Like Vanessa said, the more you know about someone beforehand, the less likely you are to suffer afterward.
I typed “Alex, 26, FiDi” in the search box. And when I saw Alex’s dazzling smile shining back at me from the screen, my heart shattered into a million pieces.
Review: typical fluttr douche. super hot, but a smooth talker. says all the right things at all the right times. don’t trust a word that comes out of his mouth.
13
I was not going to freak out.
This was only one review. Sure, it was scathing, but it was also sort of vague. “Typical Fluttr douche” could mean just about anything.
Well, not anything. It definitely meant something bad. Still, I had no idea who actually posted it. Why should I trust the words of some anonymous internet reviewer?
Of course, that begged the question of how useful JerkAlert really was if the reviews were unreliable.
But Alex had been perfect last night, in every single way. Holding me close as we danced under fairy lights. Rushing to help Ray in the aftermath of the fire. Charming my friends with his sweet, thoughtful commentary.
Which, I supposed, could be construed as smooth talk.
I didn’t realize your friends were all geniuses...
I used to dread going to work in the mornings...
Just knowing I’ll get to spend a few minutes with her...
No! That wasn’t smooth talk. When Alex said all those things, he was being totally sincere.
Wasn’t he?
Maybe not.
I needed to distract myself from this subject, immediately, so I popped open my laptop and fired up Netflix, then spent the rest of my Sunday in bed, bingeing on junk food and Jessica Jones. As I was drawn out of reality and into a fictional world, I dreamed of opening my own superhero detective agency, where I’d investigate secret shady behaviors of men who did women dirty and expose them for the liars they were. Kind of like JerkAlert, only more badass.
Between episodes, I checked my phone in vain for a text from Alex. When I inevitably found nothing, I refreshed my Twitter feed to see if any new tweets had been added to the #JerkAlert hashtag. As the night wore on, activity seemed to die down, so I signed into the JerkAlert dashboard to check current stats and found that, over the past twenty-four hours, web traffic had remained largely unchanged.
This Twitter trend wasn’t turning into the big marketing blowout Whit had predicted it’d be. There’d been more buzz over #DickInTheDark, for God’s sake.
Which should’ve eased my mind, right? When Whit told me I was gonna blow up, I’d been so worried about being found out.
Now, all I could think was: Who cared? Who cared if a bunch of basement boys turned me into a sexist meme? Who cared if they exposed and humiliated me? My entire life was a series of humiliations at the hands of men, anyway, and I was still standing. I might as well try to make a buck off it.
Since no one gave a damn about JerkAlert, though, the point was moot. It looked like I’d be stuck working the help desk for the foreseeable future.
By the time I’d burned through the entire first season of Jessica Jones, it was close to midnight. I checked my phone one last time before I turned out the light, hoping to see a message from Alex. But, of course, there wasn’t one.
He never texted like he said he would. And frankly, I was beginning to suspect he never had any intention of texting me at all. He probably didn’t even have to work on Sundays. It was merely an excuse he’d conjured up when I’d caught him trying to make his escape. Because he knew how to say all the right things at all the right times.
That’s when the truth hit me like a runaway freight train: Alex Hernandez had smooth-talked me into the sack.
* * *
“The same shit is happening again.”
Josh Brewster’s voice boomed through my cubicle. I spun around in my chair to find him standing in the doorway, shoulders squared, chest heaving, gripping his laptop in one meaty pink fist. For a second, I was afraid he was going to hurl it at my head.
Instinctively, I smiled. “Good morning, Josh. Can I help you?”
Instead of defusing the situation, my pleasant attitude only seemed to deepen his scowl.
“I don’t know. Can you?” He shook the laptop in my direction. “Every time I ask you to fix this piece of shit, it comes back even more broken than when I dropped it off.”
Stay calm. Don’t engage.
“Let me see what’s going on,” I said, coating my voice in so much syrup I could taste the sweetness on my tongue.
With a grimace, he handed it over, and I flipped it open to look at the screen. “Hmm. Looks like you’re infected with malware again.”
“Yeah, that’s what you said last time, so obviously, that’s not the problem.”
I cleared my throat, counting to three in my head before I said something rash that I’d later regret.
Josh took my silence as an opportunity to continue his rant. “The only reason I even brought this to you was because I couldn’t find Bob. He’s the only one around here who knows what he’s doing.”
God, this guy was such a dick.
“Well, why don’t you leave it with me, and I’ll bring it to Bob when I see him? I’m sure he’ll be able to fix this right away.”
He hissed, sneaking in one final sneer before stalking away. As soon as he was gone, I pulled up the keylogger and started scrolling through the sea of data it had collected on Josh’s activity. There was plenty of innocuous stuff in there: emails he’d composed in Outlook; Slack messages between him and the other members of his team; lots of really poorly written code.
But there was a lot more of the not-so-innocuous stuff. Like the hours he spent at a website called FreeBigBoobs.com, or the myriad visits he made to the Sexy Beautiful Women board on 4Chan. Also, as suspected, Josh frequented many a gambling site. If it had the words fantasy, bet, or casino in the URL, chances are Josh had been there.
The logger also showed that before every session, he’d disable the virus scanner. Afterward, he’d restart it, then delete his browser history—the man hadn’t even heard of incognito mode!—but by then, his computer was already infected.
I couldn’t wait to show Bob the evidence. Tucking Josh’s laptop under my arm, I hopped to my feet and headed toward Bob’s favorite hiding place: the server room. Whenever he went missing, I knew he was simply holed up somewhere among the racks of computers, seeking solace in the whir of their cooling fans. In there, no one would bother him.
As the boss, he could get away with that. As the underling, I couldn’t. I had to stay out on the office floor, acting as the face of the help desk and dealing with the wrath of the Hatchlings. When Bob was in the server room, I was supposed to leave him alone to work in peace, unless there was some sort of urgent crisis.