[been thinking about you]
There are times - rarely - when Rose laments what she does to put herself through college. Every week, she spends time regularly tastefully exploiting her beauty, promoting products she has little to no use for, and interacting with people online who think they know her because that's what she wants them to think. She makes a wage off of being accessible and desirable - to men and women both.
It's tiring, sometimes.
And sure, maybe she could be spending her nights dancing on a pole instead, but in a lot of ways, Rose isn't sure what's so different between a stripper and an Instagram model. Except maybe that modeling is more convenient and less physically taxing. And there isn't anything wrong with stripping, aside from Rose's lack of rhythm; if a woman is beautiful, then she should do something with it if she wants to, and Rose has great respect for the ones who are bold enough and savvy enough to make easy pickings out of lustful stares. She does the same, doesn't she? To a lesser extent, maybe, but she isn't blind to the parallels.
All the same, she is fully aware of what she is doing when she posts pictures and brags about swag. She's influencing, seducing, selling. Even if she has hard-and-fast lines that she won't cross, even though she makes sure her skin is covered and her poses are neutral, even then she knows that there will always, always be someone online who makes a point of objectifying her. That's just how it is.
This is where she and Bella differ, she thinks. Rose is almost certain that, even though she and Bella run very similar hustles, Bella is willfully ignorant of the lurkers who are lusting after her pages. Bella doesn't want to know. Rose, on the other hand, likes to keep tabs on the situation.
It's been a while since someone dared to call her a thirst trap. She wonders if she's being overly critical when she thinks it might have been better if the comments had been even a little unique. There was no original thought there. She might have skipped over it if not for the replies those comments won.
We don't tolerate that here.
Take your fuckboi self elsewhere.
This goddess deserves respect.
Harassment isn't ideal and it makes her skin prickle, but she's always had a ruthless sort of temperament and she knows that, no matter how distasteful it is, dealing with creeps is part and parcel of her job. It's something she lives with, a bitter pill she gets to swallow every day, because in exchange for some occasional online harassment, Rose gets to pay for one of the finest educations in the nation. Some rando lusts after her latest Instagram picture, and in turn, Rose gains another like, another click, another dollar for her tuition to cover what her scholarship does not.
It isn't as if she hasn't been dealing with the same thing since she popped breasts and an hourglass figure overnight. And it isn't as if Rose is ashamed of her appearance or has any hang-ups about it. She's confident and sensual, fully in command of her sexuality. She might not be a reigning, if not reluctant, beauty queen, but she is the feature in plenty of wet dreams.
She would know. Being told about these dreams is the second most popular type of DM she opens, right after unsolicited dick pics.
None of this makes it any more pleasant, of course, to scroll through the comments feed on her last post and find some pea-brained moron calling her a thirst trap after her other followers get on his ass about it. She sighs, looking away from her phone long enough to snag one of the first-row seats in the lecture hall, right in the perfect spot to see all the graphs and charts projected onto the board.
Since there are still several minutes until class is due to start, Rose turns her attention back to her phone. Her eyes narrow slightly. That username - mathmagician - is familiar. He's been following her forever, she knows, always one of the first to like her posts and always ahead of the curve when it comes to reinforcing the idea that she should be respected.
Maybe it's the memory of the weekend still so fresh in her mind - a memory where she was (reluctantly) impressed by someone who made math seem like magic - that makes her do it. Or maybe she's truly as bored as she feels. Either way, she follows the random urge to click on mathmagician's handle and waits as his personal feed loads. She doesn't do this often. She has so many followers that it would, of course, be very difficult to single one out or even be able to see each of their profiles. But she makes an exception this time.
And when the page loads, she very firmly smothers the urge to make any noise of interest or outward expression. Because she knows the face on all those pictures. It's a face she's met - or re-met - very recently.
Emmett McCarty is mathmagician.
She'd realized very quickly on Saturday that Library Guy and Emmett McCarty were one and the same, but that had been as far as she entertained the thought. She thinks back to all of her interactions with Library Guy, all the flustered stuttering, and easily matches it to the earnest adoration Emmett displayed on Bella's birthday. All that together, especially with the proof right before her eyes, makes it very easy to reconcile mathmagician's identity.
Rose thumbs through his pictures, passing the time. All dimples and dark, curly hair and vibrant eyes. She remembers him as tall, a little larger than lean, and eager. He smiles a lot in these pictures, a decided contrast to how she knows him. She figures, probably rightly so, that she must make him nervous. Many of his pictures are him with computers or with one of the others she'd met this weekend. He apparently likes to stop and snap pictures of dogs on the street, too.
He's…cute. Vaguely annoying and bafflingly content to simply stare at her, as if just being in her space was enough to make him happy, but cute all the same.
Rose stops and stares at one picture - Emmett with a broad grin that crinkles his eyes attractively, snow smashed against half his face, stubble on his chin. Objectively, he's very attractive. (Subjectively, Rose always did have a thing for dimples…)
Thinking back on it, he was sweet on Saturday, wasn't he? He wanted to carry all her drinks and he tried to (successfully) impress her by calculating large sums in his head. And she hadn't missed that his large frame shadowing her around the bars had kept other men away, giving her a peaceful night out. She recalls that he'd been respectful, too. She hadn't once caught his eyes drifting from her face, even though she knows her tight jeans and spaghetti strap blouse had shown off all her best assets. If she takes a moment to think back to her interactions with him as Library Guy, he'd been the same.
Huh. No matter how she knows him, it seems like Emmett McCarty stays true to a general respect for her, as a person. He doesn't seem to want to treat her as a sex object, not even obliquely. His admiration is pure and unrestrained.
It's been a very, very long time since any man had shown such an innocent, honest interest in her, and it makes her curious - curious in the way she feels about numbers, about what makes money flow in predictable patterns, about how the right distribution can grant the highest yield.
Emmett McCarty makes her brain itch. She wants to know what makes him tick. She wants to know what it is about her that seems to draw him so completely, with such innocent devotion. She wants to know why mathmagician calls her goddess. She wants to know how much math he can really do in his head, because she's secure enough to acknowledge that it's a skill she finds sexy, and she wants to know how long he'd be able to keep it up…under a certain kind of pressure.
Rose is curious. And just like any other curiosity in her life, she wants to seek an answer to it - because there's something different about Emmett, who does not objectify her and does not tolerate her being objectified. So she holds onto her curiosity through this class and the next, all the way through her library study group and the snack she grabs from the campus store, all the way up until she has returned to her dorm and can track down the one person who can give her the kind of answers she's looking for.
Bella is, predictably, fiddling around with the drawing tablet she's been spending hours on every afternoon, sketching out and colorizing one character sketch after another with great enthusiasm. Bella already has extraordinary focus - anyone who can willingly spend hours in front of a computer playing a game has an impressive attention span by Rose's reckoning, as she finds the very idea incredibly boring - but the attention she has been putting into these Midnight Sun projects is frankly impressive. Rose isn't exactly eager to interrupt her least dramatic friend, but needs must.
Plus, the loveable geek could probably use a break. Rose is probably saving her from carpal tunnel.
Rose passes her by to slant her body across one of the squishy bean bag chairs and nudges Bella's foot with her own. She waits until Bella's pretty, freckled face lifts to look at her, and then Rose says, "So, tell me about Emmett."
Both of Bella's brows raise.
Rose settles in to sate her curiosity.
A/N: Update 2 of 2 this weekend. I've been gearing up for this one since way back in the first arc of the story, so I'm pretty excited about it actually.
Anyway, the things mentioned in Rose's narrative are legitimate issues many people, usually women, deal with online. A DM is a direct message (generally on Twitter or Instagram) where unsolicited dick pics, sexual harassment, and exploitation are very commonly found. Of course, this issue is also prevalent on dating apps and general text exchanges. Younger generations (45 and under) regularly deal with these things, including being pressured into participating in sexting and online revenge porn, where private pictures/videos are shared on social media for the express purpose of humiliating someone, often after a nasty break-up. These are all elements of social media use that should not be overlooked. We all have to do better, whether by actively calling harassers out or by teaching children and teens early on the type of behavior that is acceptable, both online and offline. What I'm saying is this: if you haven't already, it might be time to have some uncomfortable conversations about these topics with your sons, daughters, nieces, and nephews.
In pandemic news, the Moderna vaccine has gone into phase 3 trials here in the U.S. and there is some interesting literature being published about it in scientific journals. Keep an eye out for news about this one in Nature, as there are apparently interesting implications to the vaccine that are being confirmed by the previous trial phases. But until there is a vaccine, you know what I'm going to say - wear your mask in public. Like, save a horse, ride a cowboy, except save a life, wear a mask.
As always, be brutally honest. I can take it. Stay safe, stay smart, and stay inside.
~Rae