Lights out

I’d dropped out instead of switching with him. It felt like my time at school had run its course by then, and none of my professors could teach me anything else about hacking. The rest of my education lay online, and I studied endlessly until I felt ready to enter the job market. I’d applied for only one position – the one I currently held – by hacking into a huge media conglomerate and showing the company I now worked for how I’d gotten past their defenses.

They paid me a king’s ransom to keep one step ahead of emerging cyber threats, enough that I bought the most expensive amateur camera on the market without blinking, and our rent was paid off for the next two years.

I heard a drawer slam shut in Tyler’s room, and I took that as my sign to stand. My phone was on my work desk, and I was itching to get it within my grasp. I needed to pull up the video Aly sent and see if I could find her in the comment section. She had a mask kink. Or, at the very least, she was into it enough that she wanted someone to wear one for her.

So far, I’d ignored every single DM asking me to meet with people IRL and play out their fantasies. They were strangers online. They could be anyone, and I didn’t want to show up at some octogenarian’s house when I’d been expecting a hot twentysomething.

Aly wasn’t a stranger. I knew her. Better than I should have, sure, but thanks to Dad’s genetic contributions, boundaries were hard for me.

She had been in my house, the one sanctuary I had left. The need to protect my identity and keep Tyler and me safe was strong enough that I did FBI-level research into anyone Tyler invited over. Thankfully, he understood my compulsion and told me ahead of time when he pla

I snagged my phone off the desk and sat on my bed as I pulled up my account. The video Aly screenshotted was one of my most popular, with over 3.4 million views. The downside was that I had thousands of comments to look through if I had any hope of finding her in them, and even that was a crapshoot. Most people were pretty anonymous online. It’d be just my luck that Aly was one of them. I wished I could write a code to look for her, but this part of the job required manual intervention, so I settled back against my headboard and started scrolling, glancing at names and avatars for any sign of her.

An hour passed before I sat bolt upright, thumb hovering over the username “aly.aly.oxen.free”. Holy shit, was it her? I clicked on her profile, and, of course, it was private. I leaned in, squinting. The avatar was a close-up photo of a dark-haired woman. I screenshotted it, then used the AI software I had loaded onto my phone to blow it up and fix the resolution issues until I was staring at a crystal-clear picture of Aly, sure that it was her.

Just to be a hundred percent certain, I logged into my computer and hacked her account, using every trick in the book to cover my tracks and keep her from being flagged. The IP address she used to create her account was local, and when I did some more digging, I discovered that it originated from the block she lived on.

I’d found her. Aly not only had a mask kink, but she’d liked one of my videos enough to leave the comment, “Sir, I’m at work. How dare you?”

Had she left any others?

I logged into my account on my computer and created a few lines of code that would search for her in my comment sections. There were so many returns my head started to spin. She’d liked and saved and commented on almost every single one.

All the blood in my body went straight to my dick, tenting my sweatpants. This wasn’t good. I shouldn’t be sitting there lusting after my roommate’s ex…whatever she was. Not his girlfriend. They’d never been serious enough to define their relationship, and Tyler had seen other people at the same time as Aly. That meant this wasn’t breaking any bro code, right? Only several privacy laws and a whole bunch of societal norms, but I’d never really cared much about that. Tyler was the only friend I had. I didn’t want to risk losing him over a woman, even if that woman had been plaguing my dreams since I’d first laid eyes on her.

What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him, I thought. And it wasn’t like I’d done anything yet anyway. What was the harm in a little light online stalking? She’d done the same to me.

My eyes landed on the first comment that my search returned.

“Is this video why I randomly woke up at 2 am? Was I summoned here?”

I gri

I kept reading. Her comments ranged from light-hearted to downright lascivious.

“I would like to thank the algorithm for bringing me here.”

“I’m on season six of this video.”

“Well, this has me feeling feral far too early in the morning.”

“The way I would CRAWL to him.”

“Boom. There went my ovaries.”

“This is the horror movie I would die in. Everyone else would be ru

I pushed back from my computer desk. Oh, this was bad. Because that last comment hit me harder than the rest, and now all I could picture was chasing her down and fucking her when I finally caught her.

Was this how it started? Just a quasi-i

My dick instantly deflated, which I took as a good sign. I wasn’t turned on by the idea of seriously hurting Aly, so maybe I wasn’t as far gone as I’d always feared.

I rolled my chair back to my desk and read through the rest of what she’d written, which took a while because there were over a hundred search returns.

Less than a minute passed before my dick was standing straight for her again. So many of her comments revolved around coming home and finding me waiting for her, and soon, my mind began to fill with thoughts of feeding into her fantasy.

What would happen if I actually broke into her house?

In reality, she’d either shoot my dumb ass or run away and call the cops, and then my entire life would blow up when I got arrested and the headlines started screaming that I was just like my dad.

But I wasn’t living in reality right now. My thoughts were pure fantasy, and I couldn’t stop picturing myself breaking in and Aly responding exactly like she said she would. Crawling to me. Begging me to fuck her while I held a knife to her throat.

“This man is always coming onto my FYP and never on me, and that is a tragedy,” was probably my new favorite quote of all time.

I groaned and palmed my dick through my sweatpants. The things I would do to this woman if she let me. I’d play into every lustful dark thought she’d ever had. And I wouldn’t have to worry about her desire turning to terror beneath me because, with my face hidden, there wasn’t any risk of that. For once in my life, I could be free of the fear of discovery or recognition.

That thought turned me on almost as much as Aly did.

I leaned back in my chair and slid my hand into my boxers, gripping the base of my dick. What would it be like to break into her house? I knew I could do it. Along with hacking, I was pretty good at skulking around at night. I’d always been a night owl, which was especially true lately when there was less risk of anyone seeing me in the darkness than in daylight. I did my shopping at a twenty-four-hour grocery store. My workouts were saved for 2 a.m. when there wasn’t anyone in our apartment’s gym.

I stroked my hand up my dick as I imagined picking Aly’s lock. I’d learned how to do it as a teen so I could sneak into my therapist’s office and see what he’d written about me – a mistake because I wasn’t ready for what I’d found, but at least I’d learned a new skill in the process. I could dust it off now and put it to better use, slipping into Aly’s house in the dead of night while she was on shift at the hospital.

I rubbed my thumb over the head of my dick when I reached the top, coating it in precum before sliding my hand back down to grip my base again. My lids fell shut as I pictured Aly standing in her doorway, looking rumpled and tired after a long night, her eyes flashing wide with fear when she realized she wasn’t alone.

“Who’s there? What do you want?” I heard her call out in a quavering voice.

In my head, I pointed the knife at her in answer.

You.

She put her hands up. “Just take what you want and get out. Please don’t hurt me.”

I shook my head and tilted the knife tip toward the floor in an explicit command. She dropped to her knees like a good little girl. I strode toward her, watching her chest rise and fall as I approached. Her eyes moved from the knife to my shirtless torso, covered in blood, the black of her pupils inching out brown as her fear started to shift into lust.

I stopped above her, staring down at her upturned face, reveling in the vulnerability of her position. Oh, so carefully, I placed the tip of the knife beneath her chin and tilted her face up as I unzipped my fly and let my dick spring free. Her gaze lifted to the dark eye sockets of my mask for one breathless moment, and then her lips popped open, and she leaned forward, suctioning that luscious mouth around the head of my dick, and –

Oh, fuck, I was about to come.

I yanked a few tissues from the nearby box and got them down my pants just in time to soak them. The sight of Aly before me, afraid and horny at the same time? I wanted it. Bad. More than I’d wanted anything in a long time.

All I had to do was figure out a way to make it happen that didn’t end with my arrest.

Aly’s neighborhood was still lit up like Christmas, and that was, surprisingly, the biggest hurdle I had to face while pla

Clearly, the still-rational part of my brain had failed to get the rest of me to see reason because here I stood in the shadows by Aly’s back door, trying to catch my breath after triggering a mini street-wide blackout and sprinting behind her house to unscrew her rear floodlights before the power kicked back on.