Cycle II · “The Hidden Life” · 09

She had other things she told herself she’d do tonight.

Instead, her For You page is doing its favorite thing lately: serving a steady stream of people getting absolutely wrecked.

Open palm slaps. Thigh bruises. Marked-up backs. Audio where all you hear is a hit, a gasp, and someone’s voice going low and steady, “Good girl. Take it.”

She watches one, two, five clips in a row before her brain even catches up with her thumb.

She blames The First Yes.

Ever since that night — the one where she said yes and it actually stayed a yes, all the way through — something has been… unlatched. Her body feels like it’s been living on airplane mode for years and someone finally flipped it back to full signal.

Now it’s like every wire in her is live.

A hand on a throat in a video?

Pulse.

Someone’s wrist flicking a belt out of a loop?

Pulse.

That one trending sound where a Dom voice says, “You can take it,” over and over?

Big, problematic pulse.

She keeps telling herself it’s just hormones. A delayed puberty spike. A glitch.

Still, the algorithm learns fast. It starts stitching together exactly the sort of thing she doesn’t want anyone to ever see her watching:

“rough play compilation”

“slap kink”

“impact play POV”

She doesn’t search those terms. She just… doesn’t scroll away fast enough.

Same difference.

She’s mid-scroll when a title pops up from a subscription she keeps “accidentally” opening:

Hard on Purpose.

Her first reaction is an eye-roll.

Okay. Dramatic.

Her second reaction is clicking it.

Within three lines she’s sitting up straighter.

“Some people deserve to be hit.

Hard.”

There’s that little drop in her stomach again. The way it did the first time someone’s hand landed on her ass just a bit harder than playful, and her body went:

Oh. That.

She keeps reading, jaw tight.

Tears-on-the-floor hard.

Mascara-in-rivers hard.

Fingerprints-on-purpose hard.

Part of her wants to slam the tab shut and pretend she didn’t see any of this.

Another part — the same one that queues up slap videos in the middle of the night and tells herself she’s “just curious” — is nodding so hard it hurts.

She has a quiet, private catalog of moments she never labelled.

The time she got shoved into a wall during an argument and her whole system went pure panic — nothing hot, just shock and shame and a bruise she explained as “clumsy.”

The time someone slapped her across the face without warning and she didn’t say anything, because she didn’t want to “be a problem” — and then cried about it later whenever she thought about it for too long.

The time she was just combing out her hair, hit a snag, and the brush caught just right — yanking her head back for a second — and everything in her body went calm and loud at the same time.

Same motion. Different context.

She never had words for why one felt like danger and the other felt like… home.

So she defaulted to: “There’s probably something wrong with me.”

Because what do you even do with the thought:

“I never want to be hit in anger again.
But if someone I trusted said they wanted to hurt me… I might let them — and I would enjoy it.”

You don’t put that in a group chat.

You don’t put that in a notes app.

You don’t even say it out loud when you are alone.

You just watch strangers’ bruises in 30-second loops and let your body answer questions your brain keeps editing.

From there, it dives straight into the long Not This list.

She reads through:

Family violence.
“Because I was mad,”.
Surprise choking.
Blocked exits.
“Joking” hits that really weren’t.

She finds two or three things she’s experienced and feels her throat tighten.

It’s not like her life has been some horror movie. She knows people who’ve endured worse. At least that’s what she tells herself when the memories are triggered.

But there are enough little cuts on that list that her nervous system has built its own religion:

don’t provoke,.
don’t escalate,.
if they’re mad, make yourself small..

So the part of her that wants to be thrown onto a mattress and held down on purpose feels… suspicious. Treasonous. Like kissing the hand that might hit you.

The post keeps insisting:

“That’s not kink. That’s just brutality.”

And for the first time, she lets herself consider:

Maybe I’m not trying to re-enact being hurt.

Maybe I’m trying to overwrite it.

The psych bit makes her snort — “Brains are little freaks” — but also hits uncomfortably close.

If you feel unsafe, pain = “something is wrong, get out.”

If you feel chosen and held, pain can become “this hurts and I want more.”

She thinks of the videos she watches where the person getting hit is laughing between strikes, or crying and still pushing back into the next one.

She’s never had that. Not fully.

Closest thing was that first real yes where for the first time, her body wasn’t bracing for the other shoe to drop. No punishment. No guilt. Just pleasure she was actually allowed to stay in.

Now her system is like:

Okay, cool, great.

What if we added getting slammed into a wall? For science.

Her mind recoils:

You need to chill.

But she doesn’t click away.

She lingers on the “good pain vs bad pain” examples.

Bad pain: slipping on ice, smashing your knee, suddenly living under the dictatorship of a weather app.

She has that memory too: the stupid bruise on her shin from a coffee table she moved herself. Nothing hot, just swearing and limping and feeling like the universe was out to get her.

Good pain: bracing on a bed, looking up at someone you belong to, saying “Harder. I can take it.”

Her body supplies an image before her brain can censor it:

Knees wide on a mattress.

Cheek pressed to a sheet.

A voice at her ear: “Color?”

Her own voice, shaky but clear: “Green.”

She hasn’t had that scene. Not really. But her imagination has looped it enough times it feels like a prequel, not a fantasy.

She scrolls back up and rereads the line about:

“take all the times I was hurt without a choice and burn it into something I asked for.”

Something in her loosens and tightens at the same time.

She doesn’t suddenly decide, Yes, I am a hardcore pain slut now, let’s go buy equipment.

She also doesn’t pull her usual move of shoving everything into a mental drawer labelled “Too Much, Do Not Open.”

Instead, she lets herself sit in the in-between:

She doesn’t want to be hit in anger. She does want… something that looks like what’s on her screen. She has no idea yet who she would trust enough to try it with, or how far she’d actually want to go.

For now, all she can admit is this:

When she reads about someone being marked on purpose and smiling at the bruise the next morning, it doesn’t sound disgusting.

It sounds like a kind of devotion she can almost taste.

“Some people deserve to be hit. Hard.”

She locks the screen and stares at the ceiling for a moment.

For now, she makes herself a small promise — the kind that doesn’t require a label or a grand gesture:

If someone ever looks her in the eye, asks clearly, and offers to hold that kind of pain with her?

She won’t automatically laugh it off and say, “God, no, I’m not that kind of girl.”

She might, just once, take a breath,

check in with her body,

and see whether the word that rises is:

no

or

hurt on purpose.

Cycle II · “The Hidden Life” · 09

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