ALEX #4
The man does not move as he watches me, or at least I think he watches me since I can’t actually see his eyes beneath the mask.
I start backing away, glancing over my shoulder. He still stands over the two motionless Tanner brothers.
Right then I hear footsteps from the opposite direction, some students approaching, and I turn back for another look only to find that the masked man is gone. The Tanners, however, are still lying on the ground.
Pulse spiking, I walk past the group, pretending I have no idea what’s going on and that I have nothing to do with those two people lying sixty-six feet away.
I slip out of the park and head toward the parking lot that leads to the street and then to my house.
My heart keeps hammering in my chest. I still can’t make sense of what happened.
Who was that man, what was he doing in the park, why was he wearing a mask?
I go home hoping to tell Jared about all of this, but of course he isn’t there. Right, tonight is that party.
I sit down at my laptop and start searching the internet for any information about a masked man on campus, but there are no reports. Nothing like this seems to have happened before.
Was it some one-off incident, someone coming back from a masquerade ball who just decided to help a student being attacked?
I step into the shower to wash off the sweat and stress, and for the first time in a very long time I feel something new.
A small hit of thrill runs through me. I sit on the shower step and close my eyes, replaying that moment.
The long seconds he looked at me and then pointed toward the path to my home.
Mine.
A precise direction.
Why didn’t he point toward any of the other paths, there were four branching off from that spot, but he chose the one that led straight to my place.
Does he know anything else about me, is he some… other stalker? On top of the Tanners already stalking me? Madhouse.
Alright, maybe I’m being paranoid, the last two years of constantly feeling hunted must have messed with me in some warped way.
Some mysterious guy saved me, probably coincidence…
Saved.
I swallow hard.
It was Bay who used to do it…
My mind drifts toward the past, the vivid images of the feeling I had when with him; the safe feeling. Today, the stalker gave me this. The moment of safety, being protected, what I had lost then, along with my beautiful husband.
I run my hand over my chest, pretending it’s just for hygiene—just washing up—but my fingers brush against the tip of my nipple.
Oh, how I used to love sex. Couldn’t live without it. With Bay, it was so easy, so natural, so good. Once we broke through all the fear he harbored, sex became something magical, something we effortlessly shared.
But what about the past two years? I haven't been with anyone. The only pleasure I get is from my own hand and my dildos.
Now, I trace my hard nipples with one hand: they’ve always been so sensitive, while the other slides down to my cock.
Bay loved it. Nursed it, warmed it.
He called it magical how little it took to get hard. Small dicks do that, I guess, they go erect easier, faster.
Or maybe it was just him evoking it in me? Because since we broke up, it’s not as quick, not as easy. My body, drowned in constant stress, just won’t readily cooperate.
But today… something in me crossed a line.
I start stroking up and down my little shaft, closing my eyes. The stress, the panic, the terror from what happened, it’s all pushed aside, replaced by gratitude toward that stranger who saved me.
I feel it all at once as I touch myself. It’s not clear, I can’t explain it, but there’s something thrilling about being rescued, about… being worthy of that for another person.
And now, this act somehow links this mysterious man to Bay, placing him in the category of ‘righteous alphas’, the ones who chose to do right by a small omega in desperate need of help, protecting, instead of hurting.
A sudden, paranoid thought hits me:
What if I misjudged him? What if he wanted to take advantage of me too, but only stopped because he heard students approaching in the distance?
Would I have even fought back?
Wait. What?
What a stupid scenario.
Of course, if he’d done what they wanted to do, he’d just be another rapist. But in my sick mind, I’m twisting it all into some bizarre, fucked-up fantasy, where he saves me from them, and in return, I give him… my hole.
So silly, but I’m so lonely and miserable that I guess everything works to get me to climax. I close my eyes and imagine him pushing his way inside me, and I feel like I’m committing an act of betrayal. But what choice would I have?
What could I do against such a huge alpha? If he wanted to, he could shove it in, and I’d be powerless to stop him…
No, I haven’t sunk into that much desperation to fantasize about being violated. But let’s call it a reward fantasy. I’m just giving him a reward for saving me from something far more brutal.
Of course, he wouldn’t be like that. He'd glide into me gently and smoothly with steady strokes, massaging my prostate just as Bay used to.
As I close my eyes, I see a strong body leaning over me, with long, dark red hair spilling over my neck and face. It's him again. Bay. Making love with me…
A moment later, a thin stream of white spills over my fingers. The orgasm is pleasant, but like most orgasms that don’t involve prostate stimulation, it feels like something’s missing.
Still, it helps.
For now, I have to settle for this, since it's lifting my spirits a bit, which are weighed down by depression and the heaviness of all my problems.
And now the most important question is what to do with the Tanners?
Will they be angry that they got beaten up because of me? One of them looked like he had a broken arm. Will they want revenge? Damn it, instead of going home, I should have reported the incident to campus security.
But what could I even say, that someone saved me and then disappeared? Would they look for him, demand answers from him?
On the other hand, this attack will go unpunished for the Tanners if I stay silent, nothing was recorded on any cameras after all, I have nothing to take to court to request a restraining order.
A fucked up situation.
They were beaten up, but no legal action is being taken against them. When they recover, they may decide they want retribution. They’ve already proven they can be patient, and in more suitable circumstances, ones where no mysterious masked savior shows up, they might make another move.
Did the guy just get me into trouble?
I get out of the shower, grab something to eat, and go to bed, worried about Jared, but what can I do?
My relationship with him has been falling apart more and more lately.
In the first year after he moved in, things were alright between us, but with every month subtle changes kept building.
I don’t know if he ever fully coped mentally with what happened with the Tanners.
I was probably the one at fault.
In the beginning I suggested therapy. He went maybe twice and said the therapist annoyed him, so I offered that we could look for someone else, and he replied that he didn’t need it right now, so I didn’t push. My mistake.
The problem was that in the first few months after my breakup with Bay and after my dad’s death, I was practically gone, like a ghost, spending whole days in bed in total apathy, and Jared was left on his own.
With his emotions tied to the violence he went through at his granddad’s house and then the assault, he never found any soft, open space for healing or release.
We never talked it through. I still don’t really know what exactly happened, because I was afraid to bring it up, and I think that turned into something like an underbaked layer in the cake, the source of a growing distance between us.
We never came any closer by talking about our pain.
No shared energy, no shared tears, no moments of vulnerability that could have opened the door for mutual uplift.
Each of us sank in our own suffering, and we didn’t meet halfway.
Near the end of sophomore year the first problems showed up.
He struggled with passing several classes, but I arranged tutoring for him and he managed to finish the year.
Junior year went much worse. He still got tutoring from time to time so he got by somehow, but we talked less and less, and Jared even had a boyfriend for a while who was an omega.
Then they had a fight and he was down again, and near the end of junior year, he started seeing some alpha. That boy wasn’t a good influence; he smoked cigarettes and probably weed too, and it was a miracle Jared got into senior year at all, barely.
But now things were really bad. He skipped classes often, and I could see in the grading system that negative marks kept piling up, but my urging him to patch things up and try to pass went nowhere. Finally Jared did break up with that boy too, but it didn’t help much.
He grew distant, even hostile toward me at times, and I had no one to turn to for help.
He didn’t want to talk to therapists or the school counselor, and if they finally forced him into a conversation, he dodged questions, promised he would improve, then nothing changed.
The lies and excuses started ramping up.
That shy, frightened, good boy who stood in my doorway the day I was about to unalive myself was gone. His place had been taken by someone gloomy, bitter, distant, and at moments arrogant.
Though I knew that under the surface something gentle was still in him, that most of it was just the top layer, rebellion and hurt he hadn’t healed…
The problem was that I had no idea how to help him.
I was suffering myself. Sometimes I had the impulse to talk, but then I realized I would only drag him down into my own hell and misery.