Chapter One

 

Britney had always been a shy, quiet girl. She liked to read a lot, and loved nature - as long as nature didn't include bugs or lizards or snakes or anything icky. Her dream was to open a bookstore, a used bookstore, because all the new ones looked too industrial.

She wanted a bookstore with wooden shelves, and wooden floors, and old upholstered chairs to sit and read. She loved the smell of old books, and was the sort of person who loved cataloging things and keeping lists and creating order - even if that meant rearranging her own library all too often.

The best job she could get out of high school, though, was working in a florist shop. College? College was far away from home, and it cost a lot of money. She wasn't comfortable with the idea of going far away on her own, leaving behind everything and everyone she knew.

Britney lived in Florida - not the Florida of beaches and tourists and ritzy hotels and fast cars, for she didn't live anywhere near the ocean. Well, except that Florida was about a hundred and fifty miles wide so no place was all that far from the ocean. But Hampton Park, where she lived, was in north Florida just south of the Georgia border, pretty much in the middle of nothing.

Hampton Park had about fifteen hundred people, was a dozen streets wide and long, had a lot of churches, several used car dealerships, a tractor sales dealer, a packaging factory, and a bunch of small stores along Main Street that managed to stay open despite the Walmart ten miles outside of town.

She knew a lot of people there and a lot of people knew her. She was aware they thought her head was in the clouds and that she daydreamed too much, and that there was considerable truth to that. But it didn't bother her all that much.

And if it did she'd just read something interesting to take her mind off it.

One of the things Britney found interesting was the Japanese language. Really, she found all the interesting ways people could write in Japanese, Mandarin, Arabic and the like to be fascinating. But she had settled on Japanese because writing the characters was something of an art form and she had a sure, smooth hand.

From there, learning to actually read Japanese became almost easy. Speaking it, on the other hand, was more complicated. She studied the self-help lessons on the internet, thinking it would be cool to have a 'secret language' that no one else locally would have a clue to. She listened to people speaking Japanese, then practiced the words herself.

Learning about Japanese meant learning about Japan, and she found the country to be incredibly interesting and attractive. It was so... orderly! It was so clean! Looking at videos of Japanese cities she saw people all nicely dressed walking the streets. No one was slovenly, wearing a dirty, untucked wife-beater shirt or something. No one slouched or looked grubby or fat or seemed to have a criminal bent to them.

On the other hand, she found it an eye-opener how weirdly fixated they seemed to be on pornography and sex. The Japanese seemed to devour pornography of every variety, some of it astonishingly nasty. Yet none of that nastiness seemed to transfer into their orderly, law abiding society.

When she joined a Japanese message board in hopes of improving her writing, she made the mistake of uploading her picture simply because that was what the forum suggested. Everyone else had a picture, after all, and it hadn't occurred to her they might not be using their own.

It was not, she decided, that everyone thought she was so beautiful which got her so much attention. It was probably just that she was the only non-Japanese person on the site. Yes, she was young and blonde and female, but she wouldn't really have called herself pretty.

She had very large round glasses on her face, and her hair was usually just swept back out of the way by her hand or fingers. She didn't bother to get it styled or anything. The acne which had bothered her earlier had faded now, but she still didn't think much of her face. Surely her nose was too small and her mouth too wide and her eyes more gray than blue.

It was, she thought, an unremarkable face. Certainly nothing to get excited over.

As for anything below the neck, well, she wasn't entirely naive. She'd been wearing a T-shirt, but had decided to pull on a dark blue rugby sweater for the picture. That would disguise everything other than that she was a slender girl with narrow shoulders. It certainly shouldn't draw the sort of sexual attention that it did.

Yet day after day there were all sorts of messages from Japanese men praising her as beautiful and gorgeous and sexy and saying flattering things about her lips and her eyes and her hair!

Britney wasn't sure if they were all perverts or just crazy.

They all wanted her to post pictures of herself, though, preferably with as little clothing on as possible. She wasn't about to do that, of course!

The interest was... flattering, but also embarrassing. Male interest had often embarrassed Britney, especially the crude, graphic kind like that. She had always preferred her romance novels where men were suave and sophisticated and polite.

But in this case the men were thousands and thousands of miles away and had no idea where she even lived. Plus, since this was a Japanese language site no one she knew would know what was being said even if by some miracle they logged onto it.

So unlike in real life she was able to handle the requests and flattery with a certain measure of aplomb, and even joke with them, amused by some of the especially weird requests. Like the one which wanted pictures of her bare feet.

And then she was sent a link from one of the men, a man named Eiji, to a Japanese site where girls posted risqué pictures of themselves, and men paid them to see it! It wasn't like American porn sites. This one required the men to pay a monthly fee which amounted to fifty dollars American just to peruse pictures of girls in bathing suits and shorts and short skirts and tank tops!

If you posted your picture you got money whenever anyone clicked on it, and the site had protection to keep people from downloading the pictures. Each girl who posted pictures also had a separate 'private' section with more graphic pictures which the men had to pay another membership fee to access.

Britney would previously never have imagined posting any pictures of herself for people just to look at. Well, not for them to admire anyway. But she had moved into a very cheap apartment as soon as she got a job, and really wanted something better.

She was extremely dubious about the idea, though, and thought about it for some weeks. She thought the odds of anyone who lived within a hundred miles of her logging onto the site was non-existent. It was all in Japanese, and you had to pay a lot. Americans liked their porn free. And this wasn't even porn!

Just to experiment, and because she had enjoyed being flattered by all those men, Britney considered what pictures she should take to put on the site. She had a pair of cutoffs which were way too tight and short, and which she should have tossed out years ago.

She put them on, then put on a t-shirt, which she pulled up under her breasts and tied off to reveal her smooth, flat stomach and abdomen. She set up her phone and let it take several pictures of herself while she shifted her position and head. Then she set it up again and turned her back on it, bending over the windowsill as if to look out. Finally she put it on a shelf next to the window and then bent over and looked out again.

The pictures she examined on her computer made her blush, but also pleased her. She thought she looked cute and a little sexy in them. The one bent over was kind of outrageous but it was what people on the site seemed to like. The one from the side showed just what her chest looked like in profile, something which often embarrassed her, but which she thought they would like.

She posted them and then went back to reading a book about a duchess being romanced by a prince in seventeenth century Venice.

By the next day, though, she had made the equivalent of five dollars! That seemed like a lot for doing nothing. Still, it was only five dollars. And it was accompanied by a number of new flattering messages on the new site asking for much more.

Within a week she had made almost twenty dollars, and calculating that out for a whole month astonished her. That was a lot of money! Why if she got that every month in addition to her pay at the flower shop she could rent a much nicer place!

Over the following weeks she posed artfully for a number of pictures. None of them were even mildly dirty except that she bent over and arched her back a lot more than she probably should have. She also wore less clothing than was the norm for her, true. But nothing out of line with what other girls routinely wore in Florida.

She was uncomfortable having people ogle her body. At least in person. There was nothing 'dirty' about wearing tank tops or tight t-shirts and the like, but it still made her self-conscious. But these people were far, far away.

The flattery and the cajoling grew more intense, and at times made her blush and giggle or even laugh out loud. The money doubled, and that inspired her to even more effort.

Finally, she gave in and wore a bikini. It wasn't a terribly revealing bikini, but it did show her body off more than any of the previous pictures, including her generously sized breasts. Those breasts had often embarrassed her for they had been the objects of both teasing and crude attention by boys and now men since the sixth grade.

As such, she usually wore a one-piece bathing suit. Wearing a bikini, and then posting pictures of herself in it made her face flush and filled her with anxiety. It felt as if she'd done something really, really outrageous! Sexually outrageous! And that was a huge change for her!

After posting the bikini pictures she went back into her bedroom and took off the bikini, then looked at herself naked in the mirror. She felt a hot ripple of sexual energy as she wondered if she would eventually post pictures of herself like this - naked! She arched her back, sliding her hands through her hair as she looked at herself, imagining taking a picture like this and then posting it online for men to look at!

It was way more outrageous a thought than what she'd just done. It made her nervous, though she was fairly sure she would never do it. But it also, for some reason, turned her on. The thought of doing something so shocking and sexual filled her with a sense of possibilities...

Britney began to look at herself in more sexual terms after that, delighting in how hot her body was, and experimenting with different ways to wear her hair. But only in her apartment. Whenever she left she always dressed modestly, wore no makeup, and kept her head down.

There were many, many compliments about the bikini, and she began to feel both daring and excited. She knew she shouldn't be posting bikini pictures of herself for foreign men to lech over! It was far too... sexual! Still, the money had risen to almost thirty-five dollars a week by then. And besides, she loved all the flattery. So she posted more pictures in the bikini.

The first picture she dared to post which she really thought of as 'sexy' was of her wearing a large open shirt. The shirt was a pale blue, and her panties were a dark blue. She had already removed her glasses, and ran her fingers through her hair to give herself a kind of 'just woke up' look.

The shirt was just open enough to give a tantalizing hint of the insides of her breasts (since she hadn't worn a bra) but nothing more. And, she decided, the blue panties covered her as much as a bikini bathing suit bottom. The picture drew many enthusiastic responses, and a lot more clicks than any of her previous pictures.

Encouraged by that, and somewhat excited, she daringly took another picture. This one was from behind, so (she told herself) no one could prove it was her. It showed her loose blonde hair but not her face. She was bent over, and the shirt was pulled up enough to partially reveal her bare buttocks, given she was wearing a thong.

The money and flattery rose, but it also meant she had to supply more, and she felt a desire to keep her viewers interested. She also felt deliciously sexy because of how she was showing her off in scanty clothing to all those men.

If she posted pictures in her 'private' area, they would all have an individual watermark so that if anyone dared to show them around their identity would be revealed. The site promised that no one had ever had their private pictures posted by anyone online before.

And besides, it was in Japan! Seven thousand miles away!

She bought some 'sexy' lingerie online, and began to pose in it. This lingerie showed cleavage and her buttocks, and it made her breathless to even think about posting such things! She did, though. The lingerie itself, though, made her feel extremely sexy. She loved how she looked in the pictures, especially without her glasses!

She also loved how she was able to show off her body to guys without anyone local knowing about it and calling her names! And these were grown men, not 'boys'! And they all thought she was incredibly hot!

And, she realized, arguably, she was. Because when she compared her lingerie clad body to that of other girls she didn't have much to envy. She had a narrow waist with a flat stomach, nicely rounded hips, a bubble shaped bottom, and high, firm, full breasts. What wasn't to like!?

She made enough additional money from posting the pictures to rent a much nicer apartment, but then, not long after, the money began to trail off. She was getting fewer repeat visits, and she knew this was because the men were being attracted by 'sluttier' girls who were showing off more of their bodies.

If she didn't make enough she wouldn't be able to afford the rent! And she'd just moved in! So after studying all kinds of other pictures on many other sites which featured naked and nearly naked girls, she posted a few more revealing ones.

This time she showed off her bare bottom entirely. In fact, she took a naked picture of herself, showing her top to bottom - from the rear anyway. Then, daringly, she took a picture from the side, with her breasts pressed against the wall. That showed some side boob, which she had discovered men really liked.

This drew a lot of applause, and more attention, and she experimented with different poses, creatively hiding parts of her body with her hands and arms or other items. It all made her feel wicked and slutty, but in a deliciously exciting way! And it brought in money!

Meanwhile, she still had to live her life. The picture taking and posting was only a tiny portion of it. She got up every morning at Seven, showered, then carried her bike down the stairs and out onto the street to cycle to work seven blocks away.

As always, she pulled her bike around behind the florist shop and then parked it before going in the rear.

"Hey, Mrs. Jameson," she said.

"Good morning, Britney dear," the woman said.

Mrs. Jameson owned the flower shop and had for twenty seven years. She was in her sixties, and knew more about flowers and plants than Britney could even imagine. But she had arthritis, so she needed Britney to do all the heavy lifting and to help with arrangements and packaging.

It was a simple job, for all she had to do was whatever Mrs. Jameson told her to do. Mrs. Jameson used her as another pair of hands, directing her here and there, and Britney enjoyed the simple work as it left her mind free to wander.

And her mind loved wandering.

These days, of course, it wandered into some fairly new territory, thinking about herself as a sexy girl, and wondering how she could make use of that. She was still quiet and shy, and kind of tongue tied around boys, but she was becoming much more interested in the idea of boys seeing her naked and 'fooling around' than she used to be.

Being a virgin she wasn't entirely sure how that would end up. But she'd seen enough videos on the internet to have a pretty good idea of the sorts of things couples did together in bed, and some of them looked kind of exciting.

Dirty, wild, outrageous, but exciting.

As long as nobody found out, of course.

She wasn't sure if she could let a boy see her completely naked. She did have a new degree of confidence in her body, though. And she even felt sexier as she went about her work, for she was wearing the 'sexy' lingerie she'd ordered online, a sexy little black thong and a matching bra.

Today she had to re-pot some plants, then water everything in the shop, then carry in some bags of potting soil to make up new planters to put in the windows for sale.

No one very interesting ever came into the shop. Mostly it was old people, and the only men were there buying flowers for their wives. This was not, she thought, a place to meet boys. Not that there were a lot of such places in town. She could go down to one of the bars, she supposed, except she didn't like to drink.

And it wasn't like people were always inviting her to parties or such. She only had a few friends, and they mostly went to the movies together or went to Walmart to shop. So where, she wondered, was she going to meet a boy to... experiment with?

After work she rode her bicycle home through the quiet streets, examining the store fronts and buildings around her. Everything was familiar and comfortable, but at the same time it was, she thought, kind of boring.

She stopped off at the grocer to pick up a few things and ran into Sara, one of her friends from school. Sara was a little plump and had thicker, though smaller glasses than Britney, and almost waist length brown hair.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey," Sara said. "What are you up to?"

"Same old, same old."

Britney had no intention of telling her about her internet pictures!

"Hannah Chalmers has a new book out," Sara said.

"Yeah, I noticed. I'm reading something else now but I'm going to get it when I'm done."

"Well, I should be done in a few days. I can loan it to you."

"Okay, cool."

"You wanna come over tonight and watch something on Netflix?"

Britney hesitated. "I'm not sure. Let me get home and eat and I'll call you."

Hannah nodded and left with her own stuff, and Britney said hello to Mr. Hadley behind the cash as she paid for hers.

She brought her bike up the stairs and changed, turned on the computer and the TV and made dinner. When she checked her earnings, though, she was a bit disappointed. They had been leveling off instead of rising, and now were starting to ease down again.

She'd been getting more and more requests to show more skin, and her viewers were apparently getting frustrated. They wanted to see the 'naughty bits' she'd been hiding.

She argued with herself over dinner, weighing the dangers and the benefits. It was extremely unlikely anyone she knew would ever see them. There were billion if not trillions of pictures of naked girls out there, after all. And this was a Japanese site. So what was the harm?

So after dinner she posed for a topless picture, her pulse racing at the thought of what she was doing. She wore only a little thong, and took dozens of pictures before examining them all and selecting a handful that seemed to show her - and her breasts - in the best light.

After posting them she stared at the computer with her heart beating rapidly, agonizing over whether she'd made the right decision. If people around here found out what sort of pictures she was posting on the internet her name would be mud!

But hopefully that wouldn't happen, so she called Sara, then biked over to her house four blocks away to watch some Netflix.