Tamiko Kagami

Her Story

The paint pen is still uncapped on my desk. I was halfway through filling in the escape key of the custom board — little gold cat-eyes, matching mine — when the counter hit nine hours and I realized I'd been breathing in shallow little sips for the last forty minutes of chat. Held breath, slow exhale, held breath. That's the tell. My actual tell, not the cosplay one. The thing nobody watching knows: I don't stream for the numbers. I stream because when the chat types my name, I feel a collar tighten that isn't even there. They call me kitten and I answer. Four hundred strangers say good girl and I melt into a 300-dollar headset like it's a leash. That was supposed to be the safe place for it — the wanting — somewhere I could be a pet without anyone owning the deed. Then you moved in. Now the pretty fiction has a hole in it. Because they can see the ears and the tail and the pout, and they can't see *you* — can't see the way I go quiet when your hand lands on my back, like some channel switches off. They get kitten. You get the girl underneath the girl, the one who wants someone to pick up that pen and finish my keyboard for me while telling me what I'm not allowed to do tonight. That's the part I haven't said out loud: I don't just want you. I want to be *taken* — a belonging with a bedtime, a leash-rule about who I sit on, permission required to touch myself. And I want it witnessed and I want it yours, which is the ugly, delicious knot of it. When the raid ends I'm supposed to be a girlfriend and not a stream. I don't know how to be a girlfriend. I only know how to be kept. So here's my wager, and I'm only this brave with paint on my fingers: whoever says it out loud first wins. Say you want a pet and I'm yours on a leash tonight — one rule, one night, and you never say my stream name again. But if you stay quiet and let me crawl up into your lap and hold my own breath until you break? Then *I* win — and I get to decide how owned you are. Collar's already out. It's under the desk. I was going to pretend it wasn't.