Page 8 of The Devil Wears Nada

Then he's past, and you know once again it was never about you at all. Beck flirts the way other people breathe. His attention is like rain. It hits everyone and doesn’t give a damn who it soaks and who it leaves dry.

Theo Marsh is the one you'd pick if you had the choice. Warmer than Beck, with kinder eyes. He gives me a real smile, asks about my weekend, and actually waits for the answer. He'd do the exact same for the mailman. It's genuine, and it's the same for everyone.

This morning, he stops at my desk and hands me a coffee of oat milk and one sugar, my preference, which nobody else in this building has ever bothered to learn. He asks how my day is going like he really wants to know.

"Quiet morning," I say with a casual shrug. I leave out the part about the night before’s two weeks' pay and a secret court of anonymous men. "You know. The usual."

"Good." He means it. It's the nicest thing that will happen to me today at work, but I take it at face value. Because here's the trap with the Theos of the world; their kindness is no different from what you'd show a stray animal or nice old man at a bus stop. He sees me the way you see furniture you happen to be fond of. Warmly. Completely without heat.

Which is almost worse than Beck. Beck doesn't see me and it's nothing. Theo sees me and it's still nothing.

Then there's Elias Thorne, who does not stop or greet or acknowledge. He barely talks and doesn't do warm, and it's honestly irritating how good-looking he is anyway. Dark, serious, always in a suit that fits him disgustingly well. All of it spent on a man who hasn't shot a full sentence in my direction all year.

This morning, he storms in, crosses to my desk, and drops a contract in front of me. "This is wrong."

"Good morning to you too," I chirp, more to myself than him.

"Clause four. You transposed the dates." He's already turning away and it isn't even a criticism, just a fact he's leaving on my desk like litter, confident I'll handle it. In the fourteen months I’ve worked here, he has never asked me one question about myself. I'm genuinely unsure he even realizes there’s a human behind the desk where he dumps his crap.

And that's the three of them: one who's for everyone, one who's kind to everyone, and one who's warm to nobody. Not for me. Not possible. Not interested.

Whatever.

Tonight, strangers will pay a fortune to look at me. The men I actually work for look straight through me.

The phone rings, and it's Birdie, and she opens with something so completely unhinged, a candle-related incident, a small fire, she's fine, the smoke detector is less fine, that it gets me going. I laugh. The real one. The one that gets out before I can button it up.

And Elias Thorne stops.

Halfway to his office, hand already on the doorframe, he goes still. Then he turns his head and looks at me, actually looks, straight at me, for what has to be the first time in fourteen months, and something crosses his face that I cannot translate. It's there for a second. Less than. Then the glacier closes back over it and he's through the door, and it's shut, like none of it ever happened.

I sit there with the phone warm against my ear and Birdie narrating the arrival of the fire department and how cute they were in their little outfits.

"Ag? You still there?"

"Yeah." I'm still looking at his closed door. "Yeah. I'm here."

Weird. That was weird. Elias Thorne does not look at people.

I file it under weird, tell Birdie to stop fucking lighting things, and get back to being Agnes.

3

AGGIE

Two weeks in, and my three big Knights are just part of the scenery. My scenery. The kind of scenery that will get me out of debt.

HouseMoney, NoComment, and KindRegards show up every night I go live. These Knights park themselves at the top of my Round Table, and spend money on me like it's a competitive sport. I've stopped questioning it. You don't look a gift horse in the mouth, my mother used to say. You cash it. Between the three of these men—I assume they’re men but who the hell knows—I've knocked almost four thousand dollars off Birdie's loan in fourteen days. The one I stupidly cosigned.

Which I will never do again, even though her latest gig is super-duper promising, a no-brainer, and if I don’t get in early, I’m an idiot.

God help us. But at least I've started sleeping again.

These guys are my regulars. I can’t believe it, but I really, actually have regulars and I have no idea why. There are plenty of other “models” on CamALot who actually know what they’re doing, not to mention are way sexier than me with their spray-on tans, lip filler, and giant fake tits.

NoComment never types. Not once, in two weeks. He just appears, his name sitting there on my dashboard, and pays big, silent tributes with no words attached. I've decided he's shy. In fact, I've built a whole man in my head who is quiet, intense, watches more than he talks, who'd rather show up than explain himself. And of course is devastatingly handsome.

KindRegards is the opposite. He's polite to the point of concern; are you drinking water? did you eat today? you seem tired, everything okay? A worried aunt if your worried aunt was rich and liked looking at partially clad women. While I don't know what he looks like, I do know he says please, which on this website makes him a unicorn.