Lily's Point of View
The monitor beeping next to her mother's bed is the only sound at midnight. Lily sits in the plastic chair, watching her mom's chest rise and fall. In and out. In and out. Like the breathing might stop any second.
The surgeon's words keep playing in her head.
Forty thousand dollars.
That's what he said. Not maybe. Not possibly. Forty thousand or her mother doesn't get the surgery. And without the surgery, the doctors gave her mother two years. Maybe three if she got lucky.
Forty thousand.
Lily has twelve thousand in her savings account. Twelve. She's been saving since she was sixteen, working weekends and nights while going to school. Twelve thousand dollars built from nothing. And it's not enough. It's nowhere near enough.
She pulls out her phone and opens her banking app for the hundredth time tonight. The number doesn't change. Twelve thousand, four hundred and thirty-two dollars. She keeps hoping she miscalculated.
She didn't.
Lily thinks about the loans. Three of them already. Her credit cards maxed out. The second mortgage application that got denied because there's barely any equity left in the house. She'd already given the bank everything they asked for and they still said no.
The studio is bleeding money. Her fashion design business. The thing she's been building since she was twelve years old when her grandmother taught her to sew. It's her entire life. But last month she had to let two of her three employees go part-time. She can't pay them real salaries. She can barely pay the warehouse rent.
If she takes another month off to sit here in this hospital chair, the studio dies.
Her mother dies without surgery, the studio dies because Lily can't work, and Lily dies too. Slowly. From the weight of losing both.
That's the math.
That's where she is at midnight on a Tuesday.
Her phone buzzes.
Keisha. Her best friend since middle school. The text shows up with a link and a laughing emoji.
"Girl check this out. Billionaires paying stupid money for dates. You're hot enough. Maybe charge them 50K haha. Problem solved."
Lily almost doesn't click it. She knows Keisha is joking. It's the kind of ridiculous thing best friends text at night when they're trying to make you laugh during the worst moments.
She clicks it anyway.
Luxury Nights appears on her screen. The website is all dark and expensive looking. Gold letters. Photos of women in designer dresses. Men in suits. The tagline reads: "Exclusive. Elegant. Unforgettable."
Luxury Nights connects beautiful women with exclusive experiences from high-net-worth individuals.
That's what the homepage says.
Lily scrolls. There are women posted like products. Their photos. Their descriptions. Their rates. Some women are charging ten thousand for a full day. Some are asking for twenty thousand. One woman in the top listings is getting fifty thousand for a weekend.
Fifty thousand.
Her mother needs forty.
Lily closes the app and puts her phone down.
She's not that desperate.
She's not.
Her mother coughs in her sleep. It's a wet, painful sound. The kind of cough that's been getting worse for five years. The kind that doctors kept saying might be this or might be that until finally they found what it was. A tumor. Growing. Slowly killing her.
Forty thousand dollars and they can remove it.
Forty thousand and her mother lives.
Lily picks her phone back up.
She opens the app again. Her fingers hover over the button that says Create Profile. It would take five minutes. A photo. A description. That's all. Five minutes and she could have four thousand people looking at her like she's something to bid on.
She sets the phone down again.
She's not desperate enough.
She looks at her mother's face. Her mom looks smaller in the hospital bed. Older. Like the sickness is eating her from the inside out. Sophie Chen is only fifty-six but she looks seventy. She's given everything to Lily. Everything. When Lily's father died when she was sixteen, her mother never let her drop out of school. Never let her stop dreaming about design.
Now Lily can't even figure out how to save her.
Her phone buzzes again. This time it's a hospital bill notification. One hundred and forty dollars for the room. Per night. Just for being here.
Lily opens the app for the third time.
This time she takes the photo.
She wears one of her best designs. A black dress she made two years ago from fabric she couldn't afford. It's fitted to her body. It shows her collarbones and her small frame and her dark eyes that don't miss anything. The photographer in her knows what works. The desperate woman in her doesn't care anymore.
She sits in front of her mirror at home at two in the morning and takes the photo. Her hands shake as she uploads it.
The profile description takes longer. She writes it three times. Deletes it. Rewrites it.
Finally she settles on something honest.
Fashion designer. Honest conversation and genuine company. One day only.
She stares at those words for a long time. They feel like a confession. Like she's admitting something shameful. But maybe she is. Maybe this is shameful. Maybe selling a day of her time to a stranger is the most shameful thing she could ever do.
But so is letting her mother die.
She sets the opening bid at five thousand.
That's enough for the first payment. That's enough to tell the hospital we're getting you the surgery. That's enough to breathe for one more week.
Her finger hovers over the submit button.
She thinks about her mother's face.
She thinks about the surgeon's words.
She thinks about the money in her bank account that will never be enough.
She hits submit.
The timestamp reads 11:47 PM.
Lily closes the app immediately because she can't watch people reject her. She can't see the numbers stay at five thousand forever. She can't handle the humiliation of being worthless on a platform designed to measure women's value.
She lies in bed and tries not to think about what she just did.
At 11:50 PM her phone buzzes.
Someone bid.
Just fifty more dollars. Fifty-five hundred.
Her heart starts beating faster.
Lily opens the app even though she promised herself she wouldn't.
Fifty-eight hundred.
Six thousand.
The numbers are climbing.
She watches like someone watching a car crash. She can't look away and she can't stop it from happening.
Seven thousand.
Eight.
By nine thousand, three different people are bidding against each other. Lily watches their usernames appear and disappear and appear again. These are real people. Real men. Real billionaires who want to spend that much money on her.
Twelve thousand.
She has twelve thousand in her savings. Someone just matched her entire life savings to take her out on a date.
Fifteen thousand.
Twenty.
At thirty thousand dollars, there are only three bidders left. Lily feels sick. She feels electric. She feels like she's standing on the edge of something that's going to destroy her or save her and there's no in between.
Fifty thousand.
A new bidder appears.
Username: XavierThorne
His username appears with an offer of fifty-five thousand.
Then sixty.
Then seventy-five.
He's not bidding against the other men anymore. He's bidding against himself. Raising his own price higher and higher like he's the only one who matters now.
One hundred thousand.
One hundred and twenty-five.
The other bidders disappeared two bids ago.
Xavier Thorne is alone now.
Alone with Lily on this platform, pushing his bid higher and higher.
The number changes again.
Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Lily's breath catches in her throat.
Then it happens.
A notification pops up. A private message from XavierThorne appears on her screen.
Her hands are shaking so hard she can barely read it.
The message is short.
Simple.
Devastating.
"I don't share. One day, all of it, belongs to me."