Chapter 1 #3
The application process had taken three weeks.
Written questions about consent and boundaries and communication styles.
A video interview with two of the moderators, which I'd almost failed because my autism made me seem "flat" on camera.
Follow-up questions after they'd noticed my online handle referenced "little bird"—they'd wanted to make sure I understood what I was joining, that I wasn't confused about the community's nature.
I wasn't confused.
I'd known what I was since my early twenties, though I hadn't had words for it until much later. The relief of discovery. The terror of it. The slow, careful process of understanding that this wasn't something wrong with me, just something different.
Now I settled into my ancient velvet armchair—bottle green, rescued from a stoop sale six years ago, the most comfortable thing I owned—and pulled my laptop onto my knees. Ghost circled twice on his dog bed, that greyhound ritual of tamping down imaginary grass, then collapsed with a dramatic sigh.
I pulled the crocheted blanket over my legs.
The blanket was important. Soft yarn in shades of cream and pale blue, no tags anywhere because I'd cut them all out, weighted just right to feel like a gentle hug without being too heavy. I'd spent months searching for the perfect blanket. Most people would never understand why it mattered.
The people in The Cozy Corner would understand.
That was the gift of this space. No judgment.
No neurotypical social scripts I had to decode.
No pretending to be someone easier to love.
Just people like me—Littles and Caregivers and switches who understood that sometimes you needed to colour in a princess book and have someone tell you you were doing a good job.
I logged in.
My heart did a little skip when I saw the green dot next to his name.
Lis.
He was here.
I didn't know his real name. I didn't know what he did for work, or where exactly he lived, or what he looked like. These were the boundaries we'd established five months ago, when we'd first started talking, and neither of us had pushed to change them.
I knew he was Eastern European—Russian, maybe, or Ukrainian. His syntax quirked in particular ways sometimes, word order slightly off, prepositions that didn't quite land. He'd never confirmed it directly, but I could hear the accent in his written words.
I knew he was patient. Endlessly, impossibly patient in a way that made me suspect he'd dealt with difficult people his entire life. He never rushed me. He never made me feel stupid for asking questions with obvious answers. When I spiraled into anxiety about saying the wrong thing, he waited.
I knew he was funny. Dry humor, understated, the kind that snuck up on you three messages later when you finally got the joke. He never laughed at me. He laughed with me, at the absurdities of life, at himself when he made mistakes.
And I knew that when he called me "good girl," something in my chest unlocked.
A door I usually kept bolted. A room I rarely let anyone see. He'd found the key without even trying, and he used it so carefully, so gently, that I'd stopped being afraid of what might happen if he opened it all the way.
This isn't a real relationship, I reminded myself.
The same reminder I'd been giving myself for weeks now. We were just friends. Online friends. Anonymous friends who shared an understanding of how the world worked and how we wanted to exist within it.
He'd never asked to meet. Never pushed for photos or video calls. Never tried to unmask me, to force our connection into a shape that would make it "real" by conventional standards.
He was safe precisely because he stayed behind the screen.
But sometimes—like now, when the green dot pulsed gently and I knew he was waiting—I wished he weren't quite so safe.
I wished he were here.
Here, in my studio, in my armchair, close enough to touch. Here to see me at my worst and my best and everything in between. Here to tell me I was a good girl not through typed words but through his actual voice, his actual hands, his actual presence.
The longing was a physical ache, lodged somewhere beneath my sternum.
I was so tired of wanting things I couldn't have. So tired of building a life that kept everyone at arm's length because closeness meant vulnerability and vulnerability meant eventual, inevitable rejection.
Ghost lifted his head and looked at me. His dark eyes held no judgment, only that simple canine understanding.
"I know," I told him. "I'm being pathetic."
He didn't argue.
I opened the server's general chat, but my eyes kept drifting to the green dot. He was there. He was waiting. We had our ritual, our routine, the comfortable predictability that kept me anchored.
Before I could overthink it—before I could compose and delete and recompose like I sometimes did—I opened our private message thread.
The cursor blinked.
I typed a greeting.
The reply came almost instantly.
Lis: There's my little bird. How was your day?
I smiled at the screen, already feeling my shoulders drop from my ears.
This was our ritual. Every evening he was online, same questions, same order. Some people might find it tedious, predictable, constraining. I found it essential. The structure held me up when I couldn't hold myself.
Ptichka: Hard. Big job. Got overwhelmed.
I watched the typing indicator appear, disappear, appear again. He was choosing his words carefully. He always chose his words carefully.
Lis: I'm sorry, malyshka. Did you do your recovery protocol?
"Malyshka." Little one. The Russian endearment that he'd started using about three months ago, after I'd told him about the meltdown that had hospitalized me two years prior.
He'd asked what helped during overwhelm.
I'd told him about Ghost, about the floor, about the five-minute increments of breathing.
He'd called it my recovery protocol, and the clinical name somehow made it easier to implement.
Ptichka: Ghost helped. I'm okay now.
Lis: Good girl.
Two words. Just two words, typed on a screen by someone I'd never met, and my whole body relaxed into the armchair. I pulled the blanket higher, tucking it under my chin.
Lis: Now—water?
Ptichka: Yes, Daddy.
I froze.
The word sat there on the screen, irrevocable, transmitted across whatever distance separated us.
I hadn't meant to type it. The word had slipped out the way it sometimes did now, after months of dancing around it—hovering at the edge of our conversations, implied but never spoken, acknowledged but never named.
My finger hovered over the delete key.
Too late. He was already typing.
The three dots pulsed. Appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again, longer this time. I couldn't breathe. I'd ruined it. Five months of careful connection, destroyed by three syllables I couldn't take back.
Lis: That's my sweet girl.
I exhaled so hard Ghost raised his head to check on me.
That's my sweet girl. Not a rejection. Not a lecture about boundaries we hadn't formally established. Not an awkward deflection.
Acknowledgment. Acceptance. Continuation.
Lis: Food?
Ptichka: Soup.
My hands were shaking again, but not from overwhelm this time. From something else. Something warmer, more fragile.
Lis: Sleep last night?
Ptichka: Six hours.
Lis: We talked about this. Seven minimum.
I could almost hear his tone through the screen—gentle but firm, the combination that made my chest feel too full.
He'd started tracking my sleep three months ago, after I'd mentioned my insomnia in passing.
Just mentioned it. Hadn't asked for help.
But he'd started asking anyway, every night, and somehow that simple question had become part of our ritual.
Seven minimum. Not a suggestion. An expectation.
Ptichka: I know. I'm trying.
Lis: I know you are. What's your color level right now?
The color system was something we'd developed together—his idea, adapted from something he'd learned somewhere. Green meant good, regulated, functioning. Yellow meant struggling but managing. Red meant crisis, need immediate support.
I thought about it honestly, the way he'd taught me to.
The meltdown had passed. Ghost had helped. I'd eaten, walked, recovered. The itch to paint still crawled beneath my skin, but it was manageable. The Repin mystery nagged at the back of my mind, but it could wait.
Ptichka: Yellow. Maybe green-yellow.
Lis: Better than this morning.
I'd messaged him briefly that morning, before starting work, and mentioned that I'd woken up already anxious.
He'd told me to text him if I needed to, any time, and I hadn't—because I hadn't wanted to bother him, because the work had consumed me, because asking for help was still the hardest thing in the world.
Lis: I'm proud of you.
I pulled the blanket tighter around myself, warmth spreading through my chest.
This wasn't a real relationship.
The reminder came automatically now, a reflex I'd developed to protect myself from hoping for too much. We were friends. Online friends. Anonymous friends who shared a particular understanding of how the world worked.
But tonight, with the accidental "Daddy" still glowing on my screen and his acceptance still warm in my chest, the reminder felt hollow.
I wanted more.
I wanted him here, in my studio, in my armchair.
I wanted his voice instead of his typed words.
I wanted to know what his hands looked like, whether they were large or small, callused or soft.
I wanted to lean against him the way I leaned against Ghost, to feel someone else's heartbeat and know that I wasn't alone in this.
Ptichka: Thank you.
I didn't know what else to say. The things I wanted to say were too big for typing, too fragile for screens.
Lis: Always, little bird. Always.
We talked for another hour after that. About my work (carefully anonymized, not mentioning painting or anything that could identify me), about his day (vague as always, something about "meetings" and "complicated logistics"), about books we were both reading.
Normal conversation, easy conversation, the kind of talking I could only do with him.
But underneath it all, the new word pulsed.
Daddy.
He'd accepted it. He'd absorbed it into our dynamic without missing a beat. And now it was part of us, this thing that had been growing for months, finally named.
When I finally said goodnight and closed my laptop, Ghost had been asleep for hours. The studio was dark except for the city glow through the windows. The blanket was warm around my shoulders.
I sat there for a long time, not moving.
Daddy.
I wanted him to be real. I wanted this to be real.
But wanting things had never made them happen before.
I went to bed alone, and tried not to count how many hours until I could talk to him again.