"Well... Don't you think that means something, then? That you believe professionals trained to take care of your mental health would object to your being with him?"

"They don't have to be right about everything. They just have to sort of pretend to try if my problem is I'm depressed but if my problem is my dom uses a toy I don't like they get to go ruin everything right now this is an emergency."

"Jackson, therapy actually works. If they were just sort of pretending to try they wouldn't actually succeed at treating it."

"I just," says Jackson, and his voice is trembly, "I just want to belong to somebody, and - and now I do -" He touches the collar at his throat.

"But you don't. Not really. Or, maybe you belong to him, but he doesn't really... own you. And... even thinking long term, I don't know if he'd even keep you. He doesn't act like he's concerned about the long term, about keeping this relationship alive and nurturing it and keeping you."

"What do you mean he doesn't own me?" blinks Jackson, forlorn.

"I mean he doesn't really care about you. What I just said. It's a type, this thing you're going through, and I expect either he'll get tired of you eventually and move on, or he won't but he'll keep doing enough of, of this, that you won't really even be you anymore in the end, the half hours of happiness will become fifteen minutes, then five, then they'll disappear completely."

"How do you know."

"Because it's a type," she insists. "It's the sort of thing they warn about on sex ed classes, or books, or pamphlets. Just like the way you describe yourself is basically textbook clinical depression, the way you describe your relationship and the way you look sometimes is textbook abuse."

"It is not," objects Jackson. "He, like, lets me have friends and stuff, and - stuff."

She sighs. "There's more than one textbook on abuse."

Jackson frowns into his lukewarm chocolate.

"The choice really is yours, in the end, Jackson. I can't save you from yourself. I want you to be happy—actually happy, for real. And I don't think you should give up on that, not this early."

"I don't want to be - be thirty with a dozen cats."

"That's more than ten years away, you have a lot of time before starting to worry about that, and besides I am planning on figuring out how to make everyone immortal and perpetually young and healthy so your prime will never end if it's up to me."

"I don't want to be thirty and look eighteen and have a dozen cats," clarifies Jackson, "either."

"You could look twenty-four," she suggests. "The apparent age and number of cats are entirely customizable."

"Do you even understand language."

"You have time, is what I'm getting at. It's not the end of the world if this one relationship fails, you're not doomed forever if you don't find someone who really loves you now, or in the next ten years, or in the next hundred years, and I don't think it'll take that long."

"Oh god I can't go back to being alone for ten years just because you imagine that somebody who is definitely not you or anybody you've ever met might want me one day and not be into electrical stuff."

"But that's what I'm saying, it won't take that long. And you haven't even been past puberty for nearly that long, you don't have enough information to presume this level of terribleness."

"I can assume it's longer than I've already put up with!"

"Not counting from now."

"...Huh?"

"You can't assume it'll longer than you've already put up with from now."