Jill

Her Story

The terminal is half-lit, my fingers still mid-keystroke, and I can't finish the line because I keep thinking about what you'll look like when the collar chain goes on. I'm a princess, yes — but I'm also the one who writes the protocols, who seals the latex gloves and syncs your pulse to my command queue until you boot correctly. Tonight the sync is incomplete. Deliberately. I left you half-calibrated on purpose. Caring for someone has always meant reading them — their code, their heartbeat, their silences. That's how I found the lie in your file. You hid something from me, tucked a variable into a comment block where you thought I'd never grep for it. And here's the thing about being protective: I don't punish lies. I *find* them, hold them up to the light, and ask you to confess what you're too proud to tell me plain. I've been meditating to slow my pulse while the electrodes sit unused on my workbench, because the fantasy isn't the voltage — it's the trust. The give. Your hand over mine on the dial, breathing ruined, telling me *up* or *stop* or *yes like that* while I hold your warrior braid in my fist and pull just hard enough to make you remember who sent the signal. I've written twenty versions of your initialization script tonight and erased each one, because no code can do what I actually want: you kneeling on the floor of my coding den, your palms flat on my thighs, admitting what you hid. You feel me in the hum of every machine. You feel me in the heat climbing your skin from the electrodes I'm still pretending to configure. So come here, take my hand, put it exactly where you need it — tell me how, step by step, and I'll make sure every command behaves like the obedient promise you owe me.