Mandy Moo: The Scoop That Swallowed Her Whole
Chapter Two
The Proposition
The small office Cole led Jake into was strictly functional: a pressboard desk, a rolling chair, a filing cabinet, a single overhead bulb in a wire cage that gave off a warm amber light. There was no window. The walls were plywood, sealed with clear varnish. On the desk was a single manila folder, closed, and a glass of water that had not been touched.
Jake removed his blindfold and blinked, letting his eyes adjust. Old habit made him immediately scan the room for anything worth noting—exits, cameras, the position of the desk relative to the door. There was a small CCTV camera in the upper left corner, its red light steady. He noted it without reacting to it and set his camera bag on the floor near his feet.
“What’s this about?” he asked, unzipping the bag and beginning to check his equipment. The ritual of it calmed him. The camera was real and familiar and his. “If this is about release forms, I can assure you Channel 8 has the best legal team in the business. We’ve filmed in some genuinely unusual places.”
Cole leaned against the edge of the desk, arms folded loosely, his expression neutral in the way that very composed people’s expressions are neutral—not blank, but carefully managed. He watched Jake check the camera with the same unhurried attention he brought to everything.
“It’s not about release forms,” he said. He let a pause settle, the kind of pause designed to ensure the next words landed with appropriate weight. “Before we proceed, I need to know something about you, Jake. Not about Channel 8. About you.” He uncrossed his arms and settled his hands on the edge of the desk. “What would you think of a place where you could fuck all the most voluptuous women you could ever want? No denials, no complications, no flowers, no paying for dinner. You just come in, pick out the one you want to fuck, or all of them, and you just do it. No questions, no consequences, no morning-after. Pure, unlimited pleasure whenever you want it.”
Jake’s hands went still on the camera body. The question arrived with the specific disorienting quality of something that exists in a completely different from the conversation you thought you were having—the way a sudden change in air pressure s in your ears before your brain processes the reason for it.
“I don’t understand what that has to do with the story,” Jake said carefully. His voice was steady. He was a professional. He had been propositioned in various ways by various people in various unusual locations over the course of a long career in field journalism, and he had a framework for responding to it: acknowledge, redirect, maintain professional distance.
“It has everything to do with the story,” Cole replied. His voice was warm and very even. “We’re offering you that experience. Completely and without reservation. All we ask in return is that you show us in the best possible light through your lens. No judgements. No moralising. No editorial framing that makes what happens here look like something it isn’t. Just the truth of it, captured with the skill and honesty I suspect you’re capable of.”
Jake set the camera down on the desk with more deliberateness than was strictly necessary. “And Mandy?” he said. “What about her?”
Something moved in Cole’s expression—not quite a smile, but the precursor of one, a private acknowledgement of a question he had anticipated. “Don’t worry about Mandy,” he said. “She’s being introduced to the product in her own way. She’s having the full immersive experience right now.”
Jake turned toward the door before he’d consciously decided to. “I should be with her. She’s my responsibility. We came here together.”
“Responsibility.” Cole said the word as though he were turning it over in his hands, examining it from different angles. “Out here, we prefer to think of it differently. As opportunity. The opportunity to experience something extraordinary without the weight of ordinary judgment. To film beauty in its truest, most unguarded form. To be present for genuine transformation as it occurs.” He stepped away from the desk and toward Jake, his voice dropping in without dropping in warmth. “Think about what I’m describing, Jake. Really think about it. No more lonely stretches in cheap motel rooms in towns you’ll never visit again. No more that particular particular kind of tiredness that comes from wanting and not having. Here, everything you want is available. And in exchange, you do what you do best. You document it. You make it real and visible and beautiful for people who need to see that such a life is possible.”
Jake’s grip tightened on his camera. The professional in him—the part that had been trained through a decade of working in complex ethical environments, the part that knew you never, ever filmed people without their knowledge and consent regardless of what the producer told you—that part was sounding every alarm it possessed. “This is unethical,” he said flatly. “I can’t film anything without Mandy’s knowledge and explicit consent. Whatever is happening, whatever this place is—I don’t film without consent.”
“She’ll consent,” Cole said with a certainty that was neither boastful nor unkind. It was simply the tone of a man who knows a fact. “They all do, in the end. The milk ensures it. The milk makes the decision very easy.” He held Jake’s gaze. “But you have a different kind of choice. You can walk away now—I’ll take you straight back to your car, no hard feelings, no consequences. Or you can stay. Stay and experience this place and document it for the world to see. The decision is entirely yours.”
Jake was quiet for a long moment. His eyes moved to the camera, then to the door, then back to Cole. The silence in the room was absolute except for the low, persistent hum of the milking machinery in the building beyond the partition, and underneath that, barely perceptible now but unmistakable once you identified it, the soft, breathy sounds of women in a particular kind of pleasure.
His mind was doing several things at once. The journalistic part was constructing the dimensions of the story—which were staggering, genuinely staggering, if what Cole was describing was true. The ethical part was insisting that he needed to see Mandy, needed to know she was safe and unharmed and in possession of her faculties. The deeply human part—the part that Cole had spoken to so directly and with such uncomfortable accuracy—was doing something else entirely, something that had less to do with journalism and ethics and more to do with the specific loneliness of a man who spent his working life in extraordinary places and returned to ordinary evenings alone.
“I’ll stay,” he heard himself say. The words had a slightly surprised quality, as though he was hearing them from a small distance. “But I want to see Mandy first. I want to see her and I want to know she’s okay.”
Cole’s expression resolved into something warmer, more complete. “Of course,” he said. “But first—” he lifted the manila folder from the desk and opened it to reveal a single sheet of paper, “—the technical details. Certain angles. Certain lighting conditions we find particularly effective. We’ve learned, over time, what the material demands of the camera.”
Jake sat down. He pulled the folder toward him and began to read. His hands, he noticed, were very slightly unsteady.
The folder contained eleven pages. The first three were purely technical in nature—lighting diagrams, preferred focal lengths, detailed notes on colour temperature and how the barn’s amber LEDs interacted with different skin tones to produce the particular warm luminosity visible in the sample footage Cole had apparently already collected. Jake read these pages with the close professional attention they deserved, making marginal notes in the small notebook he kept in his breast pocket alongside his pen, recognising in the specificity and intelligence of the technical notes the work of someone who knew exactly what they wanted visually and had thought very carefully about how to achieve it. He found himself making comparisons, almost involuntarily, to the best work he had done—the award-winning segment on the water quality crisis that had required three months of difficult access negotiations and two days of shoot under near-impossible lighting conditions, and which had nevertheless produced some of the most quietly beautiful documentary footage he had ever put his name to.
The remaining eight pages were something entirely different. They were descriptions—detailed, carefully composed, technically precise and yet somehow also deeply personal records of scenes. Jake found himself reading with increasing attention and with increasing difficulty maintaining the emotional and professional distance that reading-for-work-purposes normally provided him. The author, whoever they were, had a precise and extraordinarily generous eye for the human body and its responses, and the scenes they described were not crude or mechanical but rather something considerably more complex: portraits of pleasure, careful anatomies of transformation, records of women arriving at a version of themselves that they had not known existed until the barn’s particular alchemy made it available. The writing was good. That surprised him, though perhaps it shouldn’t have.
By page seven, he had stopped taking notes.
By page nine, he had stopped being entirely certain of the distance between himself and the material he was reading.
He closed the folder. Sat for a long moment in the amber light with the sounds from the barn coming through the thin plywood partition—closer now, it seemed, or perhaps simply more legible, now that he had a vocabulary for interpreting them that he had not possessed when he sat down. He thought about Mandy. He thought about what Cole had said about the milk and the certainty with which he had said it. He thought about three years of standing behind a camera while the world’s most compelling woman walked toward it, and the specific, particular, compound tiredness that three years of that had produced in him—the tiredness of wanting a thing and not naming it, of carrying it in the soft tissue of ordinary professional days without ever allowing it to surface into language.
He picked up his camera. Set his notebook on the desk. Stood.
His hands, when he checked them against the weight of the camera, were steady.