Jealous Gold

The first thing I do every morning is check his phone.

Not because I don't trust him. I trust him like I trust the sun to rise, which is to say I trust him completely and also I verify. Trust is a feeling. Verification is a practice. My mother taught me that, though she meant it about business contracts, not about the boy sleeping naked in my bed with his mouth slightly open and his hair smashed flat against the pillow.

Marco. Twenty-three years old. He still says "thank you" when I hand him a towel.

I slide the phone off the nightstand. It's an iPhone I bought him three months ago because his old one had a cracked screen and it embarrassed me to look at it. No passcode. He doesn't know how to be mysterious. I scroll through his messages while the espresso machine hisses in the kitchen. His mother. His friend Davide asking about a football match. A group chat where someone posted a meme about cats. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

This is the part where I should feel relief. Instead I feel the small hot needle of disappointment, because if there's nothing, then I have to wait for the something, and waiting is its own kind of torture.

"Giulia," he mumbles into the pillow. "Come back to bed."

"I'm making coffee."

"You're doing the thing."

"What thing?"

He rolls over. His eyes are still closed. He has the body of someone who played water polo until he was nineteen and then discovered pastries. Soft in the middle now, but the shoulders are still there. I like the softness. It makes him look like something I could eat.

"The thing where you stand in the kitchen and stare at your phone like it insulted your family."

I put his phone back on the nightstand. Face down. "Go back to sleep."

He does. He always does. That's the arrangement.

Here's what my subscribers don't know about me: I've been doing this for four years and I've never once enjoyed it. Not the filming, not the customs, not the live shows where men type my name in capital letters like I'm a deity they're trying to summon. It's work. It pays for the apartment with the terracotta floors and the view of the Duomo that I can see from my bathtub if I lean back far enough. It pays for Marco's cigarettes and his gym membership and the little ceramic bowls he buys at the market because he thinks they're charming.

He thinks a lot of things are charming. That's what I love about him. He walks through the world like it's a gift shop and everything is for sale and nothing costs anything.

I met him at a bar in Navigli. He was drunk and trying to explain the rules of some card game to a group of people who weren't listening. I sat down next to him and let him explain. He used his hands a lot. He kept saying "no, no, wait, this is the important part." I went home with him that night and stayed for three days. On the fourth day I told him what I did for a living. He blinked. Then he said, "So you're like a businesswoman."

That was the moment. Right there. Most men either get weirdly excited or weirdly judgmental. Marco just accepted it the way he accepts everything, with a shrug and a smile and a total absence of curiosity about the details. He doesn't watch my content. He doesn't ask about my subscribers. He doesn't want to know.

At first I thought that was respect. Now I think it might be something else.

I pour the espresso. Two cups, one for me and one for him, because he'll wake up eventually and he likes it with three sugars. I sit at the kitchen table in my silk robe and open my laptop. Forty-seven new messages on OnlyFans. Six custom requests. One from a guy in Dubai who wants me to call him "papà" while I do something with my feet that I won't describe here.

I answer them all in twenty minutes. I'm efficient. I have a spreadsheet that tracks my monthly income and a separate spreadsheet that tracks my monthly expenses, and Marco's column is the longest one. Rent, food, clothes, the motorcycle he wanted, the trip to Sicily we took in August, the watch he lost at the beach, the replacement watch I bought him because he looked so sad. I don't mind. I like buying him things. I like the way his face changes when I hand him something new, like a child at Christmas, like he can't believe his luck.

But this morning there's a message that isn't from a subscriber.

It's from a girl. Twenty-two, maybe. Blonde. The profile picture is a mirror selfie in a bathroom I don't recognize. She writes: "Ciao Giulia. I think we should talk about Marco."

I read it four times. Then I close the laptop. Then I open it again and read it a fifth time.

In the bedroom, Marco is snoring. Soft, rhythmic, the sound of a man who has never had a bad thought in his life. I want to go in there and shake him awake and ask him who this girl is. I want to throw the laptop against the wall. I want to laugh, because of course, of course this is happening, because nothing good ever stays good, because I've been waiting for the something and here it is, delivered to my inbox like a package I didn't order.

Instead I pour his espresso down the sink.

Then I pour myself a second one and drink it standing up, looking at the Duomo through the window, trying to decide what kind of woman I'm going to be today.

The jealous kind, probably. The kind who ruins things.

I've always been that kind.