Wanting I
Lalia was fourteen when she stumbled upon the dark side of fan fiction.
It happened slowly, really. Things rated for violence and themes and fade to black. Then, romance centered pieces with on screen, explicit but not vulgar sex scenes starting maybe halfway in and occurring every few chapters. Then ones that started and ended with the sex, and where sex was… a little bit more.
The content was not so shocking to her—but the terminology was new. Endless research rabbit holes. Oh, there’s a word for that. And that. And that.
Labels for her earliest daydreams. Some of her earliest memories were of those daydreams. Of lulling herself to sleep with the same few mental stories told slightly differently over and over again. Fiction that addressed it explicitly started to add fuel and more than the same few tropes.
Otherwise, it was kind of blushing, and reading the same few pages—even paragraphs—of relatively innocent children’s books over and over that mentioned any kind of corporal punishment. She hung on every word of friends’ stories with guilt. She liked the corporal part—she didn’t know why, but she fixated on it—but the punishment part bothered her. She liked the act, but she didn’t like the idea of doing something wrong beforehand, and surely you couldn’t do it just because. Liking any part of it was obviously not something others felt and not something to be shared. She caught onto that quickly.
In her own daydreams, she usually corrected for the punishment part with misunderstandings, accidents, pointlessly cruel authority figures, and, most frequently, something noble, often a combination of a pointlessly cruel authority figure and taking someone else’s, also someone underserving’s, punishment for them. (Some of them were not, in truth, so different to what had happened that final night at TrainingMax with Tamora, which had been very strange for her to process.)
It was fan fiction that first showed her that just because was actually a valid option for the physical. Having a few words to look up showed her the words and literature and valid options for the rest. She liked to please; that had seemed simple. The rule thing? The chore lists? She just liked to know how to do it.
Her early fantasies were always set in some kind of broader context. Some kind of institution like a boarding school or orphanage was common, probably because that was what she saw in the children’s fiction. There were always other kids, some misbehaved or simply incompetent for background plot—and a chance for the heroic side of her fantasies to fix it—and the adults in charge. She lost rank to the rest of the kids, usually. Sometimes a more long form punishment. Sometimes a scholarship fallen through. She never got the choice in it, because that was too much like the just because. This plot line always put her in a position of servitude and low status. Usually there was a lot of labor involved, more frequent physical incidents.
The adults were always the problem, and save a few bullies, the other kids weren’t in a great place either and despite her own worse situation, she often ended up in a role of offering comfort and protection—sometimes actually aided by her servile status. A bit of extra food slipped at meal times here, an extra blanket from the laundry at night there.
She saw, much later, the very first inklings of the majordomo side in those fantasies, if the negative side because she’d only had the concept of it being non consensual and discipline focused. Taking the blame. Fixing others’ mistakes. An in between role of protection from a higher power.
(She thought about that a little, checking on the trainees after a long day.)
It wasn’t all daydreams. She liked to be useful in the real world, where she could.
Now, Lalia was eighteen. Her boyfriend, Tyler, was also eighteen.
She slid in next to him on the bus home; he looped a tight arm around her shoulders. “Hey. How was Stats?”
She’d seen him last in fifth period; sixth, Statistics, was another test she could not imagine higher than a B minus on, though she hadn’t gotten results yet. She shook her head, leant against him.
She was a near straight A student. It wasn’t so much lack of effort in Statistics but that she had stopped understanding math or heavy science homework near the start of high school, and understanding that about herself made anxiety muddle her answers even when she tried, and gave her less motivation to try at times, the perfectionist who dropped what she wasn’t good at.
Tyler gave her a little squeeze. “Hey. You’ll do better next time.” That, audible if anyone could hear anything over the ruckus of the bus, was a boyfriend’s reassurance. The, “I mean that,” in her ear, was more. She had promised not only her parents a better Statistics grade, but also Tyler. They had come to a certain set of agreements in the Statistics department, one of which was that she would get an eighty-five or better on this test. If not, there were consequences. Delivered with love, but consequences. It wasn’t adversarial; contrary to her daydreams, in the real world it was better to have a partner who actually wanted you to do better, not an excuse to punish you. He helped her study. He checked her homework. He made sure she ate lunch on test days, not skipping due to anxious nausea and then having no energy in sixth period. He stroked her hair when she worried about it too much.
(Later, when she told Ezri she had never been in such a relationship before, Ezri had pointed out to her upon later extrapolation that it didn’t seem entirely true. It wasn’t that every relationship she’d been in was the picture of vanilla, but Tyler wasn’t her Dominant, let alone her Owner, but… a boyfriend who, in his own way, just wanted to help any way he could. Though they were very honest with each other, whether it was that they would probably go separate ways for college or that Lalia also liked girls, or their other proclivities. The sex was pleasantly rough, but they didn’t really have scenes and there wasn’t too much to it.)
She got a C plus on the Statistics test and Tyler followed through on his promise—not a threat, as in the early daydreams, but a promise. He stayed, after, and stroked her hair, and went over the test corrections with her with patience.
Her father asked about the test at dinner, and she squirmed but admitted to the grade honestly. Her parents went through phases of caring more or less about her grades, from not noticing semester report cards to interrogating her about every test. Even when they cared, though, there was no promise and no followthrough, just demands. And they never seemed to care much about anything else, like what she was reading or where her and Tyler had gone on their date or if she thought maybe she should see a therapist. (She shouldn’t have asked about the last one. The quarterly birth control bill was easy to hide, but frequent enough therapy would’ve been harder. Still, asking had not gone well.)
“Well, why would you do that?” To the test. To getting a C plus.
“I wasn’t trying to.” Tyler’s hand on her thigh under the table was soothing.
“Well, you should’ve tried harder. Do you think you’re going to get into any good colleges with those kinds of grades?”
“I—”
“—Your father’s right,” her mother cut in. “You haven’t been any good in math in years now; I don’t know what got into you.”
It was as if math got progressively harder as you went. “I—”
“You’re just not trying like you used to in middle school.”
“I got an A second semester last year,” she mumbled, which was true.
“That was just because that one teacher liked you for some reason. What was his name? Anyway.”
Strange that they knew he liked her but couldn’t remember his name. And he hadn’t liked her.
“It looks like you get it when Tyler’s here to help you and then whenever he’s not, I see you just staring at the textbook having one of those little tantrums you throw with all the breathing and tears and not getting anything done.”
“It’s called a panic attack.” Her voice was getting smaller and smaller.
“I don’t care what it’s called. I care that you pass math.”
“I still have a B in the class,” she whispered.
“Y’know,” said Tyler, who, according to Lalia’s parents, could do no wrong, strangely, “I did everything backwards and took Stats last year. Hard stuff. But second semester was way better. My mom said it was like a whole different class. Oh, by the way, she still wanted to ask you for that potato recipe?”
Distraction a little obvious, but successful.
After dinner, she volunteered to clean up as if it would compensate. Tyler helped. They were quiet, until she was drying dishes and the tears spilled over. He held her tightly. “I’m sorry,” she whispered over and over.
“Shh. Hey. I know. We did that part, remember?”
“I know.”
“And you are trying. No matter what they say. Okay?”
“Okay,” she whispered, and it wasn’t that she thought she wasn’t trying at all, but certainly not hard enough. Until her parents lost interest again. She ached to know what the pattern was. With Tyler, she knew what the pattern was. When she could stop feeling bad. She sniffled and drew back from him, went back to the dishes. At least, compensation or not, she could do something useful. She’d always taken comfort in that.
He sighed, and when they were done, said, “I gotta get home. You’ll be okay?”
She nodded.
“Call me, if you need me.” Not a suggestion.
“I will.”
He kissed her forehead, her lips. “Try to relax. Hey, didn’t you say that online author you liked posted something new?”
“Yeah.”
“Then go read that. And then get some sleep.” He ruffled her hair. Still not a suggestion. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
She did read it. For maybe twelve thousand words, she got lost in a world where rules were stringent but consistent, where usefulness was highly valued, where pain and pleasure mixed. She left an embarrassingly gushing review even for an anonymous one. The author did not respond at length to comments, fairly anonymous on their side, too, but Lalia read them again and again. She drifted off to sleep all but mentally reciting an earlier posting to herself.
Perhaps four miles away, Ezri Roderick shook her head a little, flustered, but pleased, at the latest feedback.
“I told you that people like your fiction,” said Clara, kneeling up to read the screen over her shoulder.
Ezri gave her a slight shove back into proper position. “You just want me to write more porn.”
Clara shrugged. “Time writing porn is time not spent living porn. And it wasn’t all porn. But I do think it’s fair to share a little with the rest of the world.”
“Well,” said Ezri, shutting the computer, “the rest of the world can wait.”