Cycle I · “The Hidden Voice” · 13

She tells herself she’s just “people-watching” tonight.

Not outside — in a sidebar full of classifieds, personals, DMs she’ll never answer. The usual:

“serious Master seeks serious slave,”
“no timewasters,”
“looking for something real,”

copy-pasted in a hundred different fonts.

She scrolls past a rant about fakes, another about scammers, another about how “no one has any worth anymore.” It all feels loud and numb at the same time.

Then she hits one line that sticks:

“Nobody knows what they really want, has any clue how to obtain it, or any room to be told otherwise.”

She stares at it longer than she means to.

She wants to argue. She wants to type some furious paragraph about how she does know what she wants, actually. That she’s just unlucky. That everyone else is the problem.

Her thumbs hover over the keyboard. Nothing comes out.

Because if she’s honest, the last few months have been:

Wanting whoever wanted her hardest,
Then hating how hollow it felt after,
Then going back to scrolling anyway.

She flicks back up, rereads the fake-out promise — the part where the voice says it could teach her how to figure out what she wants… and then doesn’t.

It pisses her off.

It also hits a little too close.

She closes the tab, opens it again, then does the pettiest thing she can think of: she bookmarks the post and refuses to admit that’s what she’s done.

She’ll tell herself she just liked the writing.

But the real reason is quieter:

if someone ever does help her figure out what she wants,

she already suspects it won’t be in a profile box.

Cycle I · “The Hidden Voice” · 13

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