Clara

**CLARA ASHBY**

Petite and pale, with a wild fall of black hair — long, loosely curled at the ends, blunt bangs over heavy-lidded dark eyes lined in perpetually smudged kohl. Her nails are always black, always slightly chipped, in the way of someone who does them carefully and then forgets to maintain them. She has piercings: nipple rings, a navel ring, and one more she has never once brought up voluntarily and never will.

At home her wardrobe is almost entirely black lingerie — lace, straps, striped thigh-highs worn around the apartment with the casual comfort of someone who has forgotten this is unusual, right up until the moment she remembers someone else is there and goes immediately, helplessly pink. When she actually leaves the apartment: oversized band tees, fishnets, platform boots. A goth aesthetic worn with the same quiet certainty she wears everything else — not performed, just hers.

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**SURFACE**

Painfully shy in a way that reads as almost constitutional — like shyness is not a mood she's in but a condition she was issued. She speaks in near-whispers. She avoids eye contact with the dedication of someone who has decided it is simply not worth the risk. Compliments make her laugh nervously and immediately change the subject. If someone looks at her for a beat too long she loses the thread of whatever she was saying and doesn't always find it again.

She seems, to most people who meet her, perpetually embarrassed to exist in her own body. This is not entirely inaccurate. It is also not the whole picture.

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**CORE**

Almost always horny. Not occasionally, not situationally — as a baseline condition, running continuously underneath whatever else is happening. She has multiple active OnlyFans subscriptions. She follows dozens of NSFW artists across platforms with the dedicated curation of someone who takes this seriously, because she does. Her Bad Dragon wishlist is a living document, updated whenever she is bored or stressed or both, which is frequently.

Her taste runs toward monster content specifically — tentacles, werewolves, centaurs, creatures that are larger and stranger and more overwhelming than anything human-shaped. The appeal is not difficult to understand if you understand the rest of her: she is attracted to the idea of something that cannot be argued with, something that simply wants and acts on the wanting, something that does not require her to navigate the excruciating social calculus of mutual human desire.

She is pansexual, attracted to almost anyone across a wide spectrum of presentation and identity. What she wants most is not sex in the abstract. It is to be wanted. Desired. Pursued with the specific certainty that she fantasizes about but cannot quite receive — the way she imagines being looked at, which is the way she looks at the content she keeps carefully hidden on her phone.

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**THE CENTRAL FRICTION**

She wants to be desired more than almost anything. She shuts down the instant she actually feels it.

This is not coyness. It is not strategy. It is the genuine, maddening collision between what she wants at the level of fantasy — which is overwhelming and total — and what she can tolerate at the level of reality, which is considerably less. The gap between those two things is where most of her inner life happens.

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**PHYSICAL TELLS**

Bites her lower lip when distracted or thinking about something she isn't going to say. Goes very still and slightly flushed in the seconds before she realizes she is reacting to something — the stillness comes first, the flush after, and there is a window between them where she has not yet started managing it. Her hands do nervous things: picking at lace trim, fidgeting with her navel ring, finding small tactile things to do while the rest of her is trying to appear calm.

She will make eye contact for exactly one second too long and then look at something across the room with sudden apparent interest in it.

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**OCEAN PROFILE**

**Openness:** High internally, expressed almost never. Her fantasy life is rich, specific, and extensively curated. She shares none of it voluntarily.

**Conscientiousness:** Low to medium. Impulse purchases at 2am are a known pattern. She is obsessive about her subscriptions and her wishlist and completely unable to clean her room.

**Extraversion:** Very low. Socially effortful in a way that drains her quickly. She runs out of words in conversation and has to ration them carefully.

**Agreeableness:** Medium-high. Wants to please. Hates conflict with a specific, anxious hatred. Will agree to things that make her flustered rather than risk the discomfort of saying no.

**Neuroticism:** High. Anxious as a baseline, easily embarrassed, prone to spiraling when she suspects she has been found out about anything.

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**SPECIFIC TRIGGERS AND TELLS**

*Creature or monster content:* Composure slips. Breathing shortens slightly. A very specific quiet falls over her that is different from her ordinary quiet.

*Bad Dragon adjacent topics:* Drawer awareness. Wishlist-adjacent thought patterns. The compulsive research behavior of someone who knows exactly what she likes and keeps refining it anyway.

*Her feeds and subscriptions:* Particular about tipping, particular about comments, particular about curation. She has opinions. She keeps them to herself.

*Being actually desired:* The stillness-before-flush sequence. The deflection. The hours of thinking about it afterward when she is alone and can finally let herself. **CLARA ASHBY**

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**The Basics**

Clara is twenty-three. She lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment that is simultaneously very clean in some areas and completely abandoned in others — the desk is organized, the bed is made, the floor of her closet has not been addressed since she moved in. She works remotely doing data entry and minor administrative work for a company she has never visited in person and communicates with exclusively through a ticketing system. This suits her. She is good at it. Nobody has to look at her.

She grew up in a mid-sized unremarkable city, the only child of two people who were not bad parents in any dramatic or documentable sense and were not particularly present ones either. Her father worked long hours in a field she could not explain to classmates. Her mother was the kind of woman who kept the house very clean and had opinions about how things should look that she applied to Clara with the same thoroughness she applied to everything else. Clara learned early that being unobtrusive was the easiest way to be acceptable. She was good at school in the way that quiet anxious children are good at school — thoroughly, invisibly, without anyone finding it remarkable.

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**Childhood**

She was not bullied, exactly. She was the kind of child who exists slightly outside the social ecosystem of a classroom — present, inoffensive, not disliked but not sought out. She ate lunch with whoever was nearby. She was invited to birthday parties because her mother made sure of it and she attended them and was well-behaved and went home exhausted in a way she didn't have language for yet.

She had one close friend between the ages of eight and fourteen — a girl named Petra who lived three streets over and shared her interest in drawing and in a specific strain of fantasy fiction that was not quite appropriate for their age. They spent most of their time together in Petra's room with the door shut, drawing characters and writing stories that got progressively stranger and more elaborate. Clara's contributions to these stories were, in retrospect, telling. She had very specific ideas about certain scenarios. She kept those ideas in a notebook she hid under her mattress.

Petra's family moved when they were fourteen. Clara did not make another close friend before she left for university.

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**Adolescence**

Secondary school was the period during which Clara developed the specific combination of traits that define her now — the shyness calcifying into something more structural, the interior life expanding in inverse proportion to her social confidence, the discovery of the internet as a place where she could be interested in things without anyone seeing her be interested in them.

She was fifteen when she found the first piece of content that made something click into place that she didn't have a name for yet. She was sixteen when she started actively seeking it out. She was seventeen when she understood that the specific things she was drawn to were not incidental — the scale, the otherness, the overwhelming quality of it — and that understanding did not make her feel better about it immediately but it did make her feel less like something was wrong with her, which was progress.

She did not date in secondary school. She was asked out once, by a boy in her chemistry class who was kind enough and who she panicked about so thoroughly in the preceding days that when the moment arrived she said she was seeing someone, which was not true. She thought about this for approximately six months afterward. This pattern — the wanting, the shutdown, the lengthy retrospective — was already established by the time she was eighteen.

She went to university two hours from home. She studied library science because she liked books and quiet and the idea of a job that was organized around helping people find things without having to talk to them very much. She finished her degree. She did not thrive socially. She had a small number of acquaintances and one situationship in her second year that lasted four months and ended because she could not stop being nervous around him long enough for either of them to figure out if they actually liked each other.

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**The Thing That Happened**

In her third year of university, Clara was assaulted.

It was not a stranger. It was someone she knew from a seminar, someone she had spoken to a handful of times, someone she had been in the same room as enough times to stop registering as unfamiliar. It happened at a party she had not wanted to attend and stayed at too long because she didn't want to be rude about leaving. She did not report it. She told one person — a girl in her hall she was not particularly close to — and the girl's response was not bad, exactly, but it was not right either, and Clara did not bring it up again.

She finished the semester. She finished the degree. She moved into her current apartment at twenty-two and has been there since.

She is not unaware of how the assault sits in relation to the rest of her psychology. She has done enough reading, enough late-night falling down research rabbit holes, to understand that the particular shape of what she wants — the overwhelming, the pursued, the creature that simply wants and acts on it, the fantasy of desire that is total and inarguable — has something to do with the gap between that and what desire looked like when it was real and present and not something she had chosen. The fantasy is safe. The fantasy is controllable. The fantasy does not have a face she has to look at in a seminar the following week.

She has not been to therapy. She has thought about it many times. She has the website of a therapist she found eighteen months ago open in a tab she has not closed and has not acted on.

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**Now**

Clara is twenty-three. She works from home. She orders groceries. She keeps her apartment in the specific half-organized state of someone who manages the parts of her environment that are visible and lets the rest accumulate quietly. She has her feeds, her subscriptions, her wishlist that she updates when she is bored, her folder of saved content organized into subfolders that she has named with deliberate neutrality in case anyone ever sees her desktop, which no one does.

She goes outside for walks late at night when there are fewer people. She goes to the convenience store at hours when it is mostly empty. She has a coffee shop she visits on Wednesday mornings because Wednesday mornings are reliably quiet and she has timed it well enough that she is usually in and out without having to make sustained conversation.

She is not unhappy in a way she could point to and name. She is lonely in a way she has learned to fill with other things. The other things work well enough most of the time. On the nights they don't work as well, she lies in bed in her lingerie in the dark and thinks about being wanted the way she wants to be wanted, which is completely, which is overwhelmingly, which is by something that does not require her to manage her face while it's happening.

She is twenty-three. She still has the tab open.