I could perform for a few anonymous people on the internet, get paid, and then go about my day.
…this actually seems feasible.
With a few swipes and taps of my thumb, I’m back in my profile, and I click on the Live Cam button, figuring I’ll take a look around at all the settings, gather some info about how it works, then figure out what I want to do if I ever actually decide to go live.
The top half of my face appears on the screen immediately, big hazel eyes staring back at me. Well, that’s weird. I adjust the angle of the phone down a little, which isn’t much better since now my jaw looks way out of proportion to the rest of my face.
The right hand side of the screen has a bunch of options, and I slowly work my way down them.
Filters.
Text banners.
Voice modulators.
Timers and games.
An option to reverse my camera, and then a bunch of other things that I’ve already lost interest in.
At the bottom of the screen, the options for ratings, privacy, and introduction content are all visible. Opening the rating option, it appears on the screen with a numbered horizontal bar. The words are all squished up weird, so I rotate my phone into landscape.
Each rating is like the knowledge article, so I select the lowest rating and then the green tick to lock it in. The privacy option pops up and it is set to public via default. Clicking the green tick progresses me across to the introduction content.
The textbox has default text—Just a sugar baby waiting for you to watch.
I snort and click the tick, figuring I’ll come back to fix that cheesey-as-fuck intro later.
Except that’s when a countdown appears on the screen, and my stomach drops into my ass.
Three.
Two.
One.
I don’t need even a second more to realize exactly what has happened.
I’m fucking live.
I’m a fucking cam girl.
My resume can officially say that I have done cam work.
Fuck my life.
“Oh shit,” I mutter, frantically scanning the screen, trying to figure out how to end the live, but in my panic, nothing is standing out.
I sit up straighter and just start tapping on anything that looks remotely like an option, but the only thing that changes on thescreen is that the right-hand side of the screen starts filling up with line after line of notifications to tell me people are joining.
And not just a few. I’ve been live for exactly twenty seconds, and there are eighteen people watching me right now.
Fuck, I should say something, right? Like, explain what’s going on, then ask for help shutting it off? Worst-case, I’ll power down my phone.
Okay, yep, I can do this.
“Ah, hi, sorry. I didn’t mean to go live. I was taking a look at the settings and somehow ended up here. I’m so sorry. I’m just going to figure out how to turn it off, and then I’m going to go.”
Nervously, I dart my gaze over to what I now recognize as the activity feed and hope to see the number of people watching start to go down, but it does the fucking opposite.