Don’t freak out, I told myself. It’s probably Ryan, casing the apartment again.
“Go,” I whispered fiercely at the window.
And still the feet remained.
With a sinking feeling, I realized I was going to have to do something unless I wanted to lie awake all night, worrying about my creepy neighbor outside.
My first thought was to call the police. I imagined how satisfying it would be to see red and blue flashing lights arrive and Ryan caught in the act. It wouldn’t be so easy for Leanne to ignore his deplorable behavior then. But my grin faded as I thought about what would come afterward: more middle-of-the-night buzzers, more illicit entries into my apartment, more of me feeling unsafe in my own home.
And what if it’s not Ryan? I challenged myself. What then?
I pictured myself calling the police, reporting a suspicion that someone was outside my window. I saw the officers rolling their eyes about silly women living in basement apartments and losing their pretty little minds over any passersby. How long would it take them to respond to a nonemergency like that? By the time they arrived, whoever it was could be long gone. Or what if the officers arrived and found it was nothing other than a homeless person looking for a safe space to sleep? I would feel awful.
Having talked myself out of calling the police, I climbed from bed, slipped my feet into flip-flops, and armed myself with a high-heeled bootie. It wasn’t the most conventional of weapons, but it would give me something to threateningly swing should Ryan—or whoever it was—lunge at me again. I gripped the shoe tightly and hoped I wouldn’t have to use it.
I quietly made my way through the front door and gate, and began inching toward the alley. The night air was hot and sticky, and still a shiver ran down my spine.
Come on, Audrey, I chided. Let’s do this.
Keeping as close to the front of the building as possible, I crept to the corner, where I paused and listened. I heard someone breathing—panting, really, a disturbing sound that both convinced me this was no innocent party and enraged me.
I jumped around the corner, brandishing the shoe over my head, and shouted, “Hey!”
A shadowy form leaped up from a crouched position and sprinted down the alley away from me. I lowered the shoe as I processed what I had just seen.
He jumped up. That sick fuck was crouched down, looking through my windows.
Trembling with righteous fury, I ran back into my apartment, where I paced the floor.
Had that been Ryan? I couldn’t tell; it had been dark and I’d been blinded by adrenaline.
All I knew was that I couldn’t stay in that apartment any longer. I grabbed my purse and took off.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
HIM
Is this what a heart attack feels like? I wondered as I sat on my couch, clutching at my chest as I struggled to breathe normally. My entire body felt clammy, my pulse a runaway train. How could I have screwed things up so completely, so irreparably? Had Audrey seen my face?
I shouldn’t have been outside her window. I knew that. Of course I knew that. I told myself I was just there to see if she liked the flowers I’d left her, but that was a lie. I knew she liked the flowers: she had Instagrammed the bouquet that very night, captioning the image Surprise flowers are the best flowers. She’d appended the caption with an emoji of flowers and one of a face surrounded by hearts, and then a string of hashtags, ranging from #flowers to #someonelikesme.
No, the truth was that Audrey was a drug to me, her small, heart-shaped face a high I couldn’t stop chasing. Once I had been able to control myself, but now that she was here in DC, breathing the same air I was every single day, I had fallen completely off the wagon.
And so I stood outside her window for hours. My stomach rumbled and my legs cramped and still I didn’t leave. I was mesmerized by her sleeping form, could have watched her chest rise and fall all night long. She was so perfect, so dizzyingly, heartbreakingly perfect, that part of me longed to wrap my hands around her delicate throat and press a thumb against her windpipe gently, lovingly, until she stopped breathing, so she would stay just like this forever.
I wouldn’t, of course. It was just another intrusive thought. Utterly harmless.
And then disaster had struck in the form of a stray cat. It had sauntered into the alley and begun rubbing its thin, flea-ridden body against my leg. Repulsed, I had swatted at it, and it had retaliated by hissing and lunging for me. I jerked out of the way and my knee smacked against the glass of Audrey’s bedroom window.
I froze, the thump as loud as a foghorn. I readjusted my position and cautiously looked down through the window to see her stirring.
I should have run. I should have fled before she could see me, but I was caught in her thrall. I remained in place, half of me thrilled at the inevitable confrontation, half of me aware it was tantamount to suicide. Go! I screamed at myself. There would be no happy ending if Audrey found me outside her bedroom window. It was Audrey herself who snapped me out of my reverie. Her objection—Hey!—had broken through to me, smacked my sense back into me. I leaped to my feet and ran.
* * *
PATHETIC, I CHASTISED MYSELF. Utterly pathetic. It’s no wonder Audrey isn’t yours. You don’t deserve to even tread the same ground as her.
I punched my fist into my thigh, hard enough to make myself wince. This couldn’t be who I was. In all other aspects of my life, I was more than competent: I had a decent job with benefits and a healthy 401(k); I maintained a carefully researched program of running and lifting weights; I laundered my sheets and towels with regularity. But where a woman—where Audrey—was concerned, I morphed into an embarrassing, irredeemable mess. I couldn’t do anything right, couldn’t even pull off sending flowers without turning it into an international incident.
Pathetic.
Oh, but she had loved those flowers. Seeing her smell them, lightly touching the blooms with a pleased smile, had been worth it. I was glad I had insisted upon the completely orange bouquet. The florist had urged me against it, had suggested I add in some different colors “for interest,” but I had held firm. I wanted Audrey to know I knew her favorite color. I wanted her to know that I understood her.
And then I had gone and screwed it all up.
Stupid, pathetic idiot, I thought, punching myself again, harder. No wonder you’re alone.
As my thigh throbbed, I realized that wasn’t true. I wasn’t alone. I had the Overexposed forums. The men there had never let me down; they’d been there for me as I agonized over Sabrina, Aly, and the other women I’d used as substitutes for Audrey. They would help me.
I grabbed my laptop and logged into the forums, but then hesitated, unsure where to post. Like dozens of other top-tier bloggers and social media influencers, Audrey had her own thread. I’d visited it on occasion and always regretted it. None of the men who posted there truly understood Audrey or even wanted to. All they wanted to do was share screen-captured images with disgusting, filthy captions and upload pictures they’d created by pasting Audrey’s face onto the bodies of various adult actresses.
Her dedicated thread would be the absolute worst place to post, and so instead I clicked through to the Relationships subforum within the Off-Topic forum, the same place where I had written about Sabrina and Aly. There, I posted a lengthy confessional about where things stood and what I had done. Instantly, I felt lighter. Help would come.
I read the comments as they began appearing. Some encouraged me; some gently ribbed me for being such a disastrous fool about the whole thing. Okay, I thought, nodding. I deserved that. But as the comments continued to pile up without a single actionable suggestion, I began to get frustrated. Where was the help I needed? The help I was counting on?
I was about to close my laptop when I received a direct message from a user calling himself pm-me-nudes:
Hey bro. Saw your post, thought you might find this interesting. https://www.objectofaffection.com/vip-forums/2017041825 You have to be VIP to se
e it. If you’re not already registered as a VIP, click here: https://www.objectofaffection.com/vip-forums/register and use my invite code: pm-me-nudes-inviteARQ573. Good luck.
VIP section? I’d been reading this site for years and had never heard of a VIP section. I hovered my cursor over the registration link and then paused. Even though this place had seen me through some tough times, I was ashamed to frequent it. Becoming a VIP was doubling down on it, falling deeper into the rabbit hole.
But what if this was the one thing that could help me with Audrey? Shouldn’t I just get over my humiliation and do it? After all, didn’t I always say that I would do anything for her?
With a sharp nod of resolve, I clicked the link and entered the invite code. Almost immediately, a smaller window popped open, reading: Welcome! Congratulations on becoming one of the elite. I keyed in the URL from the direct message and found a post in the VIP Forums titled “Full Access.”
Fellow Exposers, there’s been a lot of discussion about RATs here. If you’re looking for that information, or if you’re just wondering what the fuck a RAT is (remote administration tool, for the uninitiated), you’re in the right place. Below is my guide for setting up a tool on a slave’s computer so you can watch them all the time. So easy a trained monkey could do it.
I reread that paragraph, my skin slowly alighting in flames. You can watch them all the time. In my mind’s eye, I saw Audrey in her apartment, slowly shedding her clothing in an unintentional, unself-conscious striptease. Twisting that long, fire-laced hair up to expose her thin, pale neck. The temptation was almost too much. My palms sweat; saliva filled my mouth.
Heart pounding, I slammed the computer shut.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CAT
Catherine.”
Panic shot through my already rattled body when I heard Bill Hannover’s voice booming from my office doorway. Bill had requested that a memo on a complex procedural issue be on his desk by the time he arrived this morning, and I was still working on it at almost noon. I couldn’t believe I had blown this deadline. I’d never been late with work product, not ever, and certainly not when it mattered this much. If I dropped the ball on this, Bill would never put me on the Phillips trial team, let alone select me as the associate to argue in court.
“Where’s that memo?” he asked, an undercurrent of impatience belying his otherwise calm voice. “The deadline to file our motion is Friday. I need that research.”
“I know,” I said, nerves making my voice squeak like a cartoon character. “You’ll have it within the hour. It’s almost finished.”
It really was almost finished. The problem was that it had been almost finished all morning. Over the last two days, I had read dozens upon dozens of cases, plus all the applicable statutes and legal treatises, and had compiled a highly detailed outline highlighting the most relevant issues. Writing the memo itself should have been a breeze. At midnight, with all but the last section drafted, I had decided to take a break. I’d set my alarm for five o’clock, thinking that a few hours of sleep and a clear head would let me finish the memo in just an hour or two. My plan was solid. I should have handed in the memo on time and still felt refreshed for the rest of my day.
But then I’d been awakened around two o’clock by insistent banging on my front door. Half certain I was dreaming, I closed my eyes and waited for the noise to stop.
Then I heard my name.
Bewildered, I dragged myself from bed and carefully descended my spiral staircase. I peered cautiously through my peephole, almost expecting to see the apparition of Emily Snow, eyes cold, mouth sneering, face bloodied. Instead, there was Audrey, wearing pink cotton pajamas and flip-flops, hair in a sloppy ponytail and a purse strung incongruously across her body. As soon as I opened the door, she flung herself into my arms, jabbering incoherently about someone outside. It took me five minutes to get her calm enough so that I could understand what she was saying: she had awoken to find someone spying on her from the alley. I shuddered. I’d known that alley was bad news. That whole apartment was bad news. Audrey should have taken my advice and moved in with me. But I wouldn’t dream of rubbing it in, not when she was in such a state, so when she moaned that she couldn’t sleep there, I simply patted her on the shoulder and assured her the guest room was all hers.
Thinking the matter resolved, I yawned and returned to my own bedroom, but Audrey followed me like a lost puppy and sat on the edge of my bed. She twisted her hair around her fingers as she repeated how frightened she was. I sympathized; I did. It must have been terrifying to find someone watching her while she slept, and I could only imagine how vulnerable she must feel. But she was safe now, secured in my home on an upper level behind a solid door. She could rest.
But instead she rehashed the night’s events again and again, embroidering the details slightly with each pass. As my agitation grew, I remembered one night in college when Audrey and Nick had had some fight, the cause of which had long been forgotten, and Audrey had kept me awake all night, asking on a loop what she had done wrong and what she could do to win him back. My answers (that she had done nothing wrong and that she should not attempt to “win him back”) did nothing to console her. She seemed so distraught that I had prioritized her personal crisis over studying for my Biology 101 midterm the next day, and I had done so poorly on the exam my grade wasn’t able to recover. I got a B instead of an A in the class, ruining my perfect 4.0 GPA. Later, when I was rejected from Harvard Law, I couldn’t help but wonder if it had been because of that blemish on my record. To add insult to injury, I’d returned from that bio exam to find Audrey and that slimeball Nick making out in our shared room.
You’re not twenty years old anymore, Cat, I told myself. Just tell Audrey you have to go to bed.
But I couldn’t. Every time I opened my mouth to do so, fresh tears welled in her eyes and I was reminded that this wasn’t like the thing with Nick. This was my best friend having a truly terrifying experience. She needed me, and so I stayed up most of the night with her, falling asleep only an hour before my alarm went off. Now I was paying the price as I struggled to finish the memo, feeling as though my eyes were coated in sandpaper and my mouth was stuffed with cotton.
“I’ll be waiting for that memo, Catherine,” Bill said with a frown.
I nodded feverishly and turned back to my computer, fingers flying over the keys as I raced to finish it. Just as I was hitting my stride, my phone buzzed. I glanced away from the screen and saw that it was a text message from Audrey: I forgot to ask! Did you send me flowers yesterday?
I stared in disbelief at the message while resentment flooded my body. No Thank you for listening, no Sorry I kept you up, no How’s that memo going? Just Did you send me flowers?Audrey might’ve been my best friend, but she was also the most self-obsessed woman I’d ever met.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
AUDREY
I began having trouble sleeping in my apartment. Every time I put my head on my pillow, I heard phantom footsteps and faint scratches outside my window. I hung thicker curtains to shield myself from the prying eyes I assumed were out there, but then realized the opacity went both ways—no one could see in, but I couldn’t see out. If someone was truly out there, I might not know—and so I began routinely leaving the curtains slightly cracked.
I was already on edge, and then I started having nightmares about Rosalind. I dreamed of being stuck inside her tiny doll world, hurtling toward an unpleasant but inevitable end. One of the dioramas in particular haunted me: Rosalind, blinded by a silky sleeping mask, tucked snugly beneath a fluffy comforter while her future murderer stood outside her window, his face obscured by a balaclava and his gloved hand wrapped around a miniature hatchet.
I like the one where the guy’s outside the girl’s window with a hatchet. I shuddered as I remembered the words of that dead-eyed creep I’d caught in the Rosalind exhibit on the first day. It had been weeks, and I was still turning corners in the museum and finding him there, loiteri
ng with his gaze hidden by his baseball cap. I wanted to demand to know who the hell he was and why didn’t he ever seem to have a life to get to, but I didn’t want to cause issues at work. I wanted that promotion, and there was no way I was going to allow him to ruin it for me.
Don’t let it get to you, I chastised myself. My situation was wholly dissimilar to Rosalind’s, or Colette’s before her. So some guy who lacked social skills hung around a free museum too much. That didn’t make him a stalker. I didn’t have a stalker; at most, I had a random Peeping Tom who, as far as I knew, had never come back and probably didn’t even own a hatchet.
But still I struggled to get a good night’s rest. I had talked in my sleep since childhood—something that had made me a peculiarity at middle school slumber parties—and suddenly I began talking so loudly I woke myself. In the small hours of the morning, I would shoot bolt upright in bed, looking wildly around for the source of the voice that had awakened me, only to find the room empty. It had only taken a few nights of that before I downloaded an app called Luna Listen, which proclaimed, “Set yourself free from insomnia!” It promised to do this by tracking my sleep and recording irregular noises. The idea was that a person could use it to figure out what was disrupting their sleep, be it a snoring partner, a barking dog, or their own relentless tossing and turning. In my case, I was the only thing disrupting my sleep—when I woke up petrified with fear, I only had to listen to the most recent recording to reassure myself that the loud voice shouting I’m scared! or sometimes Go away! was only me.
* * *
I RESOLVED TO MOVE OUT of that apartment soon. Leanne could change all the locks she wanted, and that basement unit would still be vulnerable to her grandson or any other miscreant skulking through that alley. Every day over lunch, I scrolled through apartment listings on Craigslist and trolled the Zillow app. I was in a hurry to leave, but I didn’t want to be in such a hurry I found myself in a similar—or worse—situation, and I didn’t want to let moving distract me from work.
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