Chapter Text
“You know he has an OnlyFans, right?”
Sansa nearly jumps out of her skin and she almost drops her phone in her haste to exit out of Instagram and lock her screen.
“What?” she laughs, trying to act casual (though she knows that everything that just happened is the opposite of casual).
“WhiteWolf or whatever his handle is,” Margaery nods at Sansa's phone as she sits down at the table. “And honestly, if you don't want anyone to see you ogling thirst traps, maybe don't do it in the library?”
Sansa feels her entire face flush red – she'd been studying for hours and had started to lose her mind and so she'd sort of picked up her phone and opened Instagram without really thinking. She'd needed to detach her brain for a bit and Instagram is always the perfect distraction. After scrolling through for a while, she had switched to her alt-account (Rickon and Arya have a nasty habit of checking who Sansa follows on social media, so one day she'd made an alt-account to follow people she didn't really want them knowing about. Margaery calls it her shame account.)
“You're the one who introduced me to him,” Sansa grumbles, looking around to confirm that no one near them has heard or seen anything. Not that anything on WhiteWolf's Instagram is too shocking – it's mostly just photos of him standing in front of a mirror, shirtless. Faceless. (There are other photos, too, usually of a big fluffy dog and Sansa tells herself she follows him for the dog photos only.)
“And now I'm introducing you to his OnlyFans,” Margaery says graciously, like she's doing Sansa the world's biggest favor.
Sansa ignores her, turning back to her Stats book and trying to focus (math has never been her strongest suit, but she needs a math class to complete her core studies).
She doesn't want to admit that she's intrigued by Margaery's information. She's never been on OnlyFans, has the vaguest idea of what it entails, but she's fairly certain its where people pay for content that... well, wouldn't be suitable for Instagram. The idea sends a strange sensation whirling through her – excitement, curiosity, and then, as usual, a fair bit of embarassment for the prior two.
Sansa has always been shy.
She can't tell if it's in direct response to the chaos that is the rest of her family or simply a natural inclination, but she's always preferred sitting in her room alone and reading than playing with her siblings outside. She's always preferred writing poetry to going to parties.
She'd grown up awkward – all gangly pale limbs and ginger hair and too many freckles. Margaery insists she's gorgeous now, but that awkward childhood has never quite left her. And boys? Well, Joffrey was her first boyfriend and that hadn't happened until college. There had never been a boy in high school she'd wanted to date (except Waymar Royce, her first major crush who worked part time at Uncle Benjen's store and who was much too old for her, she understands now). Despite her love of stories, she never got that cliché high school romance - she'd gone to prom with Beth's cousin from out of town and went straight home right after the dance and fell asleep by midnight.
She understands, on an intellectual level, that sex is fine – to have, to talk about. As long as both parties are consenting and enjoying themselves, who cares? She just... she has trouble doing it (having it and talking about it). Part of it is lack of experience, part is her innate shyness (and part, she thinks, are those vivid memories of one of the Septas pulling the girls aside and giving them lectures on how to remain chaste and pure for their husbands. Those memories send a shiver down her spine).
Being friends with Margaery has helped. The first few months had been near torture – shy, reserved Sansa and loud, vulgar Margaery: dormmates.
But Margarey hadn't been mean about it; in fact, Margaery gleefully helps her with her irrational aversion to all things sex – it was Margaery talking her down after she slept with Joffrey for the first time (walking home after midnight in her fancy dress, crying for reasons she couldn't even articulate). It was Margaery explaining that she should be enjoying herself and if she wasn't, it's not some sort of punishment from the universe. It was Margaery who helped her understand that her anxiety and her need to be perfect were maybe making things worse.
She's working on it.
And it's Margaery who encourages her shame account – Alayne Stone. Alayne is free to follow whoever she wants. Alayne finds many people attractive and enjoys looking at their photos. Alayne likes the photos and sometimes comments (heart racing, cheeks on fire).
Between Margaery and Alayne, Sansa is slowly letting herself relax, slowly letting herself off the hook, slowly allowing herself the same understanding and kindness she allows everyone else.
A few months ago, when Marg had learned in a drunken game of Truth or Dare that Sansa had an alt-Instagram account, she had been quick to add to Sansa's list of people to follow. WhiteWolf had been one of them, and had quickly become one of Sansa's favorites, though she would be hard pressed to answer why.
He doesn't post a lot, and maybe that's part of the thrill. The dog photos were more common, especially when she scrolls back to the beginning of his account. She wonders if he even meant to create a thirst account or if it had happened accidentally, because the first shirtless selfie he'd taken had seemed like an accident (the focus was on the dog, but he'd been in the background, looking like he'd just come in from a run and Sansa had scrolled through the comments and she wonders if that had given him the idea to post more).
(And ok, yes, she had scrolled all the way back to the beginning of his account and looked through all his photos, so what? She was bored one day waiting for Joffrey to pick her up and he'd been late, as usual).
Now the shirtless selfies are more common and though the dog photos get a ton of likes, the selfies get much more interaction – more likes, more comments. All the thirst photos are pretty much the same: a mirror, his shirtless torso, sweatpants hanging low on his hips, phone held out to take the selfie. Sometimes a sweaty shirt clutched in his other hand, like he's fresh from the gym. And always faceless. She sometimes wonders what he looks like – maybe he doesn't like the way his face looks and that's why he never shows it? More likely he just wants to remain anonymous. She can understand that.
She's pretty sure he has dark brown or even black hair, considering the trail of it on his stomach that leads down to... (she shakes that thought out of her head). She wonders what color his eyes are.
It's insane to her that he has as many followers as he does, considering how unremarkable his account should be. He shouldn't stand out, and yet... and yet other people clearly find him just as fascinating as she does. He never even captions his photos with anything other than tags to let people find him – nothing that gives away his personality. Maybe that's why he's got so many followers – they can project whatever personality they want onto him. He's a blank slate of abs and a cute dog.
Would his OnlyFans have more?
(And by that she means more personality, obviously.)
It takes her almost three weeks to the day to subscribe to his OnlyFans.
She's drunk, sitting on the curb outside a frat house with Jeyne puking into the street on one side and Margaery making out with a stranger on the other. She feels sort of like the neutral option between Margaery's great night and Jeyne's terrible one. That's sort of what she feels like in general right now – neutral.
It's been nearly five months since she broke up with Joffrey and while she doesn't miss him, she does sort of miss the idea of a boyfriend. Not that Joffrey had been a great boyfriend to begin with, but there's a part of Sansa that aches to have what her parents have – it's their fault she believes in true love. But so far, she hasn't managed to find a single person she wants to date, or even just go on one date with (and it's not like she's finding someone here, at a frat house with a bunch of dudes who only remind her of Joffrey).
In a bout of feeling pathetic and lonely, she goes on her alt-Insta and the first photo on her timeline is a fluffy white dog curled up and sleeping on a blue dog bed and something in her heart stutters and the next thing she knows, she's searching him out on OnlyFans. To her absolute dismay, she needs a credit card, so no OnlyFans for her. At least, not sitting there on the curb.
But it sticks with her and later, still a bit drunk and nearing three in the morning, credit card clutched in her shaking hand, she types the info into the app she had just downloaded and immediately deleted from her home screen so that no one would ever see it.
She subscribes to him and then shuts down the application and doesn't look at it again for another week.
She sees Joffrey on a date with some girl and it doesn't hurt.
Looking back, Joffrey had been an ass and she'd been blinded by his good looks and the way he showered her with compliments and money. She'd been a freshman, away from home for the first time. His attention had been nice.
(It had soured over the year they'd dated and she often wonders what would've happened if she stayed with him longer, if it would have gotten even worse. She looks back now at little moments – flares of anger that had terrified her at the time and she's thankful she's out of that relationship.)
But that also means it's Saturday and she's not on a date. She doesn't need to be, she knows this, and she's never felt bad about being alone before, but something about seeing Joffrey on a date sends her into a sort of spiral. (The idea of going to a bar and trying to flirt with someone, though? Ugh.)
Instead, she goes back to her dorm and remembers that app she downloaded earlier this week and she gets her phone out and gets into bed and pulls the blankets up over her head and finally opens it.
The WhiteWolf's account on OnlyFans is much tamer than she thought it would be. Isn't OnlyFans supposed to be porn? But most of his content is... well, the photos are a bit more risque – his sweatpants hang lower on his hips, and in one, his hand has even slipped down below the waistband and... her heart beats frantically as her mind works to fill in the gaps of what he's doing with that hand. And there are other posts, that seem to be locked behind a paywall and that really sends her brain into a tailspin, but she can't bring herself to pay for one to see what it is.
She scrolls for a while and almost has a heart attack when a notification pops up that he's live.
With shaking hands, she clicks on it to find... a kitchen. The camera is angled so that it shows his body but not his face, and she sees an array of ingredients on the countertop and in utter fascination, she watches him start to cook. There's music playing in the background, some sort of classic rock, and he's in his normal attire of sweatpants with no shirt and every once in a while, when he turns a certain way, she is very sure he's wearing nothing under them.
Sansa's face feels hot and her heart is hummingbird-fluttering in her chest and there's a twisting low in her belly and why is she turned on by watching someone chop vegetables? At one point, the dog comes into the kitchen and WhiteWolf lets out a whistle and the dog turns three times and then sits on command and Sansa finds herself pressing a tip button. She's giving this unknown man more money, just for cooking. Just for having a cute dog that does cute tricks.
She watches in a daze as he keeps cooking and something about it is so domestic that at one point she feels almost guilty for watching. It feels intrusive. But then she reminds herself that he's the one selling subscriptions to his content and she's doing nothing wrong.
Eventually he finishes up and without ever saying a word, he turns and switches off the camera and she feels a strange sense of loss and that freaks her out so much that she immediately exits out of the app, yanks the sheets off from over her head, and decides she's done using social media for the night.
She needs to study, anyway.
Jeyne thinks she's crazy, getting a tutor, but Sansa's last Stats test had really shaken her. She's not failing, yet, but in her mind she is. And she needs to pass this Stats class. She's put off her math core for a year already, she really needs to get it out of the way so she can focus on her major.
The student center isn't too busy this time of day – it's early on a Thursday morning and she doesn't have class until the afternoon and she was lucky to grab a slot with a math tutor so quickly. It's also less than halfway through the semester – she's sure that tutors fill up more quickly nearing finals. She checks in for her appointment and they direct her to one of the study rooms, the third one on the right.
When she gets there, she knocks lightly on the door frame so she doesn't startle her new tutor – a man in a hoodie hunched over an open textbook, glasses on his face and his dark hair tied up in a knot at the back of his head. At the noise, he looks up and turns to face her.
Pushing her nerves aside, she pastes on her best smile and says, “Jon?”