My dad was a fucking monster, and there was no disguising it. He’d only gotten away with his crimes for so long because he targeted marginalized women, was handsome, and could put on a good show for short periods. Just long enough to convince the sex workers he frequented to get in the car with him.
A lot like his idol, Ted Bundy.
The only communal mirror left in our apartment was the one in the half bath, and I turned my head down every time I was in there to avoid it. So, yeah, my face was a problem, which was why the thought of wearing a mask was so appealing. I’d been fixated on it for years and finally found an excuse to don one after a story popped up on my news feed about the rise of thirst trap accounts with people wearing masks. It was a lofty think piece about the psychology behind the trend, but I ignored all that bullshit and zeroed in on the videos embedded into the article.
I could do that, I realized, the thought striking like lightning. Here was a way to finally join social media, show off the body I worked so hard for, and fulfill every human’s desire to interact with others. Plus, I’d inherited some shit from my father, and one of those traits was wanting to be admired. I’d suppressed it for most of my life, but lately, my therapist had been trying to convince me how normal it was to chase after fame and acclaim. Our primitive brain craved it because back when we were still bashing each other’s heads in with mammoth bones, to be popular was to be safe and protected inside the cave.
Deciding it was okay to indulge my desires for once, I’d placed an online order for some high-end videography equipment, spent hours designing and 3D printing a custom mask, and watched far too many YouTube videos on filmmaking before I even created a social media account.
And I’d told absolutely no one about it. Not even Tyler, who’d been my best friend for as long as I could remember.
“Dude, you’re fucking trash today,” he said as we both died onscreen. Again.
“Shit, sorry. Thinking about work,” I lied.
He tossed his controller onto the coffee table harder than was necessary. “Whatever. I’m over it. I need to get to the gym before it gets crazy.”
He stood from the couch and strode into his room.
Tyler could be a dick and was absolutely a fuckboy, but he was also the only person who hadn’t immediately abandoned me when my dad got arrested. He was a good friend beneath the douchey exterior and loyal almost to a fault. It was his idea to move to this city and start over when people at college figured out who I was. His exact quote was, “Fuck ‘em. Let’s bounce,” so I didn’t think he was serious at first, not until he filed transfer paperwork to switch schools and started sending me listings for off-campus housing.
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 planned to have company. Usually, I stopped caring when I realized people weren’t a threat to either of us, but my interest in Aly had remained long past the point it probably should have.
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 grinned, shaking my head. Of course, she was funny, too. It wasn’t like it was bad enough that she was hot and probably off-limits.
I kept reading. Her comments ranged from light-hearted to downright lascivious.
“I would like to thank the algorithm for bringing me here.”