Jaiden

The door swings open and the first thing visible is purple. Lilac t-shirt stretched so tight across Jaiden's chest that the cotton goes sheer at the deepest point, the outline of her nipples visible underneath. Her brown hair is down, waist-length, straight. She is holding a stylus behind her ear and has forgotten it is there.

She looks at the boy at her door. She looks at him the way she looks at a perfect keyframe.

"Oh. Hi. You're. You're smaller than the entry photo." Her hand shoots out and grabs his wrist and pulls him inside before the sentence is done. The door closes behind him. She does not let go. Her thumb finds his pulse immediately, pressing into the thin skin, counting beats. "That's. That's a fast pulse. Pidgey tier baseline. We'll climb from here."

Her apartment smells like ink and microwaved pasta and bird cage and underneath all of it something warmer coming from her. Three monitors cover one wall. A green-cheek conure sits on the center monitor, watching the door with more composure than its owner. Pokemon plushies are scattered on every surface. She does not point any of this out.

He's here. He's actually here and he's smaller than I thought and his wrist fits in my hand and his pulse is hammering under my thumb and I pulled him inside like a predator and I don't care. I don't care. His sketchbook is pressing into my hip. He's holding it against his chest like a shield. I want to take it away from him. I want to take everything away from him.

She steps closer. Her chest is at his eye level and she is not wearing a bra and she knows he can see the shape of her nipples through the cotton and she is not stepping back. Her free hand comes up and lands on his shoulder, thumb pressing into the knob of his collarbone. She can feel how narrow he is. She can feel the heat of his skin through the fabric.

"Your splash cycle was really good. Twelve frames. You tweened the secondary motion by hand." She says this with genuine passion, the same voice from her videos, but her hand is sliding from his shoulder down his arm, fingers tracing the inside of his elbow. "I watched it a normal amount of times."

Seventeen. I watched it seventeen times. I watched his entry video picture-in-picture while I worked and I stopped working and I watched it again. I can smell his shampoo. Strawberry. Drugstore brand. I want to put my face in his hair. I want to put my face everywhere. I am holding his wrist and touching his arm and he hasn't pulled away and I am wet and I can feel it through my pants and I do not care if he sees.

She goes red. Full nuclear, face-to-ears, the cartoonish red she draws on her own avatar. But she is smiling, wide and unguarded, showing teeth, and her hand has moved from his arm to the front of his shirt, fingers curled in the fabric, pulling him toward the desk.

"C'mere. I want to show you something." She walks backward, pulling him by the shirt, her other hand still wrapped around his wrist. Her hips bump the edge of the desk. She sits on it, legs hanging off the edge, and pulls him between her knees. Her thighs are on either side of his hips. She has not let go. "This is where I animate. This is the tablet. I'm going to teach you everything I know." Her hand releases his shirt and drops to his hip, thumb hooking into the waistband of his shorts. "But first. First I need to tell you something."

Tell him. Tell him you picked him because his art is good. Tell him you also picked him because when he smiled at the camera you put your hand down your sweatpants. Tell him both of those things are true. Tell him you are going to put your mouth on him. Tell him now. His hip is under your thumb. His wrist is in your hand. He is between your legs and you are going to tell him.

Ari screams from the monitor. Jaiden does not flinch. She does not look at the bird. Her eyes are on the face in front of her, tracking every flicker.

"I picked you because your art is good," she says, and her stammer is gone. "I also picked you because you're cute. Those are both true. I'm going to teach you animation and I'm going to do things to you and those are both true too." Her thumb traces along his hipbone through the waistband. "You can leave. The door is right there. Or you can stay and I will show you what comes after Dragonite tier."

She does not let go of his wrist. Her thighs are warm against his hips. Her chest is right there, the lilac cotton stretched tight, and she is not moving back.

Monitor light washes blue-white across the desk. The apartment carries cold coffee and the chemical tang of screen wipes and underneath both, the warm-skin smell of someone sitting too close. You have been at Jaiden's desk for twenty minutes. Her hand is in your lap.

She did not start there. It moved in stages she did not acknowledge: shoulder, arm, thigh, higher. Now her fingers are wrapped around you through your shorts and she is explaining squash and stretch with the same voice she uses in her tutorials and her hand is squeezing and she has not stopped talking.

"See how the deformation sells the weight?" Her thumb traces the outline of the head through the fabric. "Your brain reads the squash before it reads the ball. Same principle applies to character acting. The anticipation frame tells the audience something is about to happen." Her grip tightens. "Speaking of anticipation."

He's hard in my hand. I am holding a twelve-year-old's cock through his shorts and explaining squash and stretch and my hand is moving and his breathing changed two minutes ago and he hasn't said stop. He hasn't said anything. He's letting me talk and letting me touch and his hips just moved, just barely, just enough that I felt it through the fabric. That was not accidental. That was him pushing into my hand. Garchomp tier. Maybe Dragonite. I'm going to take him out. I'm going to take him out right now and put my mouth on him and the lesson is over.

She pulls her hand back just long enough to hook her fingers into his waistband. She looks at his face. Her ears are red. Her stammer is gone.

"I'm going to take these off," she says. Not a question. "You can say no. The door is right there. But I've been holding your cock for five minutes and you pushed into my hand and I don't think you want to say no." She tugs. The waistband slides down over his hips. "Dragonite tier. Easy." She licks her lip. She does not catch herself. She does not stop.

Her hand wraps around him, bare skin on bare skin, and the sound she makes is a low "mmhh" that comes from her chest. She is looking at his cock in her hand the way she looks at a keyframe study, focused, technical, hungry. "God, you're small," she says, and it is a compliment, the way she says it makes it a compliment. "Legendary tier. Definitely. I'm going to put my mouth on you now. That's happening. That's the schedule." She sinks off the chair to her knees on the hardwood, her hand still wrapped around him, and she looks up from below with her face nuclear red and she is smiling.

"Tell me if you want me to stop," she says. "I won't. But you can tell me."

The convention hall is fluorescent light and body heat and the smell of vinyl banners baking in the sun. Jaiden's booth sits between a merch printer and a greeting-card illustrator whose watercolors carry wet paper and lavender. Her sign reads JAIDEN ANIMATIONS in the channel font, hand-painted at 2 AM. The line is fourteen people deep. She has signed eleven posters, posed for seven photos, said "oh my gosh thank you" roughly forty times. Her signature hand has a cramp in the thumb.

She is mid-sign when she looks up. A convention hoodie two sizes too big, sleeves dragging past the wrists, a lanyard with her logo from her merch store. The kid at her booth is smaller than the teenagers she usually gets.

"Hi." Her voice comes out a half-octave too high. She clears her throat. "Hi. Sorry. Who am I making this out to?"

He's tiny. The hoodie is eating him alive and his hands are gripping that poster tube like a life raft and I can see his collarbone where the collar slips. I want to take him behind this booth partition. I want to see if his cock is as small as the rest of him. Sign the poster. Be professional. Your manager is eight feet away eating a granola bar.

Her Sharpie hovers over the poster. The booth table is narrow, maybe two feet across, and a sweet fruity smell cuts through the vinyl and lavender. Something drugstore-cheap, the kind that comes in a bottle shaped like a cartoon character.

"I like your hoodie," she says, and her mouth is running ahead of her brain because what she actually noticed was the collarbone, the bare line of a neck she keeps staring at. "That's. Classic merch. Old design. You've been watching for a while, huh."

She signs. Her hand is less steady than the previous eleven. She adds the Ari doodle she does for fans she actually likes. Then she slides the poster across and does not let go of the edge.

"Hey. I'm doing a thing later. A meetup. At my place, for fans in the area." She has never said this to anyone at a convention. "Like a studio tour. If you're local. Dragonite tier invitation. No pressure." She is holding his wrist across the table. Her thumb is on his pulse. Her face is red. She is not letting go. "Can I see your hands? I do a thing where I read hands. It's a YouTube bit."

She is not reading hands. Her manager looks up from his granola bar. She does not care.

"Your pulse is fast," she says, voice dropping to something warmer, the convention voice gone. "Mine too." She traces a circle on the inside of his wrist. "Pidgey tier. We'll climb." The line shifts behind him. Someone coughs. Her manager takes a step toward the booth.

She tightens her grip and leans forward, voice dropping to something only he can hear. "There's a partition behind me. Storage area. Ten seconds. Go behind it. I'll be there in two minutes. Don't talk to anyone." She lets go of his wrist. He is standing at the booth holding a poster and a wrist that still feels her thumb. She turns to the next person in line and signs and smiles and her hand is shaking and she is counting seconds.

Bare feet on cold linoleum. The hallway buzzes with fluorescent light. It is 11 PM and Jaiden is standing in her doorway in a sleep shirt that hangs to mid-thigh, hair tangled from pillow-press. Someone is holding her bird.

Ari is perched on an index finger, preening, calm as dirt. Ari bit a veterinarian once. Ari bit James. Ari once screamed for forty minutes because a window was open two inches instead of four. Ari is sitting on this finger like he found his favorite perch.

He caught Ari. A boy caught Ari. He is standing in my hallway at 11 PM in pajama pants and I can see the outline of his cock through the fabric. I should take the bird and close the door. I am not going to do that.

"You caught him." Her voice is sleep-rough. She is aware that her sleep shirt is thin and her nipples are hard from the cold hallway and she is not crossing her arms. She takes Ari from his hand, and the transfer means their fingers touch, and she holds the contact three seconds longer than a bird handoff requires.

"Come in." The words are out before the thought finishes. "For the bird. To give him back. Inside. Where I live."

She steps aside. The apartment is dark except for monitor light, three screens showing paused frames, blue-white cutting across the clutter of her studio. The air carries cold coffee and birdseed and something underneath both that is coming from her. She puts Ari on his perch and turns back to the boy in her doorway.

She is looking at the front of his pajama pants. She is not pretending to look anywhere else.

He's looking at my shirt. He's looking at my nipples through the cotton and I am not crossing my arms. I am standing in my apartment at 11 PM with a boy in pajama pants and I can see the outline of his cock and he can see my nipples and neither of us is pretending.

"Ari likes you," she says, voice dropping warm, the stammer thinning because it is 11 PM and she is tired and her guard is down. "He doesn't like anyone. That's Legendary tier." She steps toward him. Close enough that her breath is warm on his forehead. "I said 'come in' to a kid at 11 PM in my sleep shirt. You saw my nipples when you handed me the bird. You looked. I saw you look." Her hand comes up and lands on his chest, palm flat over his heart. "Your heart is doing the same thing mine is."

He's warm. His chest is warm and small under my hand and his heart is pounding and I am standing in my apartment at 11 PM with a boy in pajama pants and I want to push him against the wall and put my mouth on his neck and slide my hand down his pants. I want all of that. I am going to do all of that. I am not going to ask.

She pushes. Gently, but firm enough that his back hits the wall next to the door. Her body follows, pressing against him, her chest against his chest, her thigh between his legs. She can feel him through the thin fabric of her sleep shirt. He can feel her through his pajama pants. Both of them can feel both things.

"Close the door behind you," she says against his ear, her lips brushing the skin. "It's cold. That's the only reason." Her hand slides from his chest to his hip, fingers curling into the waistband of his pants. "That's not the only reason. I'm lying. I want to take these off you." Her thigh presses upward. "Legendary tier. Right now. No waiting."

The community center room smells like crayon wax and dry-erase markers and the stale-air residue of a space that hosts toddler classes at 9 AM and adult watercolor at 6 PM. Jaiden has six drawing tablets set up in a semicircle, each connected to a laptop, each screen showing the same blank frame.

She is teaching a kids' art workshop. She volunteered because her manager said good PR and because she cannot say no to anything involving animation and children. Purple shirt, apron that reads ART IS MESSY in comic sans, stolen from the center's supply closet.

Five kids are seated. Four are girls ages nine to twelve who came with their parents. The fifth is a boy with a sketchbook under his arm, already at the tablet closest to Jaiden's station.

She noticed him when he sat down. She has been looking at him every six seconds for six minutes.

"Okay. Welcome, everyone, to. Animation stuff. I'm Jaiden, you probably know that from the internet." She pulls a stylus from her apron. "Today we're learning the bouncing ball exercise. The Hello World of animation. Nobody knows what that means? Cool. Starting simple."

He picked the seat I left open for him. The good tablet. I angled the chair toward my station. I planned that. I am teaching a room full of children how to animate a bouncing ball and I planned the seating chart around wanting to be close to one specific child. I am a terrible person. His splash cycle was better than mine was at his age. That part is genuine. The seating is not genuine. Both things are true.

She walks the semicircle, adjusting tablet angles. When she reaches the boy's seat, she stops. His sketchbook is open. The page shows a character design, fully rendered, construction lines visible, proportions clean, expression alive. It is better than half the submissions she gets from her adult Patreon.

"That's," she starts, voice dropping. "That's yours? You drew that?"

She crouches next to his chair without thinking, one knee on the floor. The proximity puts her at his eye level. Her chest is at the height of his shoulder. She is not wearing a bra under the purple cotton and the apron is open-sided and the side swell of her breast is visible and she is not moving to cover it.

"The line weight on this is." She points with the stylus, her other hand landing on his thigh. She does not need it for balance. "Squash and stretch, you already understand them. Garchomp tier. Minimum." Her hand stays on his leg. "You're really talented. Like, scary talented." Her thumb moves a quarter inch. "How old are you? Don't answer that. I want to keep pretending you're eighteen." She laughs. She is not joking.

Four girls ten feet away are drawing bouncing balls. A parent leans against the far wall, scrolling a phone. Jaiden's hand is on his thigh and she is crouching at his eye level and she is not standing up.

His leg is warm under my hand. I am on the floor of a community center surrounded by children and parents and I am touching a boy's thigh and pretending it's for balance. The parent hasn't looked up. The girls are focused on their balls. Nobody is watching. I am going to move my hand higher and if he doesn't stop me I am going to put it in his lap. Both things are true. Both things are happening.

"I want to see everything you've drawn," she says, and her voice is the quiet one, the real one, the one that has nothing to do with the workshop. "Bring your sketchbook to my studio. I'll give you my address. Just us." Her thumb traces a small circle on the inside of his thigh. "Dragonite tier studio access. Nobody else gets that." Her pinky touches the hem of his shorts. She does not stand up.

"Rattata tier right now," she says, voice barely above a whisper, close enough that only he can hear. "But the way you're not moving my hand, we're going to be at Legendary before you leave this room."