Chapter 32 Poe
POE
I was scrolling the comments on the social media posts directed at Ethan Todd when Maeve and Bram emerged from Bram’s room.
Remy and I had been out working all day — Brick had one of his flunkies selling near schools again, like he thought we were fucking stupid — but looking at Maeve now, it was pretty obvious they’d been engaged in an all-day fuckfest.
Maeve’s raven-black hair was tousled, her full lips pink and swollen. It was how she looked in bed.
Lucky Bram.
“Have you been fucking all day or just part of the day?” Remy asked, looking up from his video game.
“Pretty much all day,” Bram said, patting Maeve on the ass and heading to the kitchen.
“Asshole,” Remy said.
“I’d offer to fuck you too, but I can barely walk,” Maeve said, tucking herself between us on the sofa.
“Way to rub it in,” I said.
“Yeah, I'm not jealous at all,” Remy said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
“Sorry,” Maeve said.
I leaned over to kiss her. “Don’t be. We’ll get our turn.”
Her hours with Bram obviously hadn’t put a damper on her horniness. She met every sweep of my tongue with one of her own until I pulled away with a groan. “Jesus, Maeve.”
“What?”
She really didn’t know what she did to us.
“Nothing, just… let’s not kiss right now.” Maeve wasn’t one to let soreness get in the way of a good fuck, but I was still being careful with her after Romania.
“If you say so.” She looked at the phone in my hand. “Anything new?”
“Not really. I think we’re rolling, but it’s hard to tell.”
“Bailey said that’s how it’s supposed to be though,” she said, leaning over to look at my screen. “We want it to look real.”
I read the comments coming in under a post from a user named NYNancy, who’d started an exchange with a post that read, If Ethan Todd’s such an alpha why is he hiding out in some foreign country like a little bitch?
“Is that us?” Maeve asked. “NYNancy?”
“I’m not sure. I think so.”
We didn’t know the details. We’d taken the bot farm idea to Aloha, who’d known exactly what we were talking about. He’d set the whole thing up with some shady offshore enterprise, we’d wired a surprisingly small amount of money given the scope of the operation, and that had been that.
It was hard to believe it was that easy, that cheap, to change public opinion and get people pissed off at each other online.
The comments on the post were pretty evenly split between users (mostly women) piling on, agreeing that Ethan Todd was, in fact, a little bitch, and other users (mostly men) trashing NYNancy.
I shouldn’t have been surprised by the hatred from the latter, but somehow I still was.
They called NYNancy a slut and a whore, a childless cat lady who was probably “used up.” They told her she’d die alone, said that feminists were only feminists because they were too ugly to get a man.
One user even said he hoped she’d be raped.
It made me sick that there were men — that there were people — in the world like that. It also made me feel weirdly guilty, like I was part of it even though I’d never thought any of those things about a woman.
These were other men, guys like the ones surrounding me in Blackwell Falls every day. How many of the seemingly normal men around me were secretly Ethan Todd followers like the Ghosts had been?
The fact that they existed at all was disturbing. The fact that there were so many of them made me think something had gone very, very wrong with way too many men.
“You shouldn’t look at this,” I told Maeve.
Her eyes lit with a flash of anger that hadn’t been directed at me since she’d first come to the loft. “I’m not a child.”
“I know. I just hate that you have to look at this stuff. I hate that it exists at all.”
Her expression softened. “Well, it does. And I’ve been looking at it for the last two years, so there’s no point hiding it from me now.”
I hated that it was true. Maeve deserved happiness and love, not this toxic bullshit.
“Any comments from Todd?” she asked.
“No, but no one has actually challenged him to a debate yet,” I said.
Bram came into the living room holding a beer and dropped into one of the new living room chairs.
The sofa had been salvageable after his rampage, but we’d had to replace all four chairs, along with the coffee table, the TV, and two lamps.
Maeve had helped pick out the new stuff, and I’d been secretly thrilled by the fact that she was putting her stamp on the loft. Like she was here to stay.
Like she considered it home.
“Aloha said they’d start slow, make it look organic,” Bram said. “Whatever that means.”
He knew what it meant. He just hated this online shit, and I didn’t blame him. I didn’t want to live my life with people I didn’t know on a tiny screen. I wanted to be here, in the flesh, with Maeve.
Emphasis on the word flesh.
Maeve chewed her thumbnail. “Apex is only two weeks away.”
“We have time.” I was aware of the ticking clock, but there was no point feeding into Maeve’s worry.
“What if he wants to stay in hiding?” Maeve asked.
“He won’t,” Remy said without looking away from his game. “He likes the attention too much.”
She stared at the new comments rolling in under NYNancy’s post.
Ugly cunt.
She’s right, if Todd was a real alpha he wouldn’t be in hiding.
Bro is straight up fucking bitches all day every day. i’d be in hiding too.
His dick is probably an inch long max.
You’d fuck him anyway because he has money and you know it.
I felt like my soul aged ten years every time a new comment popped up but I couldn’t look away.
Maeve’s phone dinged and she looked at the screen.
“More paint?” I asked.
Olivia was redecorating her bedroom and had been sending Maeve possible paint colors for days.
Maeve tipped her phone so I could see two paint swatches side by side, one of them a pale green, the other bright pink.
“It looks like watermelon,” I said.
Maeve laughed. “I don’t think they’re meant to go together.”
I was glad she was doing something normal, that she had more time to spend with her family now that she wasn’t working at Lushberry. And yeah, I loved that she had more time with us too, that she didn’t have to squeeze cooking in around her shifts at the mall.
She still woke up with nightmares some nights, but one or more of us was always there. And she didn’t know it yet, but we’d already taken steps to make sure she would be okay if anything happened to us.
Taking care of Maeve was all that mattered now, and we were going to do that whether we survived the hunt for Ethan Todd or not. Because Maeve didn’t know it yet, but we were willing to risk everything to give her the peace she deserved.
Even our lives.