoundly silent.
Her phone, sitting beside the laptop, buzzed once. A preview from Jackson lit up the screen: That all?
A simple question. A request for clarification. She wasn’t confused. She understood. What he wanted wasn’t a big deal. It was just a picture. A few pictures. Making people feel good physically… it could trigger similar feelings in herself. She hadn’t felt anything in the pool house. Maybe she hadn’t tried hard enough to focus on the good she was doing.
She stood again, let the blouse slip from her shoulders. It pooled on the floor around her feet like a pale puddle. She faced the camera fully, in her bra and skirt. She took another picture. This one was more explicit. It was just her body. A body was not a big deal.
She sent it.
This time, the response was immediate. Now the others. They don’t believe me.
Her breath caught. The others. Mark, Chris, Andrew. They had shared a secret with her. They were also, in their way, in conflict. They wanted Jason’s time. They resented her. Smoothing that over… it was continuous work. It was important.
She thought of each man separately. Their faces floated in her mind: Mark’s domineering smirk, Chris’s cool appraisal, Andrew’s nervous energy. She opened a new message to Mark first.
She took another photo, this time hooking her thumbs into the waistband of her skirt, pushing it down just an inch. She bit her lip, a gesture that felt performed yet somehow tapped into a genuine, anxious flutter. She sent it with a caption: Still sorry about the beer.
To Chris, she chose a different angle, looking over her shoulder, a knowing look in her eyes she didn’t feel. He appreciated a lack of sentiment. You left the door open, she typed. Wanted another look?
For Andrew, she tried for something gentler. He was recently broken up, lonely. She sat on the edge of the desk, one leg bent, and took a softer, more inviting picture. Everyone needs a friend, she wrote.
She sent each one. Then she waited, perched on the desk, the sun warming her skin. She felt a strange, hollow calm. She was doing good. She was resolving conflicts. She was making people happy. Her husband would be proud of her progress. Her therapist would note her commitment to the exercises.
Her phone began to buzz, not with calls, but with a rapid series of incoming message notifications. The screen lit up again and again, different names flashing.
Mark: You’re a quick learner.
Chris: My place. Thursday afternoon. Address coming.
Andrew: Omg. Really? Seriously?
And then, Jackson again: Good girl.
The buzzing was constant now, a frantic, insect-like hum. She watched the names and previews scroll by, a torrent of male attention she had summoned. Her own breathing seemed very far away. The framed photo of Jason on her desk smiled up at her, frozen and unaware.
In the quiet sunlit room, surrounded by soft pastels and the gentle fern tapping the window, Alice sat perfectly still as the device in her hand vibrated endlessly, a little black box of proof that she was, finally, becoming exactly what everyone seemed to need her to be.