Strong Signal (Cyberlove #1) (4 page)

For a moment, his face didn’t change, then he laughed. “All right.”

“I’m serious! And ask her out. You have a car.”

“Yeah I could do that.”

“I mean, or don’t. It’s up to you.” I watched him push the rest of the spaghetti around on his plate. “How’s your mom?”

At that, his expression soured. “Still dating that jackass.”

“What? Who?”

“You’ve seen him around. White dude with longish hair. Tall but real skinny. I could break him in half if I wanted.”

My eyebrows shot up. “Is there reason for you to be breaking him in half?”

“Not yet. I dunno. He gives me a bad vibe. Looks at me like he can’t wait for me to get the hell out and go to college so can take over or whatever.”

I wondered how much of it was based in reality and how much of it was Shawn worrying about leaving his mom in the summer after he graduated. They’d been a team for so long that he was likely overprotective. I didn’t blame him. I’d grown close enough to worry myself.

“Well, maybe…he’ll end up being a nice guy,” I offered.

Shrugging, Shawn picked up our plates and carried them over the sink, scraping off the uneaten food before placing them in my dishwasher. That was our agreement. I cooked for him, he cleaned up. Of course, he could cook for himself. He had for years since his mom worked two jobs and wasn’t home in the evenings, but he liked things to be fair.

We’d exchanged words for the first time four years ago. He’d been a skinny thirteen-year-old standing in my doorway with a too-big sweatshirt covering his hands. With a guarded voice he’d tried to cover, he’d asked to borrow a can opener.

No one had ever knocked on my door before. We kept to ourselves in this apartment complex, although I had seen him and his mom a couple of times as they came and went from the apartment across from mine.

I wasn’t sure what had prompted me to leave the apartment that day, but instead of letting him borrow mine, I’d followed him to his place. There I’d found a can of soup, a broken can opener, and the knife he’d been using to pry the top open. I’d pictured him accidentally cutting his hand, and something in me had cracked a little.

I’d invited him to my place and had made him a grilled cheese and some tomato soup.

He’d been visiting me ever since—the only person who ever came into my apartment. And now he was no longer that scrawny thirteen-year-old. He was a seventeen-year-old senior member of his school football team who ate everything in sight, and his frame showed it. He could probably bench press me.

“If you get to harass me about Keandra,” he said. “Then I get to give you shit for not leaving your apartment.”

I tamped down my irritation. Shawn rarely brought up my hermit status, but I knew he was concerned. I hadn’t always been this bad. Well, I’d never been so great in social situations, but I’d managed. I’d even danced in off-Broadway musicals in Philly in my early twenties, although I’d thrown up before every performance.

Eventually, I’d taken fewer roles as my anxiety worsened, and I’d started my Twitch stream. Once I’d gotten subscribers and sponsors, I’d earned way more money than I’d ever earned while dancing. Not puking my guts up was also a nice bonus.

As time went on, I’d realized I never had to really leave my apartment if I made all my income on Twitch. So I’d stopped. And now, three years later, I wasn’t sure I
could
leave. What had once been social anxiety now felt closer to agoraphobia.

Sometimes I considered the question of whether a tree in the forest made a sound when it fell, and I applied it to myself. Years from now when I was gone, and I wasn’t missed, would I have lived? God, that was so depressing.

Anyway, I was pretty sure Shawn would miss me. “Don’t give me shit.”

“How about you date?”

That was a definite no. The only people who interacted with me were all online, and the thought of meeting one of them in person—no matter how much I liked them—was not pleasant. There was no way to explain my reclusiveness without feeling like a complete fraud.

“No.”

I hadn’t really ever dated—sex had always been casual, no-strings-attached hookups with friends. Those had ended around the same time as my dancing career. How the hell could I date?
Oh hey, I spend my life online playing video games, I never leave my apartment. I also used to jack off on camera for money, and those videos are everywhere online. Nice to meet you.

Shawn rolled his eyes. “If I ask Keandra out, you gonna help me pick out clothes?”

“Just because I’m gay doesn’t mean I love personal shopping.”

Shawn frowned. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just wanted help and don’t wanna bug my mom about it since she conks out right after work.”

“Oh, well, of course I’ll help.”

I felt like a shithead, but Shawn smiled—over it in an instant like teenagers always were. I internalized everything and turned it over and over in my head until I wanted to scream, but things rolled off Shawn’s back as easy as water.

He glanced at the clock. “I should get going. I have a ton of homework to do. Math. My favorite.”

I nodded and stood up to stretch. I needed to check my messages and sign into Twitch. “Yeah, I need to work.”

“All right, man. Have fun fighting the bad guys with your orc.”

“Yeah, I’m perfecting my victory dance.”

“Sure you are. Later.”

After my front door shut behind him, I locked it—doorknob, two deadbolts and a chain—then grabbed a cup of coffee and went to my bedroom. Several messages were waiting for me on
FWO
after I signed on. One of them made me pause mid-sip and turn my head so I didn’t spew coffee all over the monitor.

I had one message from Hazzard. The American hero I’d embarrassed. Oh fuck.

All it said was:
Hey, can I talk to you about something? …Not about you killing me in the game.

That was it. That was all it said. What did he want to chat about?
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
He’d seen my Twitch stream. He’d seen
me.
And he’d kept up his cryptic comments and vague insults on my gaming style for weeks. There was no way this was going to be good. I’d never actually had a hater attempt to contact me privately before. Maybe I’d been lucky to avoid it all along, or maybe Hazzard was some extreme psycho.

I gulped down another sip of coffee and winced as it scalded my throat.

Okay, so, a message. About chatting.

I rarely engaged people privately. The emails in my inbox mostly went unanswered. I gave so much of my life to people online that I made every effort to keep my life here in the apartment to myself. Online, I got to choose who saw what, and I could present myself in only the ways I allowed. So far, no one had ever seen the real Kai.

So why was I opening up a pathway to further communication when it could blow up in my face? Maybe it was because he intrigued me—this deployed soldier who spent his free time watching my stream. If I thought about it objectively, he hadn’t merely trolled my chat for weeks. He’d also offered real tips and constructive criticism. Once, I swore he’d made a comment that had been complimentary right before he’d lapsed into sarcasm again. It was like he’d been fighting with himself about whether or not he should harass me, and the genuine gamer side of him had kept winning out.

Either way, it was just an email address. It wasn’t my longitude and latitude coordinates.

Before I could change my mind, I typed:
Sure, email okay? GamerKai18 at gmail.

It wasn’t a big deal. I knew that, and told myself that repeatedly, but my nerves were still shot. Even so, I got into Gamer Kai mode. After signing onto Twitch, I plastered a smile on my face. I had a job to do.

My first thought after waking the next morning was to check my email.

Fighting the urge, I rolled onto my stomach on the bed. It was way too big for one person, and sometimes it emphasized how alone I was. Maybe I should get a cat. But that was just another thing I had to feed and take to appointments. No thanks.

I stumbled to the bathroom to piss and attempted to force myself to the kitchen, but still wound up backtracking to my room. Once at my desk, I opened Gmail and chewed my nails.

Why was I agonizing over this? This was bullshit.

I had a whole bunch of emails, most of them nonsense, but my heart rate bumped up when I spotted a personal email address. GReid22.

The subject line said:
hey

No punctuation mark or capitalization. That was it. Why the hell was I analyzing a subject line? With a growl and a violent tap on my keyboard, I opened the email.

By the time I got to the end of the email, I tasted blood. I looked down at my hand. “Shit.” I’d bitten off half my thumbnail.

I grabbed a tissue and wrapped it around the bloody finger, then read the email again. And a third time. I leaned back in my chair, staring at the G. What did the G stand for? Gary. Glen. Garth.

Some of those people are total scumbags.

“But not you, G?”

I’d always known some people were aware of my dual personas. I’d started making videos for XXXTube a couple of years ago. Something about the camera recording me, and having people watch me but not be able to touch, had turned me on. I’d made one video, uploaded it, and had received enough views to get some ads from the website. My videos had supported me after I’d stopped dancing, but now Twitch paid more than enough and kept me busy, so I hadn’t made a video in a year or so. But I still got bank from them, so I hadn’t shut down my channel.

I wasn’t embarrassed about jacking off on camera. I did it anyway, so why not film it? It wasn’t like I had a family to judge the things I did to earn an income. Well, my dad was supposedly still alive, but he was probably in prison for yet another drug charge, so whatever.

I thought about how to answer this email. If it were someone else, someone more trollish and 4chan-esque, I might have told them to fuck off. Or sent him a link to one of my favorite videos just to be an asshole.

But with Hazzard/G, I didn’t want to do that. In fact, despite the caustic and scathing persona he’d been using in Chat, his email was kind of sweet, all dripping with concern. Protecting people was his job, right? Other than Shawn, it’d been a long time since anyone had cared about my wellbeing.

I rested my fingers on the keyboard, tapping the keys. The wise decision would be to say, “Thank for your concern, but I know.” Which actually wasn’t totally the truth. I knew people were aware of both personas, but I had no idea what kind of creepy stuff they’d done with the information. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

Shit, I needed ice cream already. And it was ten in the morning.

With halting movements, I replied.

It was more than I’d intended to say, and a little snarky. Continuing this correspondence was an awful idea, but I also couldn’t stop myself from being a little…intrigued.

Instead of logging into
FWO
again, and hooking up to my stream, I puttered around the apartment and tidied while considering the situation. I was halfway through a serious attempt to reorganize my game cases when my phone chimed with a new email notification.

It was the mysterious G. I tried to figure out what time it was on his side of the world, but I was too impatient to crack open a world clock website to find out.

It was difficult not to glow at the praise. It had taken nearly two years to get my chat free of assholes and mostly full of people who cared about gaming and hanging out rather than trolling.