Chapter 5 Seth
SETH
She’s on the couch again, eating cheesy pasta right out of the pan while watching a reality TV show about couples renovating their homes.
I can hear every word. With the volume turned up on my mixing desk, I hear both the TV and Kayla’s laughter.
I’ve been watching her for five days, and I know all the shows she watches, all the people she speaks to.
Her father has nothing to be worried about. Kayla is enjoying her freedom by eating bad food and watching crappy television. I’m betting she didn’t get to do those things in her other life.
From what I’ve been able to find out, her father was pushy with her education, determined his girls would have a better start to life than he did.
Kayla sets the pan on the floor and curls up with her feet tucked under her. The curve of her leg is outlined through her thin leggings, and my gaze traces the outline of her body as I think about her legs and the dark center at the top of them.
There’s a stirring in my trousers, and my dick lengthens.
At that moment, Felix jumps onto my lap, his claws digging into my goods.
“Fuck!”
His sharp claws penetrate my sweatpants and dig right into my cock. I pull my legs up, and Felix jumps out of the way and onto my desk. His feet scramble on the mixing desk, and his tail swishes, knocking over my empty coffee cup.
“Shit, Felix. What are you doing, buddy?”
Kayla sits up ramrod straight on the couch, staring at the TV.
“Who said that?”
She’s peering at the TV in a strange way. It’s a quiet part of the program. There’s just some music playing as they show a timelapse of the building.
Felix mewls, and I clutch him around the waist.
“Get down, you.” I lift him off the desk, and he leaps from my arms to the floor.
“What the fuck?” Kayla says to the TV.
My stomach drops as I realize what’s happening. She can hear me.
My hand darts to the mixing desk. The slider that controls my audio has been turned up, no longer on mute. Felix must have knocked it when he jumped up there.
Shit.
I hesitate with my hand hovering over the slider. Kayla looks freaked out, and I don’t blame her, but this is also my opportunity to talk to her, to speak to her without her seeing it’s the broken man she met on the waterfront.
“Hey,” I say into the microphone.
Her eyes go wide, and she jumps up from the couch.
“Who said that?”
She looks around her apartment, and her gaze comes to rest on the TV.
I don’t want to scare her any more than she is already, and I wrack my brain for something to say that isn’t creepy.
“Are you enjoying the show?”
I wince at the inanity of it. But if I say anything personal, she’ll freak out even more.
“How the fuck are you talking to me?”
Her hands rise in a WTF gesture. I don’t know how to calm her down, to turn this around.
“I’ve linked into your TV.”
Her mouth drops open in surprise, making her look fucking adorable.
“How the fuck did you do that?”
Kayla swears a lot when she’s freaking out, which is probably a sign I should leave her alone. But this might be my only chance to talk to her.
“It’s complicated.”
She narrows her eyes at the TV.
“Well, you can fuck right off.”
Picking up the remote, she turns the TV off. I use the opportunity to put my mic on mute. Let her think turning the TV off will solve the problem.
It doesn’t. I’m still here. Still watching.
She breathes heavily, her hands on her hips, her nostrils flaring.
In another moment, she reaches behind the TV and, I’m guessing, yanks the plug out of the wall. Sensible girl. That does cut my connection.
I have no eyes on Kayla, and I feel the loss deep in my chest.
Tapping my keyboard, I bring up the feed to her laptop. It’s dead. I tap some more and bring up her phone.
She’s searching “TV hacked,” which will probably scare the shit out of her even more.
I don’t have access to her phone camera, so I can’t see her face. I can’t see if she’s worried or scared or upset.
I hate the thought of her being any of those things. And knowing I’ve caused it is even worse.
I was stupid to try to start up a conversation. If I’d muted immediately, she probably would have thought it was a network error.
Sometimes I live so long in my online world that I forget this isn’t normal.
I watch the feed from her phone as she scrolls through articles about smart TV hacking. The feed pauses, and I wonder what she’s doing.
If she phones her father now, I’m screwed.
He asked me to watch Kayla, but I don’t think he imagined I’d hack into her TV.
It’s illegal. It’s a breach of her privacy. I shouldn’t have done it. But my need to watch Kayla, my obsession with the curvy beauty, is so strong that I don’t give a fuck.
My fingers tap the desk nervously. If she calls her father, I’ll intercept the call and send it to his voicemail. That’ll give me time to close out operations here and destroy the evidence.
But she doesn’t call her father. Instead, she types in a new search: “IT security Sunset Coast.”
Shit.
She’s bypassing her father and sorting it out on her own. She must realize he’d insist on her coming straight home if he knew someone had hacked her TV.
IT security. It’s what I specialize in. I’m the IT branch of Bronn’s security firm, and we’re at the top of the search.
Shit.
We also claim to provide twenty-four-hour assistance. She taps the number for Bronn’s company. She’s calling Sunset Security. I have to intercept the call.