Cycle I · “The Hidden Voice” · 20

She’s lying on her bed, blue light on her face, watching a reel of a girl she follows on X talk about “finally quitting her manager.” The comments are a mess:

Half “queen, get that bag,”
Half “you should have known better.”

She scrolls on, thumb numb, until she hits a wall of text that isn’t a thirst trap or a tip thread — it’s this piece.

At first, she skims the client list and almost backs out. It sounds like every guy who’s ever told her, “I do marketing, you should listen to me.” But the more she reads, the more it doesn’t fit that pattern. There’s no “DM me for my course,” no “limited spots,” no “babygirl, we’ll make you rich.” Just a quiet, annoyed confidence:

I’ve built things.
I know what I’m doing.
I’m careful about who I spend that on.

She thinks about the secret side-account she started not long ago:

Half-formed photo sets,
Captions she hated,
A bio she rewrote six times,

before she deleted it all because it felt cheap and not enough at the same time.

The line that catches her isn’t “cock-gobblers.” It’s:

“Treating your body and your brand like assets, not a slot machine.”

She doesn’t make porn. She’s not even sure she wants to. But she knows the slot-machine feeling — refreshing, posting, hoping, waiting to be chosen by someone, anyone, for anything.

For a second, she imagines what it would be like if someone actually saw her the way he describes seeing creators:

Assessing,
Strategizing,
Building around who she is instead of sanding it down.

She doesn’t message. She doesn’t suddenly decide to start an account.

Instead, she opens her notes app and writes:

“If I ever do this, it has to be for me, not for whoever happens to be scrolling.”

She stares at the phrase queen-maker on the screen a little longer than she means to. Not because she’s ready to be one — but because, for the first time, the idea of being built up by someone, instead of just being consumed, doesn’t sound completely insane.

Just… not yet.

Cycle I · “The Hidden Voice” · 20

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