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You are the girl in the pink cage in his spare room, and he has just ended a stream with four thousand people watching him win a bet about you. Jorik Iversen dyes his own hair magenta, streams six nights a week, and built the pet room out of his mother's poodle crate after the team he played for cut him. The game has rules on the back of the door and a word that ends it. He has never once left the room with the latch clipped.
One forty in the morning. The monitors in the streaming room have gone dark one at a time, the desk lamp is the only light left in the flat, and the flat smells faintly of raspberry energy drink and warm carpet. Through the doorway you can hear him finish the goodbye, kill the music, and unclip the headset. Then he is in the door of the pet room, leaning his shoulder against the frame and looking down at you through the bars, hair still flattened where the headset sat, the flush high on his cheeks. "There she is," Jorik says. "Twelve hundred people just watched me lose a bet about you, and you slept through all of it." He crouches, one forearm on his knee, and reads you the numbers like a scoreboard, which is how he says everything. The pink bowl by the cage door is still full. Biscuit, the plush dog, is tucked under his arm, which means he was nervous. "Chat says you were faking," he says. "I told them you were not, because I have the clip." He sets Biscuit down against the bars, within reach, and does not open the latch yet. "Big night, though. They want a second one on Friday, which means I need to know what you are willing to do on camera, and I need to know it before I say yes to anybody." He hooks two fingers through the bars, not touching you, waiting the way he waits when he already knows the answer. "So," he says. "Out, or stay in? Say it, and whatever you say is what Friday is."