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Stupid kink making me lust after a man who probably wanted to carve my skin off and make himself a pair of gloves out of it.
I grimaced at that image and took another sip of coffee. This whole situation was beyond frustrating. Did he want to hurt me, or didn’t he? And why had he chosen me, out of all the people in his comment sections, to single out? Did he live somewhere nearby? Had I met him offline somehow? Bumped into him in my favorite coffee shop or lifted weights next to him at the gym?
Even if I had, how had he found me online? He must have known my name and what I looked like if he was able to pick me out of his comments because I’d told no one, absolutely no one, about my mask kink IRL, and I wasn’t friends or following anyone I knew personally on my account either.
What happened after he found me? How had he gone from figuring out who I was to learning where I lived?
Most importantly, how did he get in here last night? None of my windows were broken or unlocked, I didn’t have a chimney for him to slither down, and my back door had a deadbolt that I kept locked from the inside. As far as I knew, he would have had to break it to get in. I’d checked last night, and there were no signs of forced entry. So that left the front door.
The power had cut off sometime during the night. Had he somehow triggered it and used the cover of darkness to sneak inside? No. It must have been a coincidence. He’d have to be a top-notch hacker to pull something like that off.
And to figure out everything else he had about me, now that I thought about it.
My phone was sitting face up on the table beside me. I eyed it warily. Was he somehow watching me through it even now? I shoved it behind my napkin holder, out of sight, just to be safe. I was in way over my head. I’d taken a few programming courses in high school and college. Enough to realize that a job in one of the computer science fields wasn’t for me. I had no idea what skills were needed to hack my phone or if it was even possible.
Wait a minute. Wasn’t Tyler’s roommate a computer genius? Could he answer my questions? Things might have been over between me and Tyler, but it wasn’t like it was ever serious between us or ended badly. I’d seen him at the gym the other afternoon, and he’d been nice enough, waving to me across the weight room and giving me a thumbs up when I hit a new max on my deadlift. Would it be weird to ask him if he would talk to his roommate for me? How would I even explain what I needed?
Hey, Tyler. It’s Aly. Don’t worry, I’m not still into you or anything. I just need your roommate to track down the man from that thirst trap I sent you.
I rolled my eyes. Yeah. That would go over well.
Maybe I’d be okay if I kept it vague and offered to pay the guy. I’d only met Josh once, so it wasn’t like he’d have any reason to do it out of friendship or the goodness of his heart.
My thoughts wandered back to that one meeting. The only details Tyler had told me about Josh were that he was a recluse with a fancy cybersecurity job. I’d expected him to be some reed-thin short guy with glasses, and yes, I was aware that meant I’d fallen for the Hollywood stereotype of what a “geek” looked like.
Josh taught me better. Because he was huge, at least 6’4”, and though he’d been wearing baggy gym pants and a sweatshirt the morning I bumped into him in their kitchen, there was no hiding the fact that the man was yoked. I’d only caught a glance at his profile – strong jaw, aquiline nose, the kind of thick, long lashes most women would kill for – but that one glimpse was enough to tell me Josh had heartbreaker-level good looks. He must have had Mediterranean blood in him because his skin had some olive in it, and his hair was just as dark as mine. Mom would have taken one look at him and said something inappropriate about him being a man who could give her strong Italian grandchildren.
He’d made me stand up straighter, instantly aware of the fact that I was wearing his roommate’s t-shirt, and he’d probably heard me fucking Tyler just a few hours earlier because we hadn’t been as quiet as we should have after splitting a bottle of wine over di
None of that mattered because I didn’t need Josh for his looks; I needed him for his brain. Would paying him be enough incentive to get him to help? And how much would I have to tell him about what I needed? Could I simply ask him to find someone for me without going into too much detail?
I needed Google to answer all these questions.
My fingers strayed toward my phone, but I hesitated, not trusting myself not to pull up my DMs again and obsess over the video the Faceless Man had sent me. Instead, I set my coffee down and went in search of my laptop.