Chapter 1: The Breakup
The coffee shop air was thick with the smell of burnt beans and artificial pumpkin spice. Sheila’s fingers were cold around her cardboard cup, but not as cold as the pit in her stomach. Across the tiny, sticky table, Derek licked froth from his upper lip and didn’t meet her eyes.
“It’s just not working, Sheil.”
The fluorescent lights buzzed like a trapped insect above them. She watched his mouth move, the words landing like dull thuds. Vanilla. Effort. Spark.
“You wear those… sacks,” he said, gesturing vaguely at her oversized hoodie with a hand that had just been all over her body two nights ago. “And you never do anything with your face. It’s like you’re trying to be invisible.”
Each word was a precise incision. She felt her skin parting under them. She thought of the nights she’d spent studying while he gamed, the way she’d learned to make his favorite sandwich just right, the quiet congratulations she’d given him for a promotion she knew was mostly his dad’s doing. None of it was currency here. The balance she was being weighed on was purely, brutally physical.
“Our sex life,” he sighed, as if explaining calculus to a child, “is boring. You just lie there. You don’t make noise. You don’t even look at me. It’s like fucking a warm mannequin.”
She flinched. The latte churned in her gut. She remembered the concentration, the fear of doing something wrong, the hope that if she stayed still and quiet, he’d just finish and maybe hold her afterward.
“I’m not a doll,” she whispered, her voice barely threading through the chatter and steam.
“Could’ve fooled me.” He finally looked at her, and his gaze was flat, assessing. It scanned her face—her plain, mousy-brown-hair-framed, glasses-wearing face—and dropped to her chest, which even the baggy fabric couldn’t completely hide. “It’s a waste, honestly. You’ve got a killer body under all that… mourning cloth. But you gotta package the product, babe.”
Product. The word echoed. She was a product. A flawed one.
He stood up, his chair scraping loudly. He pulled his jacket on, a sleek, expensive thing that probably cost more than her monthly bus pass and groceries combined. “Look, it’s over. Okay? Clean break. You’re a sweet girl. You’ll find some nice, quiet guy who doesn’t care about this stuff.” He said ‘this stuff’ like it was a frivolous preference for imported beer, not the fundamental basis on which he’d judged her entire worth.
He didn’t wait for a response. He just turned and walked out, weaving between the crammed tables of stressed students without a backward glance.
Sheila sat perfectly still. The noise of the shop melted into a distant roar. She saw her reflection, distorted and pale, in the dark window. Glasses. A face that blended into nothing. A body she’d spent twenty-two years apologizing for, hiding under layers of cotton and shame.
‘Butter face.’ The nickname from night school floated back, slithering into the fresh wound Derek had opened. Everything else is great, but her face… It had been whispered, but she’d heard it. She’d always heard it.
A hot, shameful tear escaped, tracing a path through the light sheen of oil on her cheek. She swiped at it angrily. Sweet girl. Nice guy. Vanilla.
Fucking vanilla.
A raw, jagged sound escaped her throat, half-sob, half-laugh. It drew a glance from a guy at the next table hunched over a textbook. He looked away quickly, embarrassed for her. The humiliation was complete, a public spectacle.
The humiliation was complete, a public spectacle. Sheila stood up so fast her chair nearly toppled.She didn't right it. She shoved her way out of the coffee shop, the cold evening air hitting her wet cheeks like a slap.She walked. Then she jogged. Then she was running, her backpack slamming against her spine, her breath coming in ragged, wet hitches that were more sob than oxygen. The campus blurred around her, a smear of halogen lamps and laughing groups she cut through like a ghost. She made it to her dorm building, fumbled the keycard, and stumbled into the mercifully empty elevator.
Inside her tiny single room, the dam broke.Great, heaving sobs wracked her body. She slid down the back of the door to the floor, drawing her knees up, wrapping her arms around her head as if to physically hold the pieces of herself together.The words played on a loop in her skull. Vanilla.Boring.A waste.Butter face.
After the worst of the trembling passed, she pushed herself up.Her eyes fell on the small collage of photos pinned to her corkboard. There was Derek, smiling that practiced, lopsided grin at the beach last summer. Another of them at a football game, her face pressed against his shoulder. One from her birthday, where he’d actually looked… fond.A fresh wave of pain, hot and acidic, rose in her throat. She couldn’t look at them. With a violent sweep of her arm, she knocked the pushpins out, sending the photos fluttering to her desk.She didn’t throw them away. She couldn’t.Instead, one by one, she flipped them over. The blank white backs were a relief.A temporary tomb for the memories. The sight of his face, now, made the hole in her chest ache with a physical, gnawing emptiness.
She stood there, breathing heavily, staring at the flipped images.His words weren’t just an insult; they were a diagnosis. They tore a hole through her, and through that hole leaked every insecure thought she’d ever bottled up. He was just the one who’d finally pulled the cork. She had never felt more inadequate, more ugly, as she did now in this silent, suffocating room.
Her gaze drifted from the dead pictures to her closet.The door was ajar. Mechanically, she walked over and pulled it wide.It was a sea of beige, gray, and black. Baggy jeans that hid the shape of her legs.Loose slacks for presentations. Oversized sweaters that swallowed her whole.Button-down shirts in styles her mother approved of.All of it armor. All of it fabric meant to deflect attention, to whisper ‘nothing to see here.’
You wear those sacks.
Was Derek right?Not just about the clothes, but about everything? Was the core of her—the studious, careful, quiet girl—fundamentally unattractive?Unworthy of passion?
A new thought, treacherous and sharp, pierced the fog of despair. She didn’t think she was “vanilla” when it came to sex. The few times she’d let her mind wander, alone in the dark, the ideas that flickered through her were… not that. She was just inexperienced. She’d only had a few boyfriends in her life, and Derek had been the most serious. She’d wanted to please him, so she’d followed his lead, which was straightforward and focused entirely on his own pleasure.He’d never asked what she wanted. She’d never known how to tell him.
Maybe vanilla was all you got when you were afraid to even pick a flavor.
She reached out and touched the sleeve of a particularly shapeless cable-knit sweater.It felt like failure.Like surrender. A hot, defiant anger began to simmer beneath the grief, mixing with the crippling need for validation that Derek’s dismissal had left boiling in her veins.
She didn’t just want to be told she was pretty. She needed to be proven wrong.
She needed to be proven wrong.
The silence in the dorm room was a physical thing, pressing in on her eardrums. She needed to break it. She needed to feel something other than this hollowed-out shame. Sheila rarely drank, something else Derek criticized her for. “You don’t know how to have fun.”
But she had a bottle of whiskey in her dorm, Derek’s favorite brand. A pricey single malt he’d left there after some party months ago, a trophy of his supposed refined taste. She pulled it from the back of her closet, the glass heavy in her hand. She poured a small glass into a clean mug and knocked it back.
It was like swallowing fire and dirt. The heat exploded in her throat, searing down into her empty stomach. She gagged, coughing, her eyes watering. It was awful. It tasted like him—smug and expensive and utterly unfamiliar.
She poured another. This one went down smoother, or maybe her throat was just numb. A warmth, blunt and insistent, began to spread through her limbs, loosening the tight coil of misery in her chest. It immediately hit her. A fuzzy detachment. The sharp edges of the evening began to blur.
She sat at her desk, the laptop lid glowing in the dark room. She goes on the internet, and just out of morbid curiosity, looked at a few porn sites to see what these women did that wasn’t considered “vanilla.”
The first video loaded. It was shocking, not just for the acts, but for the sheer performative energy of it. The sounds. The way the women looked into the camera, not with shame, but with a kind of defiant ownership. They screamed. They begged. They talked in a filthy, crude language that made Sheila’s face flush hot. They did things with their mouths, with their bodies, that she had never conceived of. It wasn’t intimacy. It was a spectacle. A transaction of hunger.
Is that what he wanted? she thought, the whiskey making the thought slippery. All that noise? All that… theater?
She felt a confusing stir in her gut. Part revulsion. Part… curiosity. A faint, terrifying spark of something else. What would it be like to not care? To just… let go like that? To demand something with your body instead of just loaning it out?
She clicked away, her heart hammering. She found herself on a forum, an adult forum where people posted things like sexual kinks, stories etc. It was a raw, text-heavy landscape of anonymous desire. Confessions. Requests. Fantasties laid bare without the polished visuals of porn. It felt more real, and somehow more dangerous.
She scrolled, her eyes skimming past threads about specific fetishes, advice columns, personal ads. Then she found a thread, where women ask men to “rate their bodies.” The title was brutally simple: POST YOUR PIC. GET HONEST FEEDBACK. NO HOLDS BARRED.
Her breath caught. The page was full of images. Some were artistic, silhouetted. Many were graphic, blunt displays of breasts, asses, spread thighs. The comments below each were a stream of numbers, crude assessments, and brutally specific critiques. “6/10, tits are saggy.” “9/10, would ruin that ass.” “Great body, face is a 4 though.”
Sheila was curious, should she? Her hand moved to the collar of her hoodie. Normally she would never consider the idea. The risk, the exposure, the sheer degradation of it would have been unthinkable even this morning.
But the heartache and whiskey make her think otherwise.
A hot, reckless anger pulsed in time with the blood in her ears. Fuck you, Derek. Fuck your vanilla. Fuck your ratings. Her own body felt alien to her now—a thing that had failed, a thing that needed an external audit.
Her fingers trembled as she navigated to the “Create New Reply” box. The cursor blinked, a tiny, demanding heartbeat.
She wouldn’t show her face. That was her line. The “butter face” could remain hidden. But the rest… the body he said was a “waste” under her clothes… let them see it. Let them tell her what it was worth.
She stood up, nearly knocking the chair over. The room tilted slightly, the whiskey warmly anchoring her to this terrible decision. She pulled her hoodie over her head, the static making her hair fly. She stripped off her t-shirt, her plain cotton bra. The cool dorm air hit her skin, raising goosebumps. She looked down at herself. Her breasts were full, heavy. She always thought they were too big, clumsy.
She took out her phone. She positioned it against her textbooks on the desk, angling it upward. She didn’t know how to pose. She just stood there, in the center of the room, under the harsh overhead light. She took a picture. It was clinical. Unflattering. The light washed her out, her stance awkward.
She deleted it.
A new, sharper feeling cut through the fog—a desire to do it right. If she was going to be judged, let it be on the best version of what she had. She turned, presenting her profile, arching her back slightly like she’d seen in the videos. The change was instantaneous. Her silhouette transformed. Her waist dipped, her ass curved out. She took another. Better.
She turned fully away from the phantom camera, looking back over her shoulder. She pulled down her sweatpants and plain underwear just enough to expose the full, rounded curve of her bare ass. The skin was pale, untouched. She snapped the picture.
It was the rawest image of herself she had ever seen. It was just a body. No context. No smile. No her. It was a thing submitted for appraisal.
She sat back down, the cool plastic of the chair against her bare skin. She attached the image file to the forum post. Her cursor hovered in the text box. What did she write? Her mind blanked. Finally, her fingers began to type, the letters seeming to form on their own.
Just got called vanilla. Just got dumped. He said my body was a waste. Tell me what it’s worth. Be honest.
She didn’t read it over. She didn’t think.
Her finger hovered over the trackpad, the pointer aimed at the “Submit” button. The gravity of it all suddenly rushed back in, a tidal wave of sobriety threatening to crash through the whiskey. This was permanent. This was out there. Anonymous, but real.
She closed her eyes.
And clicked. The responses were overwhelming and especially crude.
The responses were overwhelming and especially crude.
The page refreshed instantly, a deluge of notifications flooding the little counter next to her username. Sheila’s heart hammered against her ribs. She pulled her hoodie back on, hiding her skin as if the people on the screen could see her now. She took a long, burning pull from the whiskey bottle, the liquid courage sour on her tongue, and forced herself to scroll.
User: ThroatGoat69: 8/10. Tits are fantastic. Would love to see them without the bra. That ass is a meal. Your ex is a fucking idiot.
User: Hammer612: Waste? LMAO. Dude must be blind or gay. That’s a proper PAWG. Face might be a disaster though. Got a pic of that?
User: Rex_Havoc: I’d ruin you. Plain and simple. Teach you what non-vanilla feels like. PM me.
User: BobTheBuilder88: Solid 7. You’re carrying some weight in the thighs but the proportions are decent. Not a waste, but you could hit the gym.
User: DragonSlayer79: That’s a body built for fucking. No other use for it. Looks like it needs a good, hard pounding to shut your ex out of your head. I’d pin you to that dorm wall and make you scream so loud you’d forget your own name.
Sheila read them all, her face burning, a cold sweat on the back of her neck. The comments were a bizarre cocktail. They disgusted her. They made her skin crawl. And yet, beneath the revulsion, a treacherous, glowing ember of validation began to smoke. They wanted the body. They saw it. They rated it higher than he ever had. The “butter face” comments stung, but they were expected, almost a relief—they proved the anonymity was working.
The “butter face” comments stung, but they were expected, almost a relief—they proved the anonymity was working. But then the replies shifted. The demands got specific, vulgar. A user named ThroatGoat69 wrote, “CAN’T GIVE HONEST RATING WITH THIS PANTIES AND BRA.” Another, DickDamage, posted, “SHE’S COVERING TOO MUCH, SHOW US THAT ASS AND TITTIES.”
Sheila contemplated it. Yesterday, the mere idea of posting nudes on a forum would be ridiculous. But now, in this state of seeking validation, to feel seen pushed her over the edge.
The whiskey burned a path down her throat as she took another swallow. The screen blurred for a second. Her body felt hot, electric with a dangerous curiosity. These strangers—they wanted all of it. The very parts Derek had called a waste. They were demanding proof, and a twisted part of her needed to give it to them. To prove him wrong. To prove she could be more than vanilla.
She stood up. The room swayed. She steadied herself on the desk. Her hands went to the waistband of her sweatpants. She pushed them down, along with her plain cotton panties, letting them puddle around her ankles. She stepped out. The cold air hit her bare skin, making her nipples tighten instantly. She unhooked her bra, dropping it on the chair. Now she was completely naked in the fluorescent glow of her dorm room.
She looked at her phone, propped against the books. Her reflection in the black screen was a pale ghost. She turned away from it.
She positioned herself. Hands on her knees, back arched, presenting herself to the lens. She took a picture. Then another, from the side, one hand pulling her breast up, the nipple peaked and dark. Her heart was a frantic drum against her ribs. She felt exposed, terrified, and exhilarated. This was a line, crossed. She was showing everything.
She sat back down, the cool plastic a shock against her bare ass. She uploaded the images. No bra. No panties. Just skin. She typed nothing this time. Just hit submit.
The response was immediate. The notifications exploded.
User: ThroatGoat69: FUCK YES. 9.5/10. Those tits are perfect. Nipples are begging to be bitten. That cunt looks tight. I’d eat it for hours.
User: DickDamage: Now we’re talking. That’s a body built for sin. Look at that slit. Pretty pink. Bet it’s never been properly stretched.
User: AnonymousG: Holy shit. You’re dripping. Are you wet just from posting that? You filthy girl.
She was. She realized with a jolt that she was. A slick heat had gathered between her legs. The crude words weren’t just comments; they were touches. They were fingers on her skin. Her breath came short. She slid a hand down her stomach, through the coarse hair, and found herself swollen, wet. She gasped at the contact.
Her other hand scrolled, feeding the fire.
Her other hand scrolled, feeding the fire.
A raw, mechanical rhythm took over as her fingers traced her wetness, circling the tight bud of her clit. Her hips pushed against her own touch, a shallow, desperate motion.The screen blurred and cleared with each frantic scroll.
User: DankKnight99: Would breed.User: LoadMaster: That pussy looks untouched.Needs to be wrecked.
User: HungLikeHorse: PM me your address. I’ll show you what a real cock feels like.The validation was a drug, injected straight into her veins. Each crude compliment, each explicit promise, was a bandage slapped over the sucking wound Derek had left.She was wanted. She was desired.Not for her grades, not for her quiet loyalty, but for her body. The very thing she’d hidden.
Then a new comment appeared, from a user named SlimPickings91.His profile picture showed a gaunt face, sharp cheekbones, a sneer. His comment was brief: 4/10.Fat distribution is poor.Thighs cellulitic. Overrated.It was like a bucket of ice water dumped into the heat between her legs. Her hand stilled.Her breath hitched.She scrolled back up. She started looking, really looking, at the profile pictures of the commenters. ThroatGoat69 was a selfie of a heavyset man with a thick neck, grinning in a dim garage. Hammer612’s avatar was a torso shot of a round stomach. Rex_Havoc had no face, but the background showed a thick, hairy forearm.They were the ones rating her 8s, 9s, 10s. They were the ones writing paragraphs about eating her ass, ruining her cunt, breeding her. Their language was vile, but their scores were high.
Then she saw another from BonyTony: 5/10.Soft.Needs tone.Her ex was right to upgrade.She found his picture. A skeletal man in a tank top, collarbones jutting. Another, LankyFrank, gave her a 3.Called her “dumpy.” He was all elbows and angles.
A pattern, clear and cruel, etched itself into her whiskey-soaked brain. The bigger, heavier men, they wanted her.They praised her thickness, her curves, her ample flesh. The skinny, gaunt-looking guys… they saw her as fat.Soft.Unworthy.
It was a new lens, distorting everything.The validation curdled, mixing with a fresh wave of insecurity. Was she only attractive to men who were… what, desperate?Was her body a consolation prize for bigger guys? To the lean, gym-toned Dereks of the world, was she just a "waste"?