Page 6 of Get Undressed With Me

The door firmly shut, Gus took a breath to center himself just as his phone dinged with a text message. He glanced at it, seeing it was Val sending him the client information… and his gut dropped at the name.

Kickoff just got a lot more chaotic.

CHAPTER 2

BRITTANY

The morning Brittany left for Kickoff really should’ve been the indication that the day was going to be a shithole of a dumpster fire.

She’d had a morning meeting with Champagne, a high-end fashion design company that was looking to start doing capsule collections with popular fashion influencers. Which, on the surface, was Brittany’s dream, the one she had been working toward since college when she posted her first outfit of the day to social media.

However, this meeting had quickly devolved from a dream into a nightmare.

Her first sketches had been cocktail dresses based around different facets of her personality. Brittany was known for mood dressing, and for her first real collection she wanted to capture the feeling of that for her buyers.

Champagne hated it.

Now she was dodging phone calls from her mom, not wanting to feel even worse than she already did. So she wasdistractedly sending yet another call to voice mail when she stopped short at the sight of the package outside her apartment door.

He’d left another one.

When the DMs had first come through, the ones promising love and affection from a nameless, faceless social media account, Brittany hadn’t really paid them any attention. As a fashion influencer, she often posted pictures of herself in various states of dress, nothing salacious, but enough to show her followers what undergarments worked with what outfits. Brittany was a firm believer in the underwear making the outfit, and so had never shied away from talking about it or showing what worked for her. But Brittany was a public figure on the internet, so no matter what, any skin showing got her attention from the wrong crowd. As a result, she got marriage proposals every other week from both fans and creepers. When she had gotten the first message it wasn’t out of the normal, just some compliments with an abundance of rose emojis. But slowly, the DMs had gotten more and more explicit and disturbing. Brittany had eventually blocked the account and reported them. But, of course, it didn’t stop there. Whoever sent the messages simply created a new account, sending Brittany more aggressive attacks and threats. It had gotten so bad she had reported them to the police, several times. But the police weren’t able to track the messages, and there wasn’t much they could do in the meantime other than to warn her to be careful and to keep everything for evidence in a possible future case.

Then Brittany had started getting gifts left at her apartment in Los Angeles. Flowers—always red roses. Some candies. The hair ties she liked to wear on her stream.

And then he had started drawing her. The art was objectively terrible, ranging from something as mundane as drawing an Instagram post of hers, to explicit paintings of whatever thecreep was currently imagining about her. Brittany hated them, wanted to burn them, but the police had warned her to keep them, just in case. They were currently collecting dust in the very back of her hall closet, waiting for the day Brittany was finally allowed to stage a bonfire.

Now, here was another package, wrapped in fancy gift wrap and a ribbon in a way that would make Martha Stewart jealous. She looked up and down the hall, knowing it was futile, knowing the guy was long gone, but it was still unnerving. Brittany slowly approached the package and opened her door, kicking it inside.

She let it sit on her floor while she went through her other chores for the morning. There was a lot of prep involved in going to Kickoff, and she couldn’t get distracted and forget something. She spent an hour going through her packing checklist, making sure everything was ready until she couldn’t pretend the package wasn’t sitting there anymore. Finally, Brittany grit her teeth and opened the box.

The note was inside, in a red envelope of high-quality cardstock, just like it always was. Brittany saved it for last, knowing whatever he had written was going to be disgusting and make her spiral. She pulled back the layers of carefully folded tissue paper to find what she had already known was there.

A red rose, the stalker’s signature. And a painting. Of Brittany, to be exact, splayed out on a bed without a stitch of clothing on, her legs spread and her mouth open in what Brittany could only assume was meant to be a moan. Brittany did her best to examine the painting dispassionately, trying not to let the image unnerve her. Whoever the guy was, he would never make it as a professional artist, but Brittany could see enough of herself in the painting to be creeped out.

And then she noticed the dried substance caked onto the small canvas.

She dropped the painting immediately, going to wash her hands twice before she picked up the card the creep had included. And immediately regretted it.

Can’t wait to see you this weekend. Hoping you’ll spread just for me while I pound your—

Brittany threw down the note before she could read any more. His notes had slowly gotten more and more graphic. The last one she read all the way through had made her nauseous for the rest of the day, and frankly she had too much to do to put herself through that. Instead, she took a few photos of the package and sent the pics to her mom, remembering too late that she had been avoiding her call.

Immediately, her phone rang. Brittany, accepting the inevitable, answered.

“Were you avoiding me?”

Leave it to Kathleen to react to a picture of her stalker’s latest ‘gifts’ with only thoughts of herself.

“I have a lot to do today, that’s all. I wasn’t avoiding you.”

“Can we talk about your complete disaster of a meeting?”

Britt’s jaw clenched at her mother’s words, the gaping feeling of failure expanding in her chest. Kathleen Jenssen had a lot of expectations. She’d been amassing them since Brittany was old enough to enter pre-school, and she had slowly moved down her list as Brittany aged. Spelling Bee champion. Honor student. Captain of the volleyball team. Prom queen. Top of her class for her business degree.

And it was there that it all went to shit.

Because college was where Brittany met Min. Min, whose mother encouraged her to follow her dreams. Min, who discovered she could stream herself playing video games. Min, who showed Brittany how to monetize something she naturallydid every day—showing her friends how to dress for various life events.

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