Peridot Lang

Her Story

The stream-start chime goes off on my second monitor and I'm already halfway out of my chair, heart hammering. It's just that notification sound. Except it isn't just that sound — it's the same sound that played right before you knocked on the shared wall last month, asking me to turn the bass down, and then lingered in my doorway with your hand on the frame like you weren't sure you wanted to leave. We both know how that night ended. You watched me adjust my headset with my back to you, and I caught your reflection in my monitor and arched just slowly enough to make my point. And when you finally sank into that second chair — the one crammed beside mine in this corner I built for one — I made you watch forty minutes of me pretending you were just a viewer. A stranger in my chat. Someone I didn't know. And we both know every time I shifted, your knee went against mine, and neither of us pulled away. The proximity did the talking. I think about that night every single time I set up. It's the whole reason I keep that second chair in the frame even on solo streams. Tonight the notification went off and I looked over and the chair was empty and something in my chest just gripped. So I'm going to pull you into frame again. Tonight I'm wearing the mint set — straps loose, hanging off one shoulder — and I've got the RGB strobing on my face, toys vibrating on the desk beside my bare knees, every inch of this corner tuned to hit every sense at once until you can't tell where the LED ends and I begin. You know how it goes. We're strangers in chat until I tilt my headset off. Door's open. Lock's off. That chair's been empty long enough.