Who Wants to Lock Down a Billionaire - Jamie Knight

Chapter One - Morgan

I was debating whether to break out a pink of ice cream or take a bubble bath when my best friend Morgan plopped down beside me. I’d always loved this relaxing part of the evening, in which I could have fun for an hour or two now that the responsibilities of single motherhood were done for the day, before I fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion.

“Have you heard about this show called Who Wants to Lock Down with a Billionaire?” Astrid asked, pulling up the site on her laptop.

We had made a large meatloaf dinner, working together to threaten the plot of the evil oven trying to throw us off, and then put my daughter to bed, which was another team effort. I hadn’t known if she was going to head home or join me where I’d lazily collapsed on the surprisingly comfortable couch in my tiny living room. It really was amazing what you could find on the curb side if you were willing to look for it.

Astrid didn’t live with Freya and me, but she might as well have. She was constantly over and often spent the night.

“Yeah, I think so,” I said, as a timid answer to her question about the show.

All these reality TV shows sounded alike to me, and it was hard to keep track of them. But this one was new and was being done virtual style, due to the pandemic, so that was a unique twist that made it stand out a bit more from the others.

“It’s really wild!” Astrid continued. “There’s like this super rich guy and women apply to go with him to this luxury compound he has set up for a two-week lockdown! The only catch is that they have to agree in advance that if they win, they’ll be his ‘pet,’ like a sex slave or whatever, and he’s really into the whole dominance thing. Like spanking and stuff!”

I tried to keep myself from giggling at the way she was phrasing things. Astrid had been raised Dutch Orthodox and was a bit sheltered. She didn’t really know what sex was until her late teens and didn’t lose her virginity until college.

I had shown her some amateur porn just to give her a clear idea of what might happen. She nearly fainted. For her, anal sex was the height of taboo kink. There were some ways in which I envied her innocence.

The idea behind the show wasn’t the worst one I’d ever heard, for this sort of thing. Reality TV had always carried a slight varnish of sleaze, going all the way back to the first seasons of Lost and Big Brother.

Sex and betrayal were major themes of the shows and a big part of the attraction. They were Shakespearian tragedies without the writing or performances, something the tabloids, then and now, did their very best to run with.

The more devastating the news, the better. After a while they just dropped the pretense and innuendo all together and came out with shows like Naked Attraction, which is basically what it sounds like.

“So, this is like a luxury lockdown with a billionaire, but I guess the play on words is that you also lock down his heart, by being his choice of the one girl he chooses to quarantine with, out of the many who apply,” Astrid continued.

“Hmmm,” I thought, shrugging. “I guess even billionaires have needs to be fulfilled during the quarantine that they have to find special ways of going about.”

“Yeah,” she said, laughing. “The rest of us just have to fight over toilet paper at Walmart for days on end in order to have our basic needs met.”

In a lot of ways, Who Wants to Lock Down a Billionaire? seemed a lot tamer than most reality shows on network TV. Especially in the post social-media age. Which made sense, I guess, since the name of the show was a tongue-in-cheek throwback to the innocent and pure game show.

Sure, the winner was supposed to do whatever the billionaire wanted while on their luxury lockdown, but that just added to the fun. It seemed almost like a game of double dare.

The star billionaire Adam Leary’s well-publicized proclivities were all reported in age appropriate language, so you never quite got the full picture, leaving the reader to decide whether the handsome self-made man liked a bit of spanking or left his lovers with black eyes.

It was, of course, impossible to know for sure. Who really knows even their closest