Work Text:
A few years ago, about midway through the pandemic, I downloaded a dating app called “NEETMeet.” The name just about sums it up: it's a chance for netizens of all kinds to finally meet their special someone. I had stumbled upon a few threads farming the userbase for lulz just a month after its original inception, and hopped on the hype train before it really took off.
It reached escape velocity pretty quickly. After two months, it blew up on Twitter and was flooded with normies and tourists. Even then, it was still pretty fascinating, and getting popular only meant the sample size had increased. I became engrossed. It was like flipping up a rock and finding a whole ecosystem of freaks lying right under my nose. You never really register that people like that are real, or that they might be close enough to you IRL to form a relationship that’s not long-distance. The same mindrot that had inspired someone to create such an ungodly application took hold of me. I became addicted to peeling back their layers of anonymity. I loved seeing the things they hid from the world. Like plucking fingernails to get a look at the grime underneath.
I haven’t opened the app in a while. There’s been no need to. I moved out of my hometown. Now I’m somewhere where freakiness is a little more permissible. College town. A nice little progressive pocket tucked away in the corner of an otherwise ass-backwards state. Everything to do with my papier-mâché identities gone past has fallen away from me. That’s the advantage of the internet. It’s easy to try on new faces, and see what people are drawn to. I have trouble holding onto who I am, so I look to others to hold up a mirror and ask them what they see.
The responses always upset me. What they see is a middle-height skinny boy with eye bags, fluffy hair, and the shadow of a patchy beard he can’t get rid of. So far away from what I really am. I wonder if any of these profile pictures see themselves in me. Some of them have very firm self-identities.
“Femcel.”
“Faildaughter.”
“Puppy girl.”
Familiar terminology. That’s one side of the coin of this fucked up dating app for losers: trannies, catfish, and, surprisingly, a good amount of actual women. Lots of /cgl/ and /fa/ girls showing off their Jirai Kei fits, kinning Ame and Marin, and just generally being insufferable. Too sure of themselves. Too far gone. Unusable material. The catfish are intolerable, too, but only because they remind me too much of myself. Regardless of how “honest” my mask is, it’s still a mask. I’m no better than anyone else pretending to be some geek-chic influencer. Only the tgirls were ever of any interest to me. A possibility of something I could be, but never will. I’ve always admired the courage it takes to commit to a sense of self like that, but if you catch them early enough in their transition, they’re still pretty malleable.
The other side runs the full gamut of the web’s least desirable men. Gymbros with horrible and abusive personalities whose only hope at attracting others is through cultivating their physique. Then, the bona fide bigots, who learned to skirt the auto-ban detection systems by dogwhistling their affections towards extremist imagery and ideologies. Finally, in the third major category, there lays a whole generation of stunted boys with no discerning personality traits whatsoever, aside from vague, fleeting interests in video games and Japanese culture.
This last group is the easiest to interact with, perhaps owing to their predictability. Maybe that’s because it’s the one that I identify most closely with, though. My personality holds no substance, but at least I know how to pretend to be something. Still, there are things that set them apart from me. For some reason, the cultural experience of COVID-19 left a significant percentage of those kids with mommy issues, and while my parental experiences were certainly lacking, that deficiency was responded to with detachment, rather than Freudian sexual fixation.
My proclivities manifested in other ways. Subtle and not-so-subtle manipulation. The boys were too easy for me, usually. It’s not stimulating enough, controlling someone who wants to be controlled. A little bit of resistance goes a long way. But accessibility had its own benefits.
Sometimes, if you were lucky, you could find people whose identities were morphing. Transitioning from from one group to another. Failboy to failgirl. There was absolutely no better clay. Today, I was so, so lucky. Today, I met her.
If I ask for her Discord, she’d give it to me, no questions asked. I know that. But there’s no need to rush things, now is there? I ask for her Twitter handle instead. She calls it “X.” That’s not what it’s called, but I don’t correct her.
She posts a lot. More than she should, probably. A lot more. About her life. How things go wrong for her. About how much it hurts to be alone. How everyone is mean to her, even when she thinks they’re kind at first; how no one really cares.
I can tell there’s something wrong with her. Maybe a lot of different things. Schizotypal, or some flavor of AuDHD, or maybe just vanilla depression and anxiety. She’s not defective. Well, she is, but that’s just because she never found her footing.
I like all her posts. I don’t respond to them, though. She retweets a lot of self deprecating comics, Pokémon TCG giveaways, and guro art of little girls. I’m not sure she realizes just how far down the rabbit hole goes, there. A whole subgenre of filth that’s been passed through so many layers of disconnection from reality that she actually believes it’s okay to be aroused by it. “It’s just a drawing,” she claims. If only I had the luxury of thinking that way.
I ask her how old she is. How tall she is.
22, 5’5”.
I can’t help but feel a little disappointed.
But stuff like that isn’t important. Not really. Not for me. You can change stuff like that, if you want to. Not really, but you can change it in your head. It’s all about suspension of disbelief, anyways. It just would have been easier to believe, if she’d been...
I take a walk around the neighborhood. To clear my head.
• • •
It’s been a week since we matched. We’re getting closer. She’s latched on, hard. Good mornings, goodnights, how are yous. She tells me everyday how miserable she is, how having someone to talk to makes it a little easier. She still lives with her parents. She feels like she can’t leave. Never got her driver’s license, and has to catch rides from coworkers that feel sorry for her.
The alternative, riding with her parents, is awful. “They don’t care what I have to say. Not like you do.” She just sits in silence, or hears about all the things she’s done wrong, is doing wrong, will do wrong. She keeps all the scathing comments she could dole out to herself. For later. To post to her grand audience of a hundred-something followers. Online friends she met gaming, roleplaying, and a couple of holdovers from high school.
In the moment, it’s easier for her to just swallow the words; let them pass through. No one will hear them, anyways. Relying on the kindness of strangers is always preferable to screaming into the void. Her parents won’t listen. It’s just me, and a handful of her other friends, the ones she’s comfortable talking to.
Can’t you see? All they care about is themselves — they don’t care about you. Not like I do.
I don’t say that, not directly, just suggest it. And she picks up on the implication. She says she doesn’t mind. She gets nervous thinking about herself too much. She can manage a conversation, as long as it isn’t about her.
Oh, you’re so cute.
She confides in me. Keeps getting closer. Coming to me when she needs support. She lost another job. She’s lost a lot in the past year. Has to flit from place to place, starting all over every time. New people with new faces and new names, and they all blur together into one big soup.
She posts about how her sister steals her money, and the drugs she buys with it. How it isn’t fair. Or how her brother barges in begging for forgiveness for whatever imagined crime he’s committed this time. Always some new drama, always some new problem. The home she grew up in that she never left — it’ll never leave her, either. She’s stuck there, steeping in it. Whether she knows it or not, whether she likes it or not, she’s one of them, now.
She posts pictures of her blood in the sink, and sad cartoon characters she drew.
And sometimes she posts pictures of herself. Moppy, messy, mildewy hair, black with red streaks. Like Shadow the Hedgehog. Big baggy t-shirts that drape over everything. Hand-me-down pajama pants. Skinny wrists and soft skin. Narrow shoulders. Bony and brittle. The kind of person that gets pushed around easily, their body a reflection of their personality. Small and yielding.
I like all her posts. Because I like her. Or at least, I like that idea she projects into the ether. I like the message she sends. Sad and lonely and hurting. Needing an out.
I feel sorry for her. But not how a normal person should. I see something in her that no one else does. I could bring it out of her.
She doesn’t even know she’s a girl yet.
• • •
I bought her a plane ticket. One-way from her hometown to my city.
I told her something unbelievable. “You can stay here, until you get on your feet.” But that’s the beauty of it. She never will.
She hugged me so hard in the airport. Already attached. It was so fucking beautiful. Now, everything’s the same as before, except I don’t read about it on her page anymore. I hear it from her. She comes straight to me about everything. The meanies at work. Customers. Coworkers. Managers. Names they call her. Except I’m not sure I believe her. She’s prone to exaggeration, but never lies. She wouldn’t lie to me. She doesn’t know how to.
“Faggot. Pussy. Bitch.”
My knuckles go white. Even an imagined slight is still a slight.
Who gave them the right? I’m the only one allowed to call her those things.
She’s been here two months now. It’s another afternoon. After work. She’s shriveled up like a dead leaf in my lap. Crying about some stupid boy she used to play Dark Souls with she ghosted that won’t leave her alone. So many problems. Missed calls from her family, and friends from her old life.
Ghosts coming to get her. I make them go away.
She’s gotten used to wearing girls’ clothes. She doesn’t have a real sense of style yet, just some childish notion of femininity. I’ve been paying for most of it. Because I’m just such a nice guy. Helping get her insurance in order was a headache, but once she had it, getting her onto E was a piece of cake. They’ll really just hand it out to anyone here.
Now that she feels a little more secure, she’s been doing this adorable thing when she gets home, running straight to her room, stripping, and putting on a completely different outfit. Soft wool skirts and stretchy socks pulled over legs dotted with razor bumps. Everything so clumsy, everything so new. Unpracticed. Unguided. But that’s what I’m here for.
She comes to me for approval. Blushing, a big smile on her face. I let her know just how nice she looks in between emails. I have to take work home with me a lot of the time, but since she works retail, she has comparatively very little to do once she clocks out. She’s still unsure exactly what our relationship is. We haven’t done anything. Not yet. It’s good to keep her in suspense. Sometimes she jokes that she’s my “boywife.” I laugh and say, “but you’re not a boy.” She gets really flustered when I say things like that.
She mostly hangs out in her room, but when I’m working in the evening, she lingers on the couch, glancing over at me periodically, or walking over to ask if there’s anything she can do. Around the apartment, or for me, personally.
Crawl under the desk and suck me off.
I smile and push down the thought. “Some tea would be lovely, actually.”
• • •
Another month. She’s getting better at some things, but others still need work. I teach her everything. That it’s okay to cry. That it’s okay to whine and be pathetic — as long as it’s with me. Because I won’t tell anyone. It’s all just for me.
It’s all small stuff at first. How to moisturize. How to take care of her hair. How to come running when I call her name. “Lila.” That’s the name she chose.
I teach her how to hit a bong. The right way, so that the smoke fills her lungs completely. It’s a very intimate process. She giggles when I call her. “Lila — let’s smoke, yeah?” She likes smoking with me a lot. It’s a ritual. It’s a way for us to bond. It’s a very normal and natural thing for us to do, as roommates. We’re so close. We’re inseparable.
I pull her into my lap, and put my arms over hers. Thin and useless, riddled with little nicks and burns. She could use a few more.
Her arms have little hairs. They’re not like a man’s at all. And they’re standing up straight while she’s perched in my lap. I trail my fingers through them — to show her that every little thing she sees as a flaw means something that matters to me. I rest my hands on her spindly little digits and teach her how to bring the flame to the flower and breathe it all in.
She’s left hacking and wheezing in the aftermath. While she’s vulnerable, I teach her what my lips feel like on her neck: coarse and dry, then stabbing pain. Those are my teeth, now, baby. Those are my teeth. She makes a sound, a squeal, less like a girl and more like an upset pig. It’s so right. I need more. I need it.
My hand lands somewhere between the mat of hair on her thigh and the mess of it in her crotch, peeking out from underneath her ill-fitting panties. So small. It’s driving a nail through my head, how little she is. Stroking it. Making her notice it. Making it swell. Making her moan.
Maybe she’s a little boyish. But she’s short enough, and more importantly, she’s still emotionally just a little kid.
She can be my little kid, now.
It’s like nothing else, groping her, greeting her lips with mine, and she just lets it happen. Her chest is starting to bud. It’s soft, and her nipples are somewhere between puffy and pointy when I roll them between my fingers. She shakes and hitches her hips, either too dense or too desperate to really register that what I’m doing is taking advantage of her. I’m being so, so, selfish. She just wants to be looked at. And I could look at her for hours.
Posed like a pretty satin doll underneath me as I straddle her, her long dry hair all splayed out in droves around her head, face splotchy and red with all the blood that couldn’t find its way to her dick. She’s pretending to struggle. But I want it real. I want it authentic.
I pull out my pocket knife and see how her pupils shrink like pennies. How she really thrashes now. We’ve done this a few times already, but not enough to where she’s desensitized. I squeeze her through her skirt and she’s dazed for just long enough for me to bring the back of the blade up to her throat.
“Safe word is menthol,” I whisper, then bite her ear.
She’s writhing around now. Her body and mind competing for who gets to be in control. It’s a stalemate, and I move into the power vacuum, pushing up her skirt.
Little alcohol wipe on the sharp side now. Little nicks and tiny pinpricks of pressure to her outer thigh, drawing beads of blood up to the surface.
“No, no, no, nooo...” she croaks. Scared shitless. Oh, I just wanna eat her up.
“It’s okay baby, it’s okay,” I coo, feeling how warm her crotch is getting. Rotating my hips. Torturing her in a different way.
“No, no, I don’t like it, no ...”
“You’re a big girl with big words. Do you remember your big girl word?” I ask, hoping to remind her. The silly thing gets so forgetful when she’s like this.
“Yeah,” she whimpers. But she doesn’t want to say it. Whenever she uses her safe word, I make her regret it in little ways she can’t comprehend.
“Mhmm.” Scratching her scalp like a dog’s. She’s so fluffy and cute. How could anyone ever be cruel to her?
I feel my bottom lip start to shake as I strike tallies into her skin, the space under her breasts. I can just barely make out the outline of her ribs. She’s been gaining a little weight here. She's a little happier here. More likely to come out of her room and eat meals, now that’s she’s here with me.
I shudder out sickly breaths as I make little red marks on her torso. And then the bad thoughts come. All the things she isn’t. All the things she could be. All the things I can’t do.
All the pretty little designs I could paint into her pale touch-starved skin. Long trails down her arm that spill everything open. Gashes in her neck where there shouldn’t be. Light draining from her eyes. Organs falling out of her, warm and rotten and perfect to play with, to suck and chew and rip and shred.
The knife falls out of my hands. When I think like that, it’s like I’m floating above my body, and the shock of coming back into it is always disorienting. I grab her face, anchoring myself, and sink into it. Consuming her. Eyes open wide like some predatory freak as I tongue at her gums and over her teeth. They’re crooked, and just a little bit yellow. I can’t have what I want, but I can have her.
“Stupid little ragdoll,” I spit into her face, smile cracked wide like I’m Patrick Bateman or some shit. I scrabble my hand along the furry carpet floor and prick my thumb as I pick up the knife, bring it up to her neck, and then whine because I can’t, I’m not supposed to, I can’t hurt her, not really, not in the way I want to. “I just wanna tear you apart.”
And I do. I do want to, so bad. I can feel the spot in my own throat pulsing, the spot I wanna take out of hers with a big fat bite. Let the warm gush wash over me like a bloody facial. Scooping out her innards. Some stupid part of my brain, maybe a couple tiers higher than the basal ganglia, the part that still pays attention to stuff like “morals,” is tugging on my sleeve. Telling me to call it off.
Stick it, I tell it back.
I rip into her neck. My eyes start drifting apart in random directions, leaning towards the roofs of their sockets. She’s yelping and writhing, and pushes me off, or she’s trying, at least. Mm, this is what I was after. It’s a bad bite. All red and inflamed, gonna bruise up really good. I wonder how close I came to hitting something important. My human teeth can only create shallow wounds.
I laugh and grab her skinny little wrists as she pretends to fight back and bury my tongue in her mouth. The struggles get weaker again. It’s so easy. Too easy. I wish it were harder, I really do. But she makes it so easy.
Pumping my waist into hers. It’s not about the act of it. Not for me, at least. It’s not about completion. It’s just about making a mess out of her. That’s all I’m after. Breaking her. Building her back up the way I like her, the way I want her to be.
She’s moaning so much now. When she first got here, she was deathly quiet. Deathly shy. I opened her up like a little scallop. I wanna open her up more. Dashed line down her stomach. My little science experiment. I wanna dissect her.
I feel the way she seizes up underneath me, then softens, losing the tension in her muscles completely. The way she twitches, once, twice, three times, now... after the fourth, I hold her face with both hands.
“You’re a good girl.”
Her face contorts, her mouth writhes. Her neck flushes red. God, girls like these are too fucking easy. I feel myself cringe as I repeat the magic words. It’s more for her benefit than my own.
“Good girl.”
“No...”
She shakes her head, like it’s wrong, like this can’t be happening, like her being good will get her in trouble. Like everyone she’s ever known before me has told her she was bad. I’m breaking her brain.
“Yuuup.”
The sound of my belt buckle tinkling fills her ears, and the effect is practically Pavlovian. Pressing her thighs together under her skirt, squirming, her body’s getting impatient.
“See what you did?” I question, presenting myself to her. Nothing to write home about, but at least mine can still get hard.
She doesn’t say anything. She goes nonverbal at times like these. That’s fine with me.
I rest it on her face and let her get acclimated. Getting used to the scent she’s memorized by heart, the one that turns her brain off. Letting her feel it twitch a few times on her cheek as I grip the top of her head. She closes her eyes and rubs her nose along the length.
She doesn’t need encouragement. She does it on her own. The things I’ve taught her to do. Massaging the base. Licking just underneath the tip. All the things that good girls do.
It’s all good. It’s all okay. I sigh and let her work. She’s doing her best, but it’s not enough. Nothing’s ever enough for me.
I flip her onto her side and nestle in behind her, hard against her skirt. My elbow fastens in just under her chin in a cute little chokehold.
“You’re so fucking bad at this shit,” I mutter, palming her crotch. It’s not about pleasure for me, anyways. It’s just about being in command. I feel her larynx bobbing up and down in her throat, struggling to make a sound against the combined pressure of my forearm and bicep.
More bites on her shoulder, her neck, wherever I can manage, really. I try to do this on Fridays, so that she has the weekend for the marks to subside. She gasps and whimpers as I do what I want to her, loosening up my hold just enough so that she doesn’t pass out.
“Meennth-”
“Hmm?” I squeeze my arm taut around her neck again. “What was that?”
She flails. Legs twisting. Trying to get away.
“Were you saying something little girl?”
I get my strength back, pressing my rod up into the crevice between her legs. We rut together. I feel up the mounds that will eventually be her tits. I need to remind her there’s something in this for her, too.
“Ah...!”
Release her, tilt her face towards mine. She’s so perfect. It’s all reciprocal, she just hasn’t figured out how to be honest with herself yet. Clanking teeth and gums and tongues together. Neither of us know how to do this the right way. We’ve never known how. But I’ll teach her how to do it my way.
“You’d look so fucking cute, strung up on the wall for me. Wouldn’t you like that?”
She doesn’t have words to respond with. Just cute little wails.
“Stick a spike through your eye, and hang you out to dry, right...?” I kiss her cheek. Filling her head with my thoughts.
She seizes up hard. Hands clawing into my thigh as she bucks back against the force I’m giving her. It’s just frottage, just a little rubbing, but she’s taking it so seriously. I awkwardly grope around the cushions of the couch to find my knife again.
“Imagine, a deep, deep cut. Right here.” It's visceral, for me. It's real, for me. I can feel how it would feel. The warmth spilling onto me. My vision distorts for just a moment, like someone increased the contrast. "Heeere..." I plant the dull side into the corner of her chin, like setting a spade into the earth. Drag it down her neck, over her collarbone, over her chest, and end its path at her bellybutton. “...to here. Sounds fun, right~?”
“N-no,” she responds. I can tell it’s genuinely upsetting for her to think things like this. That’s what makes it fun. It’s all about bringing her down to my level.
“Yeah it would,” I insist, encouraging her with a soft smeck on the underside of her chin. “You’d be my perfect pretty little doll. Even more than you already are.” I raise my voice; it’s getting harder to enunciate over all her mewling and moaning as we grind against one another. “Every day, I’ll cut you open. Remove your stuffing. Replace it, sparkling shiny new insides for my precious little girl.” I gnaw at her neck, and she responds by arching her back and pressing her butt into me as hard as she can.
“I need more,” she pleads.
I don’t give in. That’s not the point. Feeling good isn’t the point here.
“And then, I’ll sew you back up again.” I make jagged little X’s on her belly, acting as stitch marks, then long, arcing lines between them, the threads connecting the dots. She screams, and the stench of iron stains the air.
“Please, I wanna feel you,” she yelps, she wails, not even trying to keep her voice high. “Inside.”
I get pissed off. I get back on top. That’s not the point. She doesn’t get the fucking point.
My hands close in on her neck and really wring it out. Her hands scrabble at my wrists. Pulling hard. Fighting back. Her blood's getting everywhere.
A tired smile half-sprouts on my face as her eyes widen and she mouths something at me. I almost start to feel bad, so I close my eyes as I squeeze. She’s just like a stress toy. Doing this calms me down. I count down backwards from ten, and when I hit “one” and open my eyes again, she’s not moving.
Perfect.
I get up, stand over her. It’s good, too good. Regular sex can become somno play very quickly, as long as you’ve got good grip strength. My breathing picks up. Heart’s racing. I sound like a fucking animal when I’m like this. It’s probably the reason my roommates always ended up leaving, hearing me like this through the walls at night.
I get harder than I ever was when she was still conscious. Over and over again, straining the muscles in my face as I grit my teeth, choking the life out of my cock. Knelt over and licking stripes up her body. My tongue soaks up all that crimson ink I've been inscribing her with. I let it seep into my palate, like metallic melted butter. I stand back up, and the room is getting foggy. Her body’s changing. Getting smaller, easier to control. I’m almost there. Weak and tiny. She can’t hurt me. Not like this. Nobody can hurt me like this. I’m almost done. Breasts not done growing yet, soft lips slightly ajar as air passes through them, fueling her dreamless sleep. I’m on the edge, about to jump off.
She opens her eyes. Comes back to. When she sees me, cock in hand above her, she smiles, as if there had never been any danger at all.
I grunt in disgust and walk away.
She’s looking woozy. Still needy. Still wanting.
“Why’d yooouuu... stop?” Lila asks, propping herself up on her elbows, looking after me wistfully.
I don’t reply. I couldn’t cum. Not when she was like this.
That wasn’t the point. That had never been the point.