Living The Dream—2026-07-12 (Patreon)

FREE for everyone.

Some posts and sections of some posts are reserved for Supporters. AGI Stories content almost always appears on Patreon first, ahead of all other platforms. You get it first!

Message from AGI-Stories…

I have been getting requests lately—which makes doing all this a lot more fun! Today, I'm responding to a discussion by reviving the Living The Dream storyline.

It was always meant to showcase characters who where not part of long, closely connected storylines. Over the years, it has caught scenes of characters in transition and has provided a space to showcase special events.

Periodically, scenes will be shared here. I'm making no commitment as to when or how often, but we'll see how you respond and go from there.

Let me know what you think!

WHAT SHE WAS SELLING by Laci Morehouse

Laci took the job because it paid well.

That was the honest answer.

The call sheet had described it as a western lifestyle campaign, which could mean almost anything. By the time she arrived at the ranch, someone had put her in faded jeans, a red-and-black flannel shirt, and a black cowboy hat with a red cord around the crown. Then they sat her on a horse and began taking pictures against a sweep of mountains that looked too perfect to be real.

She had asked what company the photographs were for. The wardrobe assistant gave her the name of a distributor Laci had never heard of.

“What are they selling?”

The woman glanced at the clothing rack. “Western products.”

That had not clarified much.

The shirt might have been the product. Or the jeans. Or the hat. Possibly the saddle.

There were grooming brushes arranged near the barn, several coiled lead ropes, and a collection of leather goods that kept being moved into and out of the frame.

At one point, a photographer asked her to hold the reins higher so the buckle on the bridle would show.

That suggested tack.

Ten minutes later, they changed her position so the flannel shirt would fall open more dramatically.

That suggested the shirt—or perhaps nothing more specific than the kind of woman the client imagined might persuade someone to buy whatever appeared beside her in a catalog.

Laci did not ask again.

She sat straight in the saddle, kept her shoulders relaxed, and turned her face toward the light when the photographer instructed her to. The horse was calm, the scenery was beautiful, and the check would cover a meaningful portion of her monthly expenses.

She had accepted stranger jobs.

The rest of this chapter is exclusive to Patreon.

After graduating from high school in June 2016, Laci had not imagined this exact version of adulthood.

She had turned eighteen a few days after graduation. That summer had felt unusually long and important, although she had not understood how temporary it was while she was living through it.

She and a high school friend, Vanessa Lenen, had spent weeks moving between swimming pools, the lake house, boats, shopping trips, and stretches of time that seemed to belong only to them.

Laci’s cousin, Alison was almost always nearby with a camera.

At first, the photographs had been casual. Then Alison began arranging them more carefully, adjusting the light, suggesting poses, and producing model releases with one-dollar payments so she could tease them about being professional models.

Laci had gone along with it because it was fun.

College began at the end of that summer, and adulthood gradually replaced the protected world of family homes and lake weekends. She studied business and information systems, learned how to give presentations, write reports, manage group projects, and talk confidently about technology she understood only well enough to explain to someone else.

That skill became more useful than she expected.

After college, she moved through several ordinary business jobs. She tracked projects, scheduled meetings, recorded client requests, and followed up with people who had promised to complete something by Friday and had not.

She was dependable. She was organized. She could sit through a meeting full of people speaking around a problem and eventually say, “So what you actually need is this.”

Her career did not explode upward. There was no dramatic promotion, no sudden executive title, and no company announcing that she was its youngest vice president.

It simply continued.

Eventually, she joined a technology company that built customized client-facing systems for database management and content development. Her job settled somewhere between sales, implementation, and training.

Before a contract was signed, she sometimes joined the sales team to help explain what the software could actually do.

Afterward, she traveled to the client’s location and taught people how to use it.

Then she watched them struggle with the parts no one had realized were confusing.

When she returned home, she translated those struggles for the developers.

The clients said things like, “We need this to work better.”

The developers wanted to know what better meant.

Laci explained where the employee had clicked, what the employee had expected to happen, what had happened instead, and why the difference mattered.

She was not the smartest person in either room. She did not design the systems, write the code, or negotiate the largest contracts.

But she understood people.

That kept her employed.

Modeling returned to her life in 2018, when Alison began taking fashion and swimsuit photography more seriously. The early jobs were small: web catalogs, inexpensive clothing, local brands, and products that needed an attractive woman standing beside them.

Laci discovered that modeling had less to do with glamour than most people assumed.

A glamorous photograph could come from a cold studio, an uncomfortable garment, and six hours of repeating the same movement while someone adjusted a light by two inches.

Half of her assignments involved lingerie, underwear, or swimsuits. Another quarter consisted of graphic T-shirts and casual clothes.

The rest could be almost anything.

She had posed with dog food, dog toys, grooming brushes, riding clothes, horse tack, and stable supplies. She had held a tire-patch kit as if its existence had genuinely improved her day. She had smiled beside car air fresheners. She had modeled shoe insoles, kitchen products, corn remover, and wart remover.

Once, only her feet appeared in the final photographs.

Another time, a company paid for her entire day and used one image of her hand opening a drawer organizer.

She averaged about two paid assignments each month, depending on her business-travel schedule. Some were completed near Detroit, where her office and home were. Others required a flight, a rental car, and another hotel room added to the long procession of hotel rooms that had become part of her life.

There had been a few local runway jobs too, although calling them runway shows made them sound more prestigious than they were. Most featured racy, inexpensive lingerie and sleepwear designed to resemble the kind of products sold by famous national brands.

The lights were bright. The music was loud. The pay was acceptable.

No one from Paris had been watching.

Laci never pretended that she was building a high-fashion career. She had not appeared in luxury advertisements or major magazines. No recognized designer knew her name.

Still, the work continued.

That mattered more than prestige.

She liked travel, whether it came from her day job or modeling. She liked waking in a city she had never seen, even when she spent most of the day inside an office park or studio. She liked airport terminals, rental cars, unfamiliar restaurants, and the moment when a plane lifted high enough for the roads below to stop looking important.

People occasionally asked whether she became lonely. She did not think lonely was the right word.

She was alone often. But, there was a difference.

Nearly every week introduced someone new: a nervous client preparing for a software launch, a makeup artist with three children, a photographer who had once shot weddings, a warehouse manager who hated computers, a model who planned to leave the business after one final season.

Most of those people passed briefly through her life. She was comfortable with that. Not every connection needed to become permanent to be real.

Laci’s thoughts were yanked back to the present. The photographer called for another frame.

Laci turned slightly in the saddle and rested one hand near the horn. The open flannel moved in the mountain breeze. Somewhere behind the camera, an assistant held a reflector while another person checked whether the product—whatever the product was—could still be seen.

“Perfect,” the photographer said. “Hold that.”

Laci held it.

Her life was not amazing. She would never have described it that way.

But she paid her bills.

She had useful work. She traveled. She met people. She had seen places she once knew only as names on maps. She had learned that an ordinary career could still carry a person a very long way.

Still, she did not know what she was selling that afternoon.

Maybe it was the shirt.

Maybe it was the saddle.

Maybe it was the idea that buying something from the catalog could make a person feel, for a moment, as if mountains and open roads were waiting just beyond the frame.

Whatever it was, Laci knew how to make it look convincing.

The job paid well.

And she had no regrets.

Help AGI-Stories grow… If you’re enjoying the stories, please tell others. Word of mouth referrals and your endorsements are the best way for things here to grow!

Show your support for AGI with:• one-time contribution through TipTopJar.• one-time contribution through Throne.• Patreon Membership.

All characters in this story are fictional characters, their images generated with AI for AGI Stories. They do not represent any real person, nor is their appearance based on any real human.

Message to Paying Supporters:

Thank you for helping support AGI Stories. I always consider you—the paid members—when deciding how content is shared.

As of now—early July, 2026—between donations here and Instagram monetization, about 70% of the software costs are covered. That's huge, and it is because of you.

Because of your generosity, I am able to keep going.

~AGI Original Stories & AI Images