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Cycle I: Coming on Strong
The Hidden Voice
The Hidden Girl · 24 (v2.00)
THE HOUSE OF ZAN — Zan

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Playlist Track: RAYE — “Genesis.”

The person she unpinned notices that she is still active on the site.

His message reduces the ending to something cleaner than it was. She had not been unsure about what she wanted. She had been unsure about him.

She reads it as an accusation because that is easier than reading it as something true.

Her profile still says submissive. The orientation field still says not specified. Parts of the bio were written while she kept going back to his profile. On the side account, strangers are still finding the photograph he chose.

She could tell him that some of those things changed while they were talking.

Instead, she writes, “maybe i wanted someone who actually saw me.”

The message is meant to reach somewhere her agreeable answers never did.

His reply takes longer than she wants it to.

“Maybe we both liked the idea more than the person.”

She wants him to sound angry. The sentence gives her nothing to push against.

She takes a screenshot. Before sending it to the person she recently pinned, she crops away everything above his answer.

The image now contains one sentence.

“apparently none of it was real now,” she writes beneath it.

The person she pinned asks what she said before that.

“nothing really.”

What she said is still there in the other conversation.

He tells her that wanting something different now does not make what she wanted before a lie. He does not tell her the other person was wrong. She lets the reassurance settle over the part of the story she gave him.

Then she returns to her profile and presses Edit.

She changes submissive to unsure, restores the joke she removed, and puts her photographs back in their old order. Each change looks like going backward until she sees them together.

The person she pinned appears in the viewer list.

No instructions follow.

She waits for them anyway.

Then she leaves the profile the way she made it.