Curvy & Corrupt

Sapphic Celebrity Romance
by Aurora North

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Celebrity Romance, Plus-Size Heroine, Influencer Romance, Secret Relationship, Body Worship, Praise Kink, Forbidden Romance, Transactional to Real, She Falls First, Hurt/Comfort

They called her corrupt. Then she met the one woman worth ruining everything for.

Lena Vayle doesn’t date. She detonates.

Chart-topping pop star. Tabloid villain. The woman the press calls “corrupt” because everyone she touches ends up a headline. Her machine is airtight, her scandals are authored, and nothing real has left her hands in eight years.

Then a plus-size fashion influencer drags her music video — with a smile and citations — and Lena does the one thing she has a team of eleven to prevent. She slides into the DMs herself.

I’m Nina Reyes-Carter. Eight hundred thousand followers know me as the girl who taught them to demand daylight. What they don’t know is that every partner I’ve ever had loved me at midnight and hid me by brunch — and now the most famous woman alive is offering me a styling contract with terms that aren’t on any paper.

Fourteen cities. One suite. Every night.

She performs the filthiest songs in her set looking straight at my side of the stage. She worships every inch I was taught to apologize for. And she goes cold as a stranger the second a door opens — because the last woman she loved sold eighteen months of her by the Thursday.

Then a long-lens camera finds us on a balcony. And we both find out what we’re willing to burn.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Celebrity x influencer with a scandal-armored pop star who falls first and hardest
✅ A plus-size Black heroine who gets claimed loudly — onstage, in front of eighteen thousand people
✅ Body worship and praise kink written like devotion
✅ A secret tour affair: locked dressing rooms, freight elevators, “never happened”
✅ Jealousy after a fake-boyfriend red carpet — and who takes the wheel afterward
✅ One blurry balcony photo, one manager with a shell company, one live-fired villain
✅ A ninety-one second statement video that breaks the internet
✅ The onstage walk-out in a custom red gown — “come here, baby. Walk slow. Make them wait.”
✅ Full HEA — floor picnics, stolen coffee, and the week’s dumbest headline read aloud in bed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (FF scenes), body worship and praise kink, semi-public encounters, a secret relationship, non-consensual outing via paparazzi photography, tabloid harassment, on-page fatphobia from press and online commenters (challenged by the narrative), a manipulative manager, alcohol use, and strong language. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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Chapter One

The problem with being in love with Lena Vayle was that eleven million other people were in love with Lena Vayle, and none of us had ever been in the same room as her.

I watched the music video for the fourth time with my ring light still on, which was how I knew I was about to do something stupid. The ring light was supposed to be off. The ring light being on meant some part of my brain had already decided we were filming.

“Play it again,” Dre said from my couch, mouth full of the pad thai I’d paid for. “I want to count.”

“Count what?”

“You know what.”

I knew what. I hit play again anyway, because I am a professional, and professionals gather evidence.

The video was called “Ruin Me Gently,” which was the most Lena Vayle title in the history of Lena Vayle titles, and it was — objectively — a masterpiece. Four minutes of her prowling through a burned-out cathedral in custom couture, corset boned like architecture, thigh slit up to the mezzanine, singing about wanting somebody to wreck her reputation on purpose. Her voice did that thing in the bridge, the low broken-glass thing, and my whole body responded like it had been personally addressed. It was embarrassing. I was twenty-six years old and a grown woman with a business license, and a pop star I had never met could raise my heart rate through a phone screen.

The styling was flawless. I’d already screenshotted six frames for my inspiration folder.

And in four minutes of a video that was — according to Lena herself, in the album press cycle — “about bodies, about taking your body back, about being free in it” — there were nineteen dancers, and every single one of them was a size two.

“Nineteen,” Dre said, pointing a chopstick at the screen like a prosecutor. “I counted. Nineteen dancers and not one of them has ever had to size up in a sample sale.”

“Maybe the casting was—”

“Nina.”

“I’m just saying, maybe—”

“Nina Simone Reyes-Carter.”

“Okay, don’t full-name me.”

“A video about body freedom.” Dre set the takeout container down, which meant it was serious. “‘Take your body back.’ Whose body? Because it’s not mine, and it is definitely not yours, and you have four hundred drafts in your head right now and I can see them scrolling behind your eyes like a slot machine.”

Here’s the thing about me. On camera, I am bulletproof. Eight hundred thousand followers know me as the girl who will wear a bodycon dress in a size twenty-two and dare the comment section to say something. I’ve done outfit videos in swimwear. I’ve read hate comments out loud in a full beat of glam and laughed at them, actually laughed, because most of them aren’t even creative. On camera I have never once flinched.

Off camera, I was sitting in my apartment at eleven p.m. trying to talk myself out of criticizing my favorite artist alive, because some pathetic parasocial part of me was worried she’d see it and not like me anymore.

She didn’t know I existed. There was no anymore.

“If it were anyone else,” Dre said, gentler now, because he’s known me since we were nineteen and broke, “you’d have posted an hour ago.”

“That’s not—” I stopped. It was true. If Dua had done it, if literally any other artist on earth had done it, the video would already be up and I’d be asleep. “She’s different.”

“She’s a celebrity, babe. She’s not your girlfriend. She is a stranger who is contractually hot.”

“She’s not just—” I heard myself and physically winced. “Oh my God, I’m defending her. I’m defending a millionaire to my best friend at eleven p.m.”

“You are. It’s tragic. I’m embarrassed for both of us.” He picked the pad thai back up. “Film the video.”

So I filmed the video.

I want it on the record that I was fair. I was more than fair. I spent the first ninety seconds on the styling, because credit where it’s due, and it was due — the corset alone deserved a dissertation. I broke down the silhouette references, the McQueen homage in the shoulder line, the way the costume design told the story of the song better than the label’s marketing did. I was generous. I was glowing. Anyone watching the first half would think it was a fan edit.

Then I said the thing.

“But here’s what I keep snagging on,” I told the camera, and I felt the click in my chest, the one that happens when I stop performing confidence and start actually meaning it. “This song is about taking your body back. This whole era is about being free in your body — her words, not mine. And there are nineteen dancers in this video, and every single body on that screen is the same body. So whose freedom are we talking about? Because from where I’m sitting — in this body, the one I built a whole career on loving out loud — it looks like body freedom is still a size two with a smoke machine.”

I let the pause sit. On camera, I’m good at pauses.

“Lena. Girl. I adore you. I have adored you since the first album, I own the vinyl, I am not the enemy here. Which is exactly why I’m saying it. You want to make art about ruined reputations and bodies without shame? Put some bodies in it. Put a size twenty on that cathedral altar and watch what happens. I promise you the girls will scream so loud they’ll hear it from space.” I smiled, the smile that four years of doing this has taught me lands like a closing argument. “You want corrupt? Hire us. We’re extremely corrupt. We’re also a great time.”

I watched the playback once. My editing brain said trim four seconds off the intro. My survival brain said delete the entire file and move to a country without Wi-Fi.

I trimmed the four seconds and posted it at 11:52 p.m.

Then I put my phone face-down on the nightstand like a coward, took off my makeup, and lay in the dark listening to it buzz.

I woke up famous-adjacent.

Not famous. I’d been internet-known for four years; I understood the tiers. But I went to sleep with 803,000 followers and woke up with 841,000, and by the time I’d made coffee it was 862,000, and the video had four million views and a quote-tweet ratio that made my hands sweat.

The good news: the girls understood the assignment. My comments were a coronation. SAY IT LOUDER. The way she praised the styling FIRST so nobody could call it hating. Nina really said “hire us, we’re corrupt” I’m putting it on a shirt. Three separate fan accounts had already clipped the “put a size twenty on that cathedral altar” line and set it to Lena’s own song, which was either the funniest or most dangerous thing I’d ever seen, depending on who watched it.

The bad news: they were tagging her. All of them. Tens of thousands of people, tagging Lena Vayle under a video of me critiquing Lena Vayle, with captions like @lenavayle answer for this and @lenavayle the girls are WAITING.

“Oh no,” I said to my empty kitchen.

The neutral news, which felt like bad news wearing a disguise: two gossip accounts had picked it up. Influencer Calls Out Lena Vayle’s “Body Freedom” Hypocrisy. Which was not what I said. I said nineteen nice things and one true thing, and the internet had, with its usual surgical precision, kept only the knife.

Dre called at 9:15. I answered on speaker while staring at my own face on a gossip account with 2.1 million followers.

“You’re trending,” he said, in the exact tone a person uses to say the building is on fire.

“I’m aware.”

“Number seven. You’re above a senator.”

“The senator did something worse, give it an hour.”

“Brand inbox is insane. I’ve got two fashion houses, a shapewear company that we’re ignoring on principle, and a podcast that wants you tomorrow.” Papers shuffled. Dre prints things out; it’s his one old-man trait and it means he’s in operator mode. “Also, and I want you to stay calm—”

“That sentence has never once preceded calm.”

“—her fans found your whole page. The stans. The Vaylors.”

I sat down slowly on a kitchen chair. The Vaylors were famous the way weather events are famous. They had ended careers. There was a music journalist who reviewed the second album unfavorably in 2022 who, as far as anyone knew, was still in hiding.

“And?” I said.

“And…” Dre paused for effect, because he’s dramatic and I love him. “They like you.”

“They what?”

“They’re claiming you. There’s a thread with ninety thousand likes calling you ‘the only critic Lena would respect.’ Someone made fan art. You have fan art, Nina. You’re wearing the corset from the video in it. Honestly the artist gave you incredible—”

“Okay!” My face was hot. I pulled the thread up while he talked, and there it was: me, rendered in someone’s very good digital brushwork, plus-size and smirking on the cathedral altar from “Ruin Me Gently,” with the caption she said put us in the video so I did.

Something in my chest went sideways. That was the thing nobody warned you about with this job — the whiplash between the internet is discussing your body at scale and a stranger drew you like you were worth drawing. Four years in and I still didn’t have a shelf to put it on.

“This is good,” Dre was saying. “This is rocket fuel. But Nina — she’s going to see it. There’s no version of this where she doesn’t see it. Sixty thousand tags. Her team has definitely flagged it by now.”

“I know.”

“So what happens if she responds?”

I looked at the frozen frame of my own video, my own mouth mid-sentence, saying hire us, we’re extremely corrupt to a woman with a hundred and forty million followers and a legal team.

“She won’t,” I said. “Celebrities don’t respond. They let the machine eat it. In three days there’ll be a new scandal and I’ll be a footnote with forty thousand new followers and a good story.”

“Uh huh.” Dre did not sound convinced. “And if she does?”

“Then I die instantly of cardiac arrest, and you get the apartment.”

For two days, I was right.

The number climbed — 880K, 905K, past 920 — and the machine did what the machine does. A boy band member got caught lip-syncing and the discourse moved on like a weather front. My video settled into its afterlife of steady views and brand emails. I filmed a haul. I filmed a “styling the same skirt five ways” video that did numbers. I told myself the flutter in my stomach every time a notification came through was caffeine.

I did not check whether Lena Vayle had viewed my story. There was no way to check. I want to be clear that I researched whether there was a way to check, found there wasn’t, and felt both relieved and devastated, which is the parasocial condition in miniature.

At night, though. At night I lay in bed and let myself replay the fantasy I’d never said out loud to anyone, not even Dre, especially not Dre: not the meeting-her fantasy, everyone had that one. Mine was more specific and more humiliating. It was her seeing it. It was Lena Vayle, somewhere in a penthouse or a tour bus or wherever creatures like her existed, watching my video — watching me, in the red dress I’d worn because it photographed like a dare — and not scrolling past. The fantasy wasn’t even that she agreed with me.

The fantasy was her looking. Really looking. The fantasy was being impossible to look away from, for once, to someone who could look at anything in the world.

Every ex I’d ever had had loved this body at midnight and lost my number by brunch. Marcus-from-the-gym who never once took me anywhere with windows. Talia, who posted every girlfriend she’d ever had except me. I had built eight hundred thousand followers on the premise that I was unashamed, and I was, I was — and also no one who’d ever touched me had wanted to be seen doing it, and I’d stopped letting myself notice the pattern because noticing it felt like agreeing with it.

So no. I didn’t need Lena Vayle to respond. I needed forty thousand followers and a good story, and I had both.

That’s what I was telling myself on Thursday night, eleven-forty, face washed, city humming outside the window, when my phone lit the dark ceiling blue.

I almost didn’t look. It was probably Dre sending me the lip-sync memes.

I looked.

Instagram: lenavayle sent you a message.

Blue badge. Fourteen letters. My entire nervous system left the building.

I sat up so fast the room tilted. I turned on the lamp like the message might be dangerous in the dark. I stared at the notification without opening it for a full thirty seconds, because right now it could still be anything — an automated brand thing, a team account, a hack — and the moment I opened it, it would be one specific thing forever.

My thumb was shaking. Genuinely, visibly shaking, which I noted from a distance with professional disappointment.

I opened it.

lenavayle: nineteen nice things and one knife. i counted.

lenavayle: you dragged me with a smile. do it in person.

I read it four times. I read it a fifth time out loud, in a whisper, in my empty bedroom, like it might change under vocalization. It didn’t. It sat there being real, typed by hands that had held Grammys, no capital letters like she couldn’t be bothered, do it in person glowing on my screen like a dare, like a door, like the exact beginning of something I was in no way prepared for.

Three dots appeared. She was still typing.

I stopped breathing entirely.

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The Debrief — A scene too intimate for Amazon.
City three, mid-tour, from Lena’s POV. The worst show of the leg, a furious pop star, and the night Nina took the phone out of her hand — and taught her a better process. The night Lena realized she was already gone.

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