Chapter 2: A Favor for a View
The gray light made the screen look like a slab of wet cement. The number glowed: (47).
Leah’s finger hovered over the trackpad. The silence in the dorm was a high-pitched ring. Somewhere, a shower turned on, pipes groaning in the walls. A normal sound. She clicked.
The page jumped to life. The first few comments were just more of the same, a blur of demand and degradation. But they quickly evolved.
UserX69: Seriously. DM me. Let’s talk. I want to hear your voice.
TruthTeller87: The upvotes don’t lie. People wanna see more. Give the people what they want.
LordSinister: A photo is a teaser. A trailer. We need the feature presentation. Show us the merchandise from all angles.
The comments were urging her to post more. The words scrolled, a unified chant. Show us. Prove it. Give us more.
She pushed back from the desk, the chair wheels squealing. Her body felt both heavy and weightless. She walked to her dresser, the one with the chipped Ikea finish. In the top drawer, buried under practical cotton briefs and sport bras, was a single, forgotten item.
It was a pair of thin white cotton panties. She’d bought them online on a whim, a year ago, imagining a different version of herself wearing them. They were lace-trimmed, barely there. Slightly see-through.
She stripped off her sweatshirt and underwear, letting them pool on the floor. The dorm air was cool on her skin. She stepped into the white cotton. The fabric was insubstantial, a whisper against her skin. She looked in the full-length mirror.
The panties clung to the curve of her ass, the pale fabric doing little to obscure the shadow of skin beneath. They cut high on her hips, emphasizing the swell. She turned, looked over her shoulder. The mirror showed the full, round shape, the cotton stretched tight, nearly transparent at the crest.
A sour taste flooded the back of her throat. Nausea. This was debasement. This was stripping herself for the digital wolves.
Her heart thumped a frantic, thrilling rhythm against her ribs. Excitement. It was a hot, shameful wire pulled taut in her gut. They wanted to see. And she was going to show them.
She grabbed her phone from the desk. The screen was smudged. She opened the camera, switching to the rear lens. She didn’t look at her face. She walked back to the center of the room, where the light from the window was strongest.
She turned her back to the mirror, presenting herself to the phone she held behind her. She angled it down, aiming at her ass. The preview screen showed the image: the thin white fabric, the dark shadow of the cleft beneath, the firm curves she’d squatted for every morning. It was blatant. It was an offering.
She took a breath. Held it. She snapped the picture.
The shutter sound was a gunshot in the quiet. She stood frozen for a moment, staring at the phone in her hand. The image was perfect in its awful clarity. You could see everything. The texture of the cotton, the faint hint of skin tone beneath.
She walked, legs unsteady, back to the laptop. The forum page was still open, the comments still pouring in. She attached the new image. Her fingers trembled over the keys.
LeahChen21: You asked.
She hit ‘Post Reply.’
The page refreshed. Her new comment appeared, the attached image a tiny, provocative thumbnail. She watched it. For three seconds, nothing.
Then the notifications exploded.
(52) New Replies to Your Comment.
The first one loaded instantly.
LordSinister: FUCK. YES. Now we’re talking. Look at that fat, perfect ass. I can see right through those panties, you slut.
UserX69: Holy shit. DM me right fucking now. I need to see that in person.
ThrowAway123: That’s a grade-A piece of ass. I want to peel those wet panties off with my teeth.
The responses came faster, a torrent of explicit hunger. They described what they wanted to do to her in vivid, filthy detail. They used words that made her skin prickle. Each comment was a violation, and each violation stoked that low, confused fire in her core.
She read them all, her breathing shallow. One hand drifted between her legs, pressing against the thin cotton. She was already wet, the moisture soaking through the fabric. She rubbed herself through it, a rough, circular motion spurred on by the crude poetry on the screen.
“You like that, don’t you?” she whispered to the empty room, her voice harsh. “You like being their little slut.”
She gasped, her own words hanging in the air like a curse. The phone vibrated again in her other hand, a relentless pulse.
The screen refreshed with new comments, the words blurring then sharpening into brutal focus.
UserX69: FUCK! I BET SHE HAS A TIGHT ASS! ASIAN BITCHES HAVE SNUG PUSSIES AND TIGHT ASSES!
ThrowAway123: THIS CHINESE THICC BITCH NEEDS SOME BLACK COCK!!
LordSinister: I’D TONGUE FUCK THAT ASSHOLE! Let us see it. Spread it for us.
Her breath hitched. A jolt, sharp and electric, shot through her. It wasn’t arousal. It was a seismic shock of exposure, hitting a fault line she didn’t know existed. They weren’t just looking at her ass now. They were speculating on the puckered, hidden part of it. They were reducing her ethnicity to a crude stereotype about tightness. They were talking about her… there.
She had never done anything with her ass. The thought had never seriously occurred to her; it was a boundary, a private line. Now a chorus of strangers was drawing a digital arrow right to it.
Other comments scrolled past, overlapping, demanding variation.
TruthTeller87: Enough with the ass. Show us your wet pussy. Prove you’re as turned on as we are.
AnonDom: TAKE THE PANTIES OFF. SHOW US THOSE BIG TITS TOO.
Her head swam. The room, with its clinical light and the scent of her lavender lotion, seemed to tilt. The torn poster—“DON’T STOP UNTIL YOU’RE PROUD”—fluttered from the wall in a draft she couldn’t feel. A hysterical laugh bubbled in her throat. Proud. This was the opposite of that.
But the hollow, lonely feeling from the morning was still there, a vast and empty room inside her chest. These comments, vile as they were, were shouting into that empty room. They were filling it with noise, with heat, with a purpose. She was no longer the girl who’d been discarded for being ‘thick.’ She was an event. She was a demand.
Her fingers, still pressed against the damp cotton, moved. She rubbed harder, the friction a bright, clarifying pain. “Fuck you,” she whispered, not sure who she meant—them, her ex, herself.
She let the phone clatter onto the keyboard and used both hands. She hooked her thumbs into the sides of the flimsy white panties. She paused, staring at her reflection in the dark laptop screen—a pale, fragmented ghost of a girl.
Then she pushed them down her thighs in one sharp movement. The air was cool on her bare skin. She kicked the fabric away.
She stood completely naked before the laptop’s camera. Her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped animal. This was the point of no return. The first photo could have been a mistake, a moment of madness. This was deliberation.
She positioned herself again, but this time she turned slightly, offering a three-quarter view. She let one hand slide down her stomach, through the dark thatch of hair, and pressed two fingers against her own slickness. She was soaked. Her other hand came up to roughly knead her breast, pulling at the nipple. Her face was averted, expressionless, looking toward the window where the gray light bled in.
She held the pose. She used her elbow to tap the spacebar, waking the laptop from sleep. The forum was there, waiting. She found the camera icon.
She took the picture.
The flash was a brutal, white star, bleaching her vision. She blinked away purple spots. Without reading the new comments already flooding in, she attached the image. Her fingers, sticky now, typed.
LeahChen21: Happy?
She hit reply. A wave of dizziness passed over her.
A wave of dizziness passed over her. She gripped the edge of the desk, knuckles white, waiting for the world to solidify. The screen pulsed with light.
THE COMMENTS ERUPTED.
LordSinister: FUCK, THIS BITCH IS DRIPPING! Look at her fingers. She’s fucking soaked. I can smell it from here.
UserX69: THAT’S A SLOPPY WET CUNT! I’d drink that straight from the source.
ThrowAway123: THIS BITCH NEEDS BOTH HER HOLES FILLED! FINGER THAT ASS WHILE YOU FUCK THAT PUSSY. LOVE THAT BUSH. Don’t you dare shave it.
THE COMMENTS KEPT COMING, NON STOP. They were a single, shouting entity now. They described the act they wanted to see with graphic, mechanical precision. They talked about stretching her, filling her, making her scream. They speculated on the taste, the sound, the feel. Her wetness, evident in the photo, had sent them into a frenzy.
Leah’s own breathing was the loudest sound in the room. Each ragged inhale hitched. The crude words didn’t feel like insults anymore. They felt like scripts. Like orders. Her body, stupid and traitorous, was obeying. The throbbing between her legs was a deep, insistent ache, synchronizing with the pulse of notifications.
She lowered herself into her desk chair, the plastic cool against her bare skin. She kept reading. TruthTeller87: Bet that cunt grips. Bet it’s like a hot, wet fist. AnonDom: I’d PIN YOU DOWN AND LICK YOU UNTIL YOU CAME, THEN SLIDE MY COCK IN THAT TIGHT ASS.
Her left hand slid down her body again, of its own volition. Her right scrolled. She read the words and her fingers mimicked them. She pushed two fingers inside herself, a sharp, full sensation that made her gasp. She was tighter than she expected, the muscles clenching around the intrusion. She fucked herself with her fingers, slowly at first, then with a hurried, jerky rhythm.
“Like that?” she panted at the screen, her voice broken. “Is that what you want?”
She curled her fingers, searching, and found a swollen, electric spot deep inside. A jolt shot through her, straight to the base of her skull. She cried out, a short, sharp sound. She scrolled with her sticky right hand, smearing the trackpad.
New comments blended with the old. CuriousGeorge88: SHOW US YOU COMING. MAKE A VIDEO. LET US HEAR YOU. BigDEnergy22: I WANT TO SEE YOU FUCK YOURSELF WITH SOMETHING. USE A HAIRBRUSH. USE THAT WINE BOTTLE.
The wine bottle. It sat on the floor by her bed, empty. The thought was absurd, grotesque. The glass would be cold. It would be hard.
A violent shudder wracked her. Her fingers stilled inside her. The image flashed in her mind: the green glass, the tapered neck, the shameless plunge. It was a line. A tangible, dangerous line the comments were urging her to cross.
She pulled her fingers out, slick and shining. She stared at them, then at the bottle. The hollow feeling in her chest yawned wide, a chasm that this frantic, digital fucking couldn’t fill. It demanded more. A bigger sensation. A bigger violation.
“No,” she whispered. It was a plea to herself.
But she was already standing. The floorboards were gritty under her feet. She walked to the bottle, picked it up by the neck. The glass was cool, smooth. She brought it back to the desk, placing it beside the laptop like a utensil.
Her reflection in the black screen was a mess of shadows and pale limbs. She looked at the bottle. She looked at the comments, still cascading.
UserX69: DO IT YOU SLUT. WE KNOW YOU WANT TO. FILL THAT CUNT UP.
Her hand was shaking. She uncapped the bottle of lavender-scented lotion on her desk, the one she used after pilates. She squeezed a liberal amount, not onto her hand, but directly onto the neck of the wine bottle. The white cream slid down the dark glass in thick rivulets.
The act was so deliberate, so clinical, it cut through the frenzy. For a second, she was just Leah Chen, pre-med, applying lubricant to a glass cylinder. The absurdity was paralyzing.
Then the phone on her keyboard vibrated with another cluster of notifications. The sound broke the spell.
A raw, grim determination settled over her. It was a chemical feeling, sharp and metallic. She wanted to obliterate the girl who baked almond flour cookies and cried over text messages. She wanted to become the thing in the comments, a creature of pure, undeniable physicality.
She turned her back to the laptop, facing the room. She didn’t look at the camera. She bent forward, bracing her hands on the edge of her rumpled bed. The position presented her completely to the desk, to the laptop’s eye.
She reached back with one lotion-slick hand, guiding the cold, rounded glass head of the bottle between her legs. She pressed. The resistance was immediate, a burning stretch. She gritted her teeth, a low groan escaping her.
“Fuck,” she hissed, pushing back against it.
The glass, slick with lotion, yielded suddenly, popping past the tight ring of muscle. The feeling was a shock—a deep, full, unnatural pressure. It was too much. It was everything. She froze, impaled, breathing in shallow pants. The coolness of the glass inside her was a bizarre contrast to the heat of her own body.
Her eyes were squeezed shut. In the darkness, the comments played like a subtitle track. FILL THAT CUNT. She began to move. A tiny, experimental rock of her hips. The bottle shifted inside her, a solid, unyielding presence. A broken sound, half-sob, half-moan, tore from her throat.
She moved again, with more intent. She fucked herself back onto the bottle, the neck penetrating her deeply with each thrust. The glass was smooth and relentless. Her other hand scrambled between her legs, finding her clit, rubbing frantic, rough circles. The dual sensations were overwhelming—the deep, stretching fullness and the sharp, bright friction.
She was panting, chanting under her breath. “You see? You see? Is this… is this what you fucking want?” Her words were slurry, lost in the sounds of her body and the creak of the bed frame.
The climax built not as a wave but as a seizure. It ripped through her, wrenching a raw, guttural scream from her chest that was absolutely silent, all her breath stolen by the force of it. Her knees buckled. She collapsed forward onto the bed, the bottle slipping out of her with a wet, final sound.
It rolled onto the floor, thudding dully on the pilates mat.
She lay face down, every muscle trembling. The room smelled of sex and lavender. The laptop hummed. The comments, unseen now, were still coming.
A different kind of wetness was on her face, hot and silent, soaking into her comforter. The tears were quiet, inexorable. The hollow feeling was back, bigger now, gaping. She had fed it a feast of degradation, and it was still hungry.
A sharp knock rattled her door.
“Leah?” It was Maya again. “You okay in there? I thought I heard… I don’t know, a thump.”
Leah didn’t move. She couldn’t form words. She stared at the fabric of her comforter, an inch from her eye.
“Leah? Seriously, you’re freaking me out. Open up.”
She swallowed, her throat scraped raw. “I’m fine,” she croaked, the voice not her own. “I just… fell out of bed.”
Silence from the hallway. Then Maya’s voice, lower now, unsure. “You fell out of bed.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah,” Leah forced out, pressing her face deeper into the fabric. “Clumsy.”
Another pause, longer this time. Leah could picture Maya’s expression on the other side of the door—the narrowed eyes, the pressed lips. The concern that was curdling into skepticism.
“Okay,” Maya finally said, the word flat. “Well. Don’t hurt yourself.”
Her footsteps retreated, slower this time. Leah listened until they faded completely.
She was alone. The silence rushed back, swollen and heavy. The cool air from the window raised goosebumps on her bare skin. She became aware of the sticky, drying mess between her thighs, the ache deep inside her, the sharp scent of sex and lavender lotion fouling the sterile room.
She rolled onto her back, staring at the water-stained ceiling tiles. A full, shaking breath filled her lungs and then escaped as a ragged, shattered thing.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
Her own voice was a foreign rasp in the quiet. It broke the spell.
“Get a hold of yourself!” She sat up abruptly, the motion making her head spin. The evidence surrounded her. The overturned wine bottle glistening on the green mat. The laptop humming, its screen a goddamn beacon to the depravity she’d just broadcast. Her own nakedness, exposed and used.
Shame detonated within her, a white-hot nova that scorched away the last traces of numb thrill. It left pure, undiluted horror in its wake.
“What are you doing exposing yourself to grotesque men online?”
Her shriek was muffled by the tight walls. She scrambled off the bed, her legs unsteady, and lunged for the laptop. Her fingers, slick and trembling, fumbled before she finally grasped it. She slammed the screen shut so hard the plastic casing cracked.
The sharp sound echoed.
She stood there, panting, the machine now a sealed black rectangle. A coffin for the thing she’d just become. Her stomach churned. She stumbled to her small, shared bathroom, locking the door and turning the shower to scalding. She scrubbed her skin raw, the soap stinging the tender flesh between her legs, but the feeling of violation seemed seeped into her bones.
Afterward, wrapped in a towel, she avoided the mirror. She dressed in her most oversized sweats and a hoodie, baggy enough to erase her shape. She gathered the white panties from the floor, the wine bottle, the lavender lotion, and shoved them all into a plastic grocery bag, knotting it tightly. She threw it in the dumpster behind the dorm, a silent burial.
For a week, she was a ghost in her own life. She attended every lecture, her posture perfect, her notes meticulous. She filled the margins of her organic chemistry textbook with such dense annotations that the pages turned black with ink. She spoke only when called upon, her answers precise and emotionless. She ate salads at her desk, chewing each leaf twenty times, and did her Pilates routine at dawn with robotic focus.
She was the prim and proper girl she had always been. She was a museum exhibit of that girl. Empty.
Every vibration of her phone sent a jolt through her. She kept it face-up on her textbooks, a guilty, watchful thing. Each notification was a possibility. An apology. A I made a terrible mistake. The silence from him was a physical void she walked around, carefully, every day.
On the eighth day, she took her books to the library. She needed the quiet, the sanctified hush, to finally attack the mountain of cellular biology readings. She found a carrel in a distant corner on the third floor, a wooden cubicle that smelled of dust and old paper.
She was highlighting a passage on mitochondrial DNA when the sound of laughter filtered over the shelf. It was a light, feminine laugh, followed by a low, familiar chuckle.
Her hand froze. The highlighter bled a yellow smear across the page.
She didn’t want to look. Her body turned anyway, slowly, as if pulled by a puppeteer’s string.
Through a gap in the stacks, she saw them. Two carrels down, nestled together in a nook by the window. Her ex had his arm slung around the shoulders of a girl Leah had never seen. The girl was blonde, willowy, wearing a tight knit sweater that draped over a frame as straight and narrow as a ruler. She was whispering something in his ear, her hand resting on his thigh. He was smiling, that lazy, affectionate smile Leah remembered aiming at her a thousand times.
They were a painting. Young, attractive, entwined.
Leah’s breath vanished. The library’s air grew thick and syrupy, impossible to draw into her lungs.
As if sensing the weight of her stare, he glanced up. His eyes moved past the shelves, past the books, and locked directly onto hers.
Time stopped. In that frozen slice of a second, she saw it register in his face. The surprise, the fleeting discomfort, and then—clearly, unmistakably—the pity. He saw the devastation crash over her features, saw her world crumbling right there in the silent library.
He looked away.
He didn’t nod. He didn’t mouth “sorry.” He simply returned his attention to the skinny, pretty girl, pulling her closer, his hand giving her shoulder a soft squeeze. The dismissal was absolute. She was already forgotten. A solved problem. A “thick girl” he’d upgraded from.
A sob ripped from Leah’s throat, strangled and wet. She clapped a hand over her mouth, muffling the sound. She shoved her books into her bag, the pages crumpling, her highlighter rolling off the desk and clattering on the floor. She didn’t retrieve it.
She ran. She fled past the rows of silent scholars, down the echoing stairwell, through the heavy brass doors, and into the brittle autumn afternoon. The cold air slapped her tear-streaked face. She didn’t stop running until she crashed through her dorm room door, heaving, her vision blurred.
She sank to the floor, her back against the door, and wept. Great, wrenching sobs that tore from a place so deep it felt ancestral. The image was seared onto the backs of her eyelids: his arm around her, his casual, contemptuous dismissal. She was ugly. She was fat. She was nothing. The words from the forum, his text, her father’s comments, they swirled together into a single, damning verdict.
The hollow ache in her chest was a sucking wound. It needed filling. It needed screaming into. It needed proof, any proof, that she existed, that she was something to someone, even if that something was an object of filthy, desperate want.
The craving was chemical, urgent. It overrode the shame, the vow, the prim and proper performance.
Still crying, she crawled to her desk. She pulled the laptop onto her knees. The crack in the casing felt like a scar. Her fingers, wet with tears, typed the web address she had sworn never to visit again. She remembered it perfectly.
The forum loaded, garish and welcoming. The “Log In” prompt flashed.
Her breath hitched. A final, weak fragment of her conscience whispered no.
She typed her username. LeahChen21.
She entered the password.
She clicked.