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He muttered to himself, “I must be crazy. Getting desperate in my old age.” Of course, thirty-four wasn’t exactly ancient. The lines appearing on the screen erased his thoughts.
I am sighing as I press into you. I pick up your shirt at its edges, peel it up over your skin, up over your head, and nestle my face against your chest, sucking on your skin, biting you lightly.
Jack sighed, feeling a surge of arousal. Hey, he was human. Having a woman say things like that was the next best thing to being there. The next best thing. But not the best thing. He ignored the doubt that was chipping away at him, and started to respond in kind, when another line appeared, and then another…
I slide my hands down your stomach and wrap my fingers around your erection, squeezing and stroking, loving the feel of you in my hand.” Rider, I want you…I want to make you crazy….”
He felt his heart pound and shook his head, surprised that this was affecting him so deeply. He had been using online networks before most people knew networks existed. His dad had helped him build his own computer, and he’d “talked” to people on the old, slow FIDOnet bulletin boards in the eighties when he was just a kid.
He had literally grown up with the Internet, and it had always been a part of his life—but it had never, ever, been like this. This was a whole new world, a different kind of reality. His jaw clenched as he pounded out the words to her.
“You’ve made me crazy every night, and a good part of every day, for weeks now. I want you to make me crazy for real, Nilla. I want to do the same to you.”
Nothing. The cursor hung like heavy silence between them.
“Hmm, Rider. Are you okay? You don’t seem like yourself tonight.”
Jack shook his head and ran his hands over his face. It was all he could do not to track her down in real life. During the day, he would think of her, something they’d shared, something she’d said, and feel immediately aroused, which wasn’t always convenient. When he wasn’t losing sleep, he dreamed of her at night. Of knowing her. Finding her.
He was an Internet security expert. He certainly had the skills to find her, to get past the pseudonym and find out who she really was. Hell, at his level of expertise, locating her wouldn’t even be a challenge. Even though they used generic e-mails with pseudonyms, it was a simple matter of finding her network address, locating her service provider and making some phone calls.
What most people didn’t understand in the miraculous age of the Internet was that the most common method of hacking wasn’t done with computers, but by finding out the information you needed the old-fashioned way: talking to people who could tell you what you needed to know.
Most people were afraid of putting their credit card number online, but didn’t think twice about handing it over to a waiter who disappeared with it for five minutes. It never failed to amaze him, but those curious social and psychological traits made his work interesting. Computers, he knew, were all about the people sitting in front of them.
A few keystrokes, a few casual requests, and he could know who she was, where she lived and worked, and probably anything else he wanted to know in just a few hours. But he wouldn’t do it, though he damned his sense of ethics to hell. His job was to enforce the rules, not break them himself. Though he was desperately tempted.
“Nilla, baby, I am in knots. That’s the problem. You tie me up.”
“We could certainly try that, if you want.”
Jack nearly broke into a sweat. She could do this to him just with the words. What would the reality be like? There was some kind of wild connection between them, though he didn’t know how it happened, or what to do about it.
He reached down, slid his hand over his crotch, felt the stiffness pushing at the seam of his jeans and dropped his head back, the sharp edge of need burning through him. But this time, it just wasn’t right. He was sitting on his sofa in the dark. Again. Alone.
No. No more of this.
This wasn’t what he wanted, how he operated. It just wasn’t enough anymore, not nearly enough. He sometimes felt as if he lived in front of the screen—it was where he worked, kept up on current events, had his morning coffee and sometimes his dinner—but he was damned if he was going to have his sex life there, too! He typed impatiently this time.
“Nilla, I want to meet you. We need to meet. For real.”
“Not a good idea. I could be fat, bald and seventy-five years old, for all you know.”
He let out a heavy breath. She was trying to deflect him. Disappointment doused arousal as he realized she wasn’t as avid to make that connection as he was.
“Nilla, we’re two healthy adults who are driving each other crazy and then ending up in bed alone every night. I want to kiss you. I want to stop imagining and pretending. I want to see what color your eyes are. What’s wrong with that?”
“I don’t know, Rider. We don’t know each other well enough. This is just a game. I like it this way.”
“It stopped being a game a while ago. For me, anyway. Think about what we could be missing.”
“Like I said, it could be all lies, Rider. How can we know? We are creating a kind of fiction here, right? That’s what this place is for, not truth. But at least here we know that outright. Why do you want to complicate this?”
“Have you lied to me, Nilla?”
He held his breath for the few long seconds the screen remained blank.
“No, but I haven’t told you the truth, either. You don’t really know anything about me. Not really. I don’t want you to know.”
“What I know is that there is something in you that speaks to something in me. I know you are smart, funny and passionate. I know your politics and your beliefs, but I don’t know the shape of your face, the scent of you, the sound of your voice. And I want to. I didn’t go looking for this, for you, but now I can’t settle for words on a screen.”
“Hold on. This is getting too intense, Rider. I need to think.”
Jack’s shoulders slumped and he rubbed his tired eyes, shoving the computer back on the table. He wandered into the kitchen to get another beer. He had pushed the issue, and he was going to lose her. Though he felt ridiculous getting all worked up over a name on a screen, that idea really hurt.
RAINE CLOSED HER EYES and let out a frustrated sigh. Since they’d never even mentioned meeting in person, they’d had openly shared their thoughts and feelings, developing a high level of intimacy fairly quickly, something she had never actually had happen in a so-called normal relationship. She wasn’t sure she believed it could happen in a normal, real relationship.
She had never known a man could share this way, communicate feelings and thoughts the way Rider did. It certainly had never happened to her. If he was like this in real life… She blew out a breath and dropped her head back, amazed at the possibilities. But that was unlikely—this was fantasy. In real life, everything would be exposed, all the faults and awkwardness, all the things that got in the way.
She wished she could meet a man who would not leave her hopes in shambles, but she couldn’t bring herself to believe he really existed. She steadied herself, and wrote carefully.
“Rider, you’re right, this has been special. And if we meet, it might all just evaporate in a big cloud of disappointment. Here we can say, do, be anything we want. We get to be larger than life, but in real life we would probably just bore each other senseless. Or worse.”
“I don’t think so, Nilla. And what if we didn’t? But so what if we did? What’s to lose?”
“I don’t know, Rider. I don’t want to lose this. I enjoy what I’ve had. You. Here.”
“Nilla, this is not real—we’re just two strangers sitting in front of a computer every night, having to face being alone when the screen clicks off. I want to know you. I want you to know me, for real.”
Raine felt a dark cloud of frustration descend around her as she read his next words.
“We have to meet, or I’m out. I’m done.”
She gaped, the ultimatum slamming into her like a hard, cold wind.
“I have to think about it, Rider. Please, I have to think. I’ll meet you here tomorrow night and we can talk about it some more, okay?” I kiss you softly, press my lips to yours. Goodbye.
“Wait!… Don’t go…”
She turned the computer off, ruthlessly cutting the connection.
Collapsing on the soft cushions, she groaned in frustration—this night was just not going well. She had always looked forward to these times with Rider. Meeting him had made her typically quiet evenings exciting.
Though physically it was difficult to be so consistently aroused by someone who could never be there to actually help you release those passions, for her it had been wonderful just to be able to feel them—to walk around basking in the glow of it, to dream of it at night, and to be blissfully unafraid of the pain or disappointment that inevitably followed when you dared those things in real life.
Though she didn’t feel so great at the moment. It was distressing to realize that this wonderful interlude she had discovered and enjoyed was coming to an end. He wanted more, and she did not believe there could be more. She would not be meeting Rider the next evening, for talk or anything else. He would not stop pushing her, and she knew she would not hold out against him in the long run. And that would be an awful mistake.
She knew exactly what she had to do to get some distance on this situation, to grab control of it and put it behind her. First, she could never meet with him again, obviously. Next, she had to write about it. She had experienced Internet romance, right? She had faced the tough decision, and she had made it. Now it was time to share what she had learned with her readers. Only then could she move on and forget all this. Hauling herself upright, she grabbed her laptop again. She opened a blank word-processing page and went to work.
2
“WELL, THIS ISN’T a bad start, but we need more.”
Raine resisted the urge to roll her eyes, and stared at Duane, her managing editor, straight in the eye. She liked him, though grudgingly at times such as now.
“I need to add in the research, get some outside interviews. That should round it off. This is just the first draft, obviously.”
Duane nodded and set the draft of the article she had been up nearly all night writing on the desk between them. She could’ve had his job if she had wanted it, but she liked being a writer. Duane was a good manager, and oddly, he seemed to enjoy it.
He was twenty-eight, almost four years younger than her, fresh out of graduate school, and on the job for a year. He was cute in a frat-boy kind of way, with shaggy dark brown hair and bright-blue eyes. Half the women in the building were gaga for him. Raine just couldn’t work up that kind of enthusiasm, though she had come to respect him as an editor.
He had one of those low-key, soft-spoken, intensely focused personalities that could be deceptive at first. But when the chips were down, or when he wanted things to go his way, he would wield his will like a sword. So far, he’d kept the ship on course, and skillfully managed a diverse group of writers at the magazine. But at the moment, Raine wasn’t in the mood to be managed.
“C’mon, Raine. You know as well as I do what you have to do here to make this article pop. The real meat of it is in the move from online to real life. You need to meet him. This is too good to pass up. See it through.”
She just glared, and her voice was stiff and caustic when she spoke. “Is that an order? Just how far would you like me to take this, Duane?”
“I’m not saying you have to marry the guy, or do more than have a cup of coffee with him. But you have already invested all this time in establishing a connection with him, right? And how can you answer the questions that are facing readers if you haven’t really put yourself in their place?” His eyes narrowed thoughtfully, and she resisted the urge to squirm under his gaze.
“This isn’t a real romance, is it? You have chalked this up as research?”
She closed her eyes and thought of all she had left out of the draft—if only Duane knew the connections she had “established” with Rider. She’d left out most of the intimate material and had written up the experience as a light flirtation, a dalliance. She wasn’t about to expose the reality—or herself—like that for the sake of a column. But deep down, she knew that Duane was right, and just for the moment, she hated him for it.
She nodded. “More or less. But he is a nice person, as far as I know, and you can’t just play with people’s feelings, Duane. He’s not just a lab rat for the article.”
Nodding again, Duane quirked an eyebrow.
“If the safety aspect of it is worrying you, we can help with that. I don’t expect you to go out and meet some creep by yourself.”
“He’s not a creep.” She felt a headache fuzz her thoughts. “At least, I don’t think so.”
“Okay, but that’s what we need to know. And what you need to find out.” He picked up the draft and handed it back to her. “You pitched this, you make it work. Meet the guy, then take another stab at it. This could be a killer story, Raine, but you have to see it through.”
“I THINK HE LOOKS LIKE Superman.” Gwen sighed dreamily, watching a man who stared intently at a computer on a desk directly across from them.
Raine snorted and put sugar in her coffee. “That’s Jackson Harris. I think everyone calls him Jack, though. He is the ultimate in computer gurus, from what Duane says. Been here about six months.”
Raine didn’t add that the new guy seemed to have taken a dislike to her on sight, for reasons she couldn’t fathom. He seemed friendly enough with everyone else, but gave her the cold shoulder. The few times they’d crossed paths he hadn’t even returned her hallway acknowledgments. So she’d stopped offering them. She only knew his name because he had been introduced to everyone upon his hiring.
“He’s a computer geek—that would make him a lot more like Clark Kent, right?” Raine didn’t bother holding back on the sarcasm.
Gwen stuck out her tongue. “Kent was Superman—and those dark glasses he always wore were so sexy. Anyway—that guy would look great in a tight blue bodysuit. How the heck did I miss him? This place is hiring one buff guy after another, first Duane, now Jack. I love working here.”
“Please. Spare me.”
Gwen just shrugged and continued to watch Jack work. “So what’s the news on Jerry?”
Raine rolled her eyes and leaned back against the kitchen counter in the employees’ lounge at the end of the hall. The staff often worked late hours, especially on a deadline. Having a full, stocked kitchen available was one of the luxuries that made the company worth working for.
“It was ridiculous. Terrible. He was like a dog in heat—it was crazy, I don’t think I did anything to lead him on. In fact, quite the opposite.”
“Yeah, the buzz is he wasn’t all too happy about it, either. Did you guys argue?”
Raine expelled a disgusted breath. Word traveled fast. Jerry must not have bought the stomachache defense. Oh well.
“No, no arguing. But I was barely able to eat because I had to keep stopping him from mauling me under the table at the restaurant. He couldn’t even hold a conversation. Everything—and I do mean everything, had to come back to sex. And it wasn’t just talk, he has hands like an octopus. So, when we got back to my place, I pretended I had to throw up to escape the good-night grope. Or worse, him wanting to come in.”
“Hey, that’s a new one! I don’t know if he bought your excuse though.”
“Yeah, well, whatever. I have a whole repertoire of techniques to get away from men at the end of dates. I’ll scratch that one off my list.”
“Maybe you should be thinking about things to do to get them into bed at the end of dates.”
Raine snorted. “All I would have to do to get Jerry into bed is breathe. There’s no point.”
Gwen’s jaw dropped in shock. “Wow, you really have forgotten, haven’t you? Jerry aside, orgasms are the point, girlie!”
Raine sipped her coffee and muttered over the top of her cup, “Really? I’ve never known a man who thought so.”
She turned and headed back to her office. Gwen followed, slipping into Raine’s office before she could close the door.
“Gwen, really, I have work…”
“Whoa—hold on. Are you trying to say you have never, you know—that you haven’t had…”
“An orgasm. Yes, I have. Plenty. Just not with a guy.” She sighed. “They haven’t got the faintest clue. I mean, I don’t want to have to tell someone what to do. Women shouldn’t have to come with an instruction booklet.”
“You should use that line in a column. Clever.” Gwen grinned.
“Yeah, right. Sometimes I wish I was a lesbian, maybe a woman would be better at it. That’s my curse—I’m stuck with men.”
Gwen sighed and dropped down in the cushy chair in the corner of the office, ignoring the impatient looks Raine was sending her way. When Gwen was intent on a visit, there just was no stopping her.
“Oh now, it’ll happen one of these days. But geez, I can’t believe you are what…thirty-two?” She ignored the glare Raine shot at her. “And you haven’t had one tiny tingle with a guy? I guess I can see why you don’t want to bother anymore, but you know you have to keep on trying. Sitting at home in front of your computer certainly isn’t going to help things any.”
“I never should have told you about that. Let’s just drop it. That whole thing is coming back to bite me in the butt now, big-time.”
“Why? Are things going downhill? Is the prince turning into a frog?”
Raine sighed and knew Gwen would not go away, and she would not be able to get any work done until she dealt with it.
“No. I don’t know. Rider’s getting too pushy, so I ended it. I wanted it over with.” She sat back, staring out the window at the dark gray clouds forming in the sky over the shops lining Pickering Wharf’s crescent-shaped streets. “But, Duane, in his ultimate wisdom, doesn’t want it over with. He says the article won’t fly unless I ‘see it through.’”
She screwed up her eyes and did a shabby Duane imitation on the last three words. “But I don’t want to see it through. I want to see it over.”
“Why? The computer guy sounds hot from everything you’ve said.”
“Yeah, well, he wants to meet, and I don’t want to—end of story.”
