"Honey, I'd be glad to, uh... "model" with you if it was just... normal modeling. You know, standing around striking a pose or whatever?" I tried to explain to my daughter, who had just made an extremely odd request.
She pushed her light brown hair behind her ear and looked away from me for just a moment.
"I mean, all you'd have to do is just stand there, technically," she argued. "Actually, it'd be best if you just stand there!" she smiled hopefully up at me. "You literally wouldn't have to do anything except hold the camera!"
"Buggy, it's out of the question," I said, maybe a little more forcefully than I meant to.
My daughter's name was Beth. "Bug" had been her nickname ever since she had failed her first attempt at saying her own name when she was very little.
"Dad, I don't think you understand. Let me show you something," Beth said, turning around in her chair and pulling a website up on her computer. I had been standing in the entrance to her room, and now I walked in and stood behind her chair. I gently placed my hand on her shoulder and looked at the screen in front of her.
"Okay, so, look," Beth said, motioning to a multicolored bar graph. "Hmm," I made a hum of acknowledgement.
"All right, so this bar on the left? That's basically me," Beth explained.
"Uh-huh..." I replied, looking closely at the graph. Beth was referring to a bar on the far left side of the graph. It was the smallest bar visible. Underneath the bar was a label: "Solo Only."
"Solo only, huh?" I asked a little sarcastically.
_____
When my daughter, Beth, graduated high school, she didn't want to move out of my house. Her mom wasn't in our lives, and Beth was my only kid.
Beth was short -- when she was growing up, she only shot up in height about half as much as other girls at her school. Hell, maybe not even half. She stopped growing around the time she turned 18, and she was about a head shorter than most other girls her age. She wasn't Danny DeVito levels of short, but she wasn't far from it either. I just thought it made her cuter, though.
She had straight, light-brown hair that went down a few inches past her shoulders. She would often put her hair behind her ears when she's concentrating or nervous, or trying to listen closely.
Even though she was slightly chubby, like her mom, her breasts were still on the smaller side. However, she had very wide hips, a big round butt, and some pretty thick thighs to go along with it. I had always assumed that she was self-conscious about her body (even though I never thought there was anything wrong with it), and I was a little relieved to find out that that wasn't the case at all.
When Beth unexpectedly presented me with $500 cash, I wasn't sure where she had gotten the money. I asked a few times where she'd gotten the dough, but she just assured me that she was being safe, and told me not to worry. She told me it was a rent payment, and that I could expect to see them on the first of each month as long as she was staying at home with me. I never would have asked her for money, but I wasn't in a position to turn it down, either.
"You're not, uh... a lady of the evening, are you...?" I had asked her at some point later on. She laughed and denied it emphatically enough that I believed her, and dropped it.
At some point after she had given me her first monthly rent payment, I was dropping off some laundry in Beth's bedroom while she was out of the house. I noticed a few things in her room, and I began to understand where she was probably getting the money.
Standing on the floor at the foot of Beth's bed were two things, both on tripods: A round ring-shaped light, and a little camera.
After Beth returned home that day, I talked with her about what I had found in her room.
She was pretty embarrassed, but eventually she explained to me that since shortly after she had graduated high school, she had been making pornography to sell on Onlyfans, and that that's where the money had been coming from.
She went on to explain that she only filmed at home, and that she hadn't done anything with guys on camera. She also explained that since her face is only visible to her paid subscribers, the chances of someone we know stumbling upon her profile were very low.
Whatever. I didn't like the idea of strange men looking at my only daughter like that, but at least she wasn't doing hardcore sex stuff, and it sounded like she was being pretty safe. She was over 18 anyway. It was time for her to make her own decisions, and live with them afterwards.
Since that day, my daughter was a little more open about her new job. She always kept the door closed when she was working, obviously, but now I would hear her filming sometimes, and when she did I would always notice the bright light from the ring light seeping out from under her door. I hadn't noticed that before we talked about it -- she must have been only filming at night, or when I was out of the house.
At first, it was pretty weird to hear my daughter, uh... filming herself. But I got used to it surprisingly quickly. I supposed that if she was going to do something like this, then I would just be glad she was doing it safely from home.
In some small way that I didn't recognize until later, I was glad she felt comfortable enough at home to do that stuff semi-openly.
_____
"Yeah, I only do solo stuff, remember?" Beth reminded me.
"Well... that's... good?" I said unsurely.
"I guess, but look..." Beth motioned to the next bar on the graph, which was maybe 25% higher than the first one. This bar was labeled "Solo + G/G"
"That's a lot higher," I admitted. "What's G/G?" I asked, afraid of the answer, because I saw that the next bars in the graph all included B/G, and they were all much higher than the first two bars.
"Girl-girl. Like if two girls make a video together and they-"
"Okay, I get it, I get it," I interrupted her. I pinched her shoulder lightly each time I said "get it."
