Hush Baby Hush

He cocks his brow, skeptical.

“Come upstairs,” Hollywood says to me. “We’ll clean you up in my bathroom.”

I follow her up to the ensuite where she holds my hand under the faucet. A wave of exhaustion pours over me. I watch the red drain away and feel...nothing. Like there’s a pane of glass between me and my senses. I can press my nose to the glass, fog it with my breath and write messages in the condensation, but I can’t break through.

Hollywood bandages my hand and then wraps her arms around me.

“I’m sorry this is happening to you, Kenzie.”

“It’s happening to all of us.”

“What happened at Rudy’s didn’t happen to all of us.” She pulls back to look at me. “I just wish I could erase every trace of that video from the internet.”

“I don’t even care about the video,” I say. “I’m not ashamed of having been a cam model. It’s the attention I hate, how it disrupts my life and the lives of everyone around me.”

She squeezes my uninjured hand. “All the disruptions in the world are worth it if it means having you in our lives.”

My throat tightens, a crack in the glass.

She sighs. “One day, you’ll believe it, too.”