Chapter 19 Catfish
CATFISH
Where the fuck is Wren?
I need to show them what I just found on my phone. A link. A clue as to who set them up.
I glance into the living room as I rush to the kitchen, realizing I forgot to put clothes on. When I get there, I find them crouched beneath the kitchen island, stool on its side, swirling, steaming coffee cup on the counter.
Their chest moves in and out like a racing piston.
“What are you doing down there?” I ask, picking up the stool.
They place their palm over their chest, and pink mottles their cheeks as they look at their knees. “I thought we were being attacked. I thought your yell meant I should…”
Lines form on my forehead, and then I piece it all together. Me yelling for them, no context, I scared them. “Oh, God. No. Sorry.” I offer Wren my hand and tug them to their feet. “Come here, sweetheart. No. I’m sorry I scared you.”
I wrap my arms tightly around them. Holding them close until I can feel their shaking stop and their heart rate normalize.
“There’s no one out there?” Wren asks.
I look out into the darkness of the early morning. “To the best of my knowledge, no. I found something I thought would help, something that might make sense of some of your situation. Just hurried to show you.”
“Is that why you’re naked?”
I huff a laugh and kiss their temple. “Happen to like being naked. Especially with you around. Woke up this way and wondered where you were, for a second. I had plans to take you. Or let you take me. A ride is a ride, whether you’re the one riding or being ridden.”
“You’re incorrigible.” Wren nudges me away, shakes their hands, and circles their shoulders. “But it’s also a nice feeling, to know that you woke up and your first thought was about me. If I’d been there, I would have happily taken you up on that offer. But I got an email.”
I tug Wren back against me. I like how straightforward they are about their sexual preferences.
So, I tell them, “For the record, I’m a fan of free use.
You wake up and you want me, you feel free to get started on my cock.
I promise you I’ll wake up pretty damn fast and be fully on board.
What about you? If I was feeling hungry and wanted something to eat… that thing I was craving being you.”
“The second foster home I stayed in, I was removed because the husband felt he could climb into bed with me.”
My body stiffens. “He did what?”
Wren presses their forehead to my chest. “Yeah, and when I raised it with my social worker, not only did he deny it, but him and his wife made me out to be a pathological liar who was way more—what was the phrase they used?—messed up in the head than they had been led to believe.”
I slide my hand into their hair, grip it tightly, and force Wren to look at me. “Did he rape you?”
The question comes out on a gruff rasp.
Wren shakes their head, and a momentary blip of relief flows through me. “No. Even that young, I knew it was wrong. So, I fought him off, and it was enough to make him leave. Although, he did tell me that if I told anyone, I’d get in trouble. Guess I fucked around and found out, huh?”
I step back and cup their cheeks. The rage I feel now is like the uncontrolled rage I felt when I was younger. Like I was a sieve it just had to flow out of. “Where was this?”
“DeWitt. A town north of Lansing, Michigan.”
“Fucker.” I study the lines of Wren’s face, promising myself that I’ll put only laughter lines there in the future. “You’ve really been through the wars, huh?”
They shrug. “I’m used to it.”
I kiss them softly, shifting us from side to side a little. Not enough that it would count as our first dance, but enough to get the blood circulating a little. “Doesn’t mean it’s right. Forget free use. We don’t need it. I’d rather you always feel safe in whatever we do.”
“Can I rain check it? We only just met, really. And while I trust you, I think I just need a little more time to—”
“You got all the time you need. You can free use me anytime. I won’t free use you ever unless you tell me at some point in the future it’s okay.”
“I’m sorry,” Wren says. “That feels unfair.”
“Don’t be and it’s not. I’ll be honest, I’ve never felt nervous with a partner before.
I’ve always been the one in control, and generally, club girls don’t tend to care what you do.
I feel like my usual moves won’t cut it with you.
I’ll admit I love the idea of fucking you, being with you in that way, however it starts.
But if you need to steer because of the shit that’s happened to you, I’m cool. ”
Wren slips their hands around my neck and tugs me to them. “You’re a good human being.”
“So are you. Thank you for trusting me. And for the record, you deserved better.”
Wren runs their hands down my bare chest, over my nipples, and slowly make their way over my abs.
“You doing okay there, sweetheart?” I say when I notice their mouth is open a little.
“Shut up. You’re pretty and you know it.”
“So do you, apparently.”
“Fine, you have decent abs and stunning ink.”
“Wow, that was almost a complete compliment.” I see my phone where I placed it before I tugged Wren to their feet. “Wait. You’re distracting me. This is important. The reason I was looking for you. Let me show you what I was looking at.”
Wren glances at my phone, and I show them the photograph of the bird I was looking at.
“You’re a closet birdwatcher?” Wren asks.
“No.” I shove the phone closer to them so they can see what I saw. “Willa wants me to paint a mural in Maddie’s room.”
“You’re an artist too? A regular renaissance man.”
“Hardly. But Maddie loves birds, so I thought I could do birds from around the world. I was just scrolling, looking for interesting ones. This is a bicolored wren.”
Wren looks closely, then looks up at me. “I’m still not certain what prompted this bird to be so important that you stampeded through the house naked. I mean, it’s cool, but—”
“No. Not cool. Look at its Latin or whatever the fuck language a bird’s real name is written in.”
Wren leans in and reads it. “Cam…pylor…hynchus Griseus.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Say it again.”
Wren does as I say. “Campylorhynchus Griseus.
And then it finally dawns on them. “Oh, God.”
“Yeah. CamGriseus6. It was no accident you were hired for that hack, Wren. It means bicolored wren.” He touches the ends of my hair.
“And I double-checked. Griseus means gray. Didn’t you say that before your hair was green, it was gray?
Bicolored wren was referring to you and your two-tone gray-and-black hair.
Whoever it was, they were always looking for you. ”
Wren slumps back onto the stool and places a hand over their heart. “This is bad. None of this is a coincidence.”
I stroke a hand over their hair. “I know. But we can figure this out together.”
“How? It means they’ve been watching me. For a while. Long enough to know what my hair looked like before I changed it. That’s not just data scraping or facial recognition from a public feed. That’s personal. It’s way too close.”
Wren looks around the kitchen like somehow the perpetrator is going to emerge from the shadows. I step closer and grip their arms, hopefully grounding and not scaring them.
“Hey, look at me.”
Wren does. Barely.
“We already knew someone was targeting you,” I say quietly. “But this? It tells us more. Yes, they’ve been watching and planning. And who knows, maybe this clue, they wanted you to figure it out. Or maybe they thought you never would. Either way, it’s a mistake.”
“A mistake?” Wren echoes.
“Sure. It’s a mistake. They told us they know you, that it’s personal. They got cocky. You don’t drop Latin-or-whatever bird names in usernames unless you’re an educated jerk-off.”
Wren shakes their head. “Or maybe they are playing with me. And if they’ve been tracking me this long, when I thought I was covering my footsteps, what else do they know?”
I stroke my thumb over their shoulder, slow and steady. “I don’t know, Wren. But we’ll find out together. You’re not alone.”
Wren exhales a shaky breath and then leans their forehead against my chest for just a second. “It just…it makes it worse, that they know who I am. That they know me, and I don’t know them.”
“But it also makes it easier to track them down. We’ve got the start of a pattern. CamGriseus6 is a handle. And we now know to be watchful of other handles. Names that are too clever for the person they’re dealing with to pay too much attention to.”
Wren looks at their laptop, lips pursed. “I wonder, if I go back through the metadata on that job, I might be able to narrow it down. Or cast a wide net looking for similarly coded usernames. It’s a one-in-a-million chance that it will yield anything.”
“But it’s action, right? And we should figure out who knew enough about you back when you were approached for the job. Somehow you got on this person’s radar. Maybe someone recommended you. Maybe someone sold you out.”
The color I’d just worked so hard to put back on Wren’s face disappears again. “You think it was someone who knows me?”
“I think it’s worth considering. People lie all the time. But look, we’re both good at seeing patterns.”
Wren raises an eyebrow at the photograph of the wren still on my phone. “Yeah. We are.”
For a moment, we’re silent.
“If it’s personal for them,” Wren says, “then it needs to be personal for me. I need to think like they would. About how you could do something like this to someone you know.”
I smile. “That’s more like it. See, it’s a clue that’s reframing how you think about the problem. And now, you and me, we’re on to them.”
And whoever thought they could play God with Wren’s life just led me one step closer to putting an end to all this… and them.