i like the pretty lights

She got a new job. A good one. Marketing director for a company that made something boring and necessary, the kind of job that came with health insurance and a 401k. She showed up early. She stayed late. She impressed people. Her boss used the word "high potential" in her six-month review, and she didn't just hear it as "you'd make a good pet," which was progress.

She started running. Not far, not fast, but enough that her body felt like something she inhabited rather than something others used. She ate vegetables. She called her mother on Sundays. She went on dates with men who were nice and respectful and didn't make her feel like she was under their thumb.

She had sex too. Normal sex. The kind where both people cum and then talk about their days and fall asleep in each other's arms. Not to mention, she stopped calling herself a slut in her head while she did it. Stopped imagining someone else was watching. Not everything had to be a kink.

She was better.

Except.

Her phone still autocapitalizes "You" sometimes, a memory from years of typing it as a proper noun. She changes it when she notices, but she doesn't always notice.

Kneeling during yoga still does something to her. The instructor says "child's pose" and she folds forward and feels her forehead touch the mat and something in her chest unlocks. She breathes through it. Tells herself it's just a stretch.

She still begs sometimes when she touches herself. Not every time. But sometimes the words slip out, quiet and desperate, "please" and "let me" and "I'll be good," and she doesn't know who she's talking to and she doesn't let herself think about it too deeply. Oh, and she lets herself cum. That's a big one. Normal, healthy orgasms. Not the hours-long edging sessions that used to leave her stupid and shaking. Just regular masturbation, like regular people have.

She was doing really well, all things considered, but unfortunately forward progress can only last so long for fragile things that try to put themselves back together.

It's a normal Thursday when the cracks start to show.

She's home early from work, a rare thing, and she's done everything right. Made dinner. Gone for a run. Called a friend. She's sitting on her couch with a book and a cup of tea like a person with no baggage at all.

But she's bored.

Bored in a specific way. Like something is missing and she can't name it and the not-naming is only making it worse. The book isn't landing. The tea is too hot. Her skin feels tight.

She puts down the book. Picks up her phone. Opens Instagram, closes it. Opens TikTok, closes it. Her thumb hovers...

She could just look. That's not relapsing. Looking isn't doing. She's a different person now. She can handle it.

She types the blog name from memory. Of course she remembers it. Six months is nothing. Especially when she spent years there.

The blog looks the same. The familiar layout, the font, the cadence of the posts. She scrolls without reading, just getting a feel for it. Just checking in. She's anthropologizing her past self. That's healthy, probably. Confronting where she came from.

She reads one post.

It's nothing special. Short, almost throwaway. Something about how good girls don't need to understand why they obey, they just need to feel how right it is. She's read a hundred posts like this before. A thousand maybe.

But it still hits. Her thighs press together.

She knows she should get off this app. This is the exact sequence of events that led to all the bad times before. Late night, boredom, one post, two posts, suddenly it's 3am and she's edging on the floor of her bedroom, begging an empty room to let her cum.

She reads another post.

This one is longer. About corruption. About how the girls who come back after trying to leave always fall harder than they did before. About how the "better" never really takes, it just builds pressure, and when they finally break they shatter into something even more desperate than they were the first time.

She should definitely get off this app.

She doesn't.

Her hand moves without her deciding. Slides under the waistband of her leggings. She's wet. Just from two posts and the memory of who she used to be.

She reads another post. Touches herself while she reads. Doesn't let herself cum. That would be giving in. That would be admitting something. She can edge a little and go to bed and pretend this didn't happen.

An hour passes.

She's on the floor now. She doesn't remember moving to the floor, but here she is, on her knees, one hand between her legs, scrolling with the other. Her leggings are around her thighs. She's making sounds she hasn't made in months. Whimpers. Little pleas. The begging she told herself was beneath the new her.

She doesn't cum. She won't let herself cum. If she doesn't cum, this doesn't count. If she doesn't cum, she's still better. She's just having a moment. A slip. Everyone slips.

Two hours.

She's crying now. Not sad crying. The other kind. The kind that happens when you've been edging so long your body doesn't know what else to do with the sensation. Her clit is swollen and throbbing and she can't stop touching it and she can't let herself finish and she can't get off this fucking app.

The posts keep coming. She reads them all. Drinks them like water after a drought. Her brain is getting fuzzy, that familiar fog she used to chase for hours. She missed it. God, she missed it. All those months of being better and she never felt like this. Never felt this alive, this desperate, this much like herself.

"I'm a slut," she whispers, testing it out.

The word lands in her chest and explodes into warmth. She says it again. Adds more words.

Dumb slut. Desperate slut. Pathetic, needy, cock-drunk slut who can't stop scrolling.

She cums.

Six months of healthy orgasms revealed as pale imitations of this. She screams into her empty apartment and shakes and cries and keeps rubbing because one isn't enough, she needs more, she needs to make up for all the time she wasted pretending she didn't need this.

She cums again. And again. Until she's too sensitive to touch and too fucked out to move and she's just lying on her floor in the dark, leggings around her ankles, phone still glowing with the blog she never should have visited.

The next morning she calls in sick to work. First time in six months. She spends the day on her knees, edging, reading, scrolling. She creates a new account. Follows all the blogs she used to follow. Reblog, like, reblog, like. Her thumb knows the motions.

She finds the collar she'd tucked away. Some part of her knew. Some part of her was always waiting for this.

She puts it on. Wraps it around her neck so tight she can barely breathe.

By the weekend, she's worse than she ever was before. The job is a distant concern. Friend's texts left unanswered. The nice men's numbers are blocked. She's back to sleeping on the floor because the bed feels too comfortable, too human, too much like something a better person would deserve.

She edges for five hours on Saturday. Eight on Sunday. She loses count of the orgasms, the denials. She talks to herself constantly, narrating her own destruction, telling herself what she is.

On Monday morning, she opens up a blank doc on her laptop.

She starts to write.

About how she tried to get better. About the job and the running and the nice men. About the residue that never washed off. About the autocapitalized You, the kneeling, the begging. About the Thursday night when she finally stopped pretending.

She writes about what it felt like to fall. How the six months of "better" had only made the drop sweeter. How she'd been so afraid of becoming this again, and now that she's here, she can't remember why. She writes about the collar around her neck as she types, about the wetness between her thighs, about how she's going to post this and then edge for hours thinking about strangers reading it.

When she's finished, she reads it back. Fixes a few typos. Considers, for one brief moment, deleting the whole thing. Then she posts it.

She sits there, collar on, cunt aching, watching the notes climb. Watching other girls reblog her words, add tags about how seen they feel. Girls who tried to get better too. Girls who are thinking about getting worse. Girls who are exactly where she was six months ago, staring at a screen, telling themselves they can stop whenever they want.

She reaches down. Starts to touch herself again. Rubbing to the fact that she's not the only one getting worse. The disease is spreading.