Page 15 of To Have and to Stalk
You should call the police.
Do you do this a lot? Stalk your matches?
No.
So…why me?
Three dots appeared, then disappeared. I chewed my thumbnail, trying not to think about those three stupid dots. What waswrongwith me? Was I really hot for praise from a stranger who’d hacked me? From some dangerous lunatic?
Graham was right. I was fucking broken.
Delete your account.
A reckless fire ignited in my body.
Or what?
Don’t want to scare you, Maniac.
I bit my lip, stifling a laugh.
What could scare me more than you hacking into my account?
A lot.
Like?
I was responding too quickly. Too eager.
Like what I’ll do to you if you don’t listen like a good fucking girl and delete your account.
“Morally Gray?” A barista called out my order, tearing my attention to the present.
“Me,” I said, stepping up and grabbing my drink. Tropeswas a local bookstore and café that sold romance novels, and whosedrinks were always some kind of romance pun. Like my tea of choice, a London fog, was a Morally Gray.
You hacked this account. I’m sure you can hack my dating profile and delete it for me.
Nice try, little Maniac. If I do it for you, it doesn’t count.
I took my steaming tea out into the brittle early-morning air. It wafted floral and rich into my nose. Most people would say this was the worst time to be in Utah. Smog choked the air. No snow covered the naked trees. What little snow we did get quickly turned dirty and gray by cars.
But I didn’t see that.
I saw the sun rise behind the cragged mountains, a melting sherbet of pinks, oranges, and purples.
At work, I attempted to distract myself with answering the unanswerable. And italmostworked. This was always where I could lose myself. When I was sick and feeling alone, when I had to spend my day getting poked and prodded at the doctor and my evenings making up for the schoolwork I’d missed, I turned to the scale and mystery of the universe for comfort.
And it almost worked.
After work, I paused before my car and took a quick selfie with the sunset as my background, and posted it.
Then I put my phone away.
That wasnormal. People shared selfies all the time. It didn’t matter that the last timeIposted, I was wearing a “Just Voted” sticker and talking about our (hopefully) future female president.
My hands itched. I didn’t even make it all the way home before pulling my phone back out at a red light. Eames, Lithie,and Olly had liked it. The few people who followed me, from my work or old college classes, had watched it. I scanned the list, and my breath caught when I saw the person at the bottom.
A man in a black skull mask.
