At Any Price

I sighed. “Yeah, yeah. You don’t have to keep saying that. I get it.”

“Stop rolling your big brown eyes. I’m not thrilled about having to sift through all the bullshit and find out what lech has been ogling your pictures on your website.”

My stomach squeezed at his words and I didn’t say anything for a long moment. This really was lunacy and every time I talked myself down from the panic that hovered at the edge of my consciousness, something else would trigger it to summit levels once again.

“You’re not helping,” I said, fighting to keep the irritation from my voice.

“Who the hell set up the damn thing? I’m a conscientious objector to your crazy ‘new paradigm’—yes—but I’m still not going to leave you hanging.”

Relieved, I coughed, wanting desperately to change the subject before he lapsed into another lecture about the self-destructive potential of my actions. “Okay so… Next steps?”

He cleared his throat. “I evaluate the top three bidders based on your all-important criteria. If they’re losers, I move down to the next batch and so on until I find someone who isn’t a dirty old creep, if indeed there is someone who isn’t a dirty old creep.”

“Okay, you have that list somewhere, right?” I grimaced, picturing the mountainous heap of papers and crap on his desk. He probably hadn’t seen it in weeks.

“Christ, Mia. I don’t need the damn list. I remember it all. He can’t be married. Needs to provide a complete lab workup to rule out STDs. Umm…”

“See? You can’t remember half of it.” I paused. “Find the list and clean your damn desk once in a while.”

He was riffling through paperwork on the other end. “It’s right here under the pile of—”

“Shit?”

“I remember another one—criminal history?”

“Uh huh…And what else?”

“Ahh. Here it is, see I told you I’d find it right under my stack of Minecraft notes. Let’s see—lab workups, marital status, yadda yadda, okay—proof of money set aside in an offshore holding account.”

“And last but not least…?”

“A really big one?”

My eyes shot to the ceiling. Typical for him to jump to something like size mattering. “We don’t all think like you do.”

“Well yeah, that would be one of my criteria—what of it? The last one is that you both make an agreement that there will be no future contact between the two parties after the terms of the contract have been fulfilled.”

I sat back. “Great. I’m in good hands, then.”

“It’s my job to make sure you will be.”

That tight feeling in my gut wrenched again. “That’s the plan.”

“I’ve already got e-mails in to the top bidders.”

My brows shot up. That was quick. It wasn’t really like him to be so Johnny-on-the-spot like this. Heath—my best friend since the eighth grade and a surrogate older brother even if only by six months—was always this protective. When I’d showed him the Virgin Manifesto post about to go up on my blog, he’d freaked.

Fortunately, he calmed down and demanded to have control over the result. It was the compromise I had to put up with in exchange for his help and I knew I could trust him. Heath was the only man on this planet whom I did trust, actually.

We said good-bye and I closed my browser with a decisive click. I was sure my blog readers would demand a recap of the auction results tomorrow. This whole thing had gone semi-viral within the online community of gamers, and even beyond—Huffington Post, Jezebel, even Twitter. I squeezed my eyes closed, dreading the thought of writing that post. The readers would want answers and I didn’t have any. Not yet, anyway.

Regardless, there’d been complaints for the past few weeks that the auction had interfered with my regular posts. After all, it was a gaming blog, for God’s sake!

During the auction hoopla, most of my male readers had apparently come to the consensus that I rated an eight or higher. My opinion was probably closer to a solid six. But gamer dudes weren’t usually too picky when it came to women in our community. The main requirements were that a woman was breathing and had reasonably-sized breasts. As a girl gamer, if you stuck your nametag across your cleavage at Comic-Con, you were likely to never have them meet your gaze.

With shaky hands, I went about the next few hours in a haze. I made some tea from the small box of expensive Orange Pekoe—my favorite. I allowed myself the treat because it was a special occasion and I vowed to reuse the bag for breakfast in the morning. Nowadays, I had to enact cost measures like that. My scholarship money had dwindled and expenses were barely being covered by the ads on my blog and my part-time orderly job at the hospital.