closer to me. “I don’t know, I am still trying to get a handle on it myself. But it’s something special. I’m intrigued by you. That doesn’t happen too often, for me at least.”
Raine sighed and closed her eyes. She never would have believed it if she hadn’t experienced it herself. It was amazing how erotic, how amazingly vivid the words could be, typed across the screen. There was no sound, yet she could hear each word as if he was whispering it in her ear.
She felt her back arch a little as if she really was being pulled closer to him, and she imagined she could feel his warm breath on her face. Then again, maybe she had just gone without real sex for so long, lame as it usually was, that she was like tinder to a spark—even a virtual one.
JACK SAT BACK and waited to see how she would respond to his request. C’mon, Nilla, sweetheart, talk to me. He couldn’t get over the effect this woman had on him. He was hypnotized. He hadn’t understood why for weeks he would rather be here, sitting on his sofa with a beer and a hard-on, typing pages and pages of conversation, having virtual sex and whatever else they came up with, instead of going out and bringing home a real live woman who could do more than just get him completely hot and then leave him to take care of it by himself.
He was getting impatient with the whole situation; it wasn’t his usual style. Nothing about this was his usual style. He wasn’t a party animal but he’d had a healthy social life that had gone to the dogs lately. He liked to go out, meet women, hang with his friends and have a good time. He hadn’t been with anyone exclusive in a while, but maybe that was because he was spending way too much time sitting in front of his laptop. His pal Greg had called him to go out twice in the last two weeks, and he had made excuses. He said he had to work, when the truth was he really didn’t want to miss time with Nilla.
He muttered to himself, “I must be crazy. Getting desperate in my old age.” Of course, thirty-four wasn’t exactly ancient. The lines appearing on the screen erased his thoughts.
I am sighing as I press into you. I pick up your shirt at its edges, peel it up over your skin, up over your head, and nestle my face against your chest, sucking on your skin, biting you lightly.
Jack sighed, feeling a surge of arousal. Hey, he was human. Having a woman say things like that was the next best thing to being there. The next best thing. But not the best thing. He ignored the doubt that was chipping away at him, and started to respond in kind, when another line appeared, and then another…
I slide my hands down your stomach and wrap my fingers around your erection, squeezing and stroking, loving the feel of you in my hand.” Rider, I want you…I want to make you crazy….”
He felt his heart pound and shook his head, surprised that this was affecting him so deeply. He had been using online networks before most people knew networks existed. His dad had helped him build his own computer, and he’d “talked” to people on the old, slow FIDOnet bulletin boards in the eighties when he was just a kid.
He had literally grown up with the Internet, and it had always been a part of his life—but it had never, ever, been like this. This was a whole new world, a different kind of reality. His jaw clenched as he pounded out the words to her.
“You’ve made me crazy every night, and a good part of every day, for weeks now. I want you to make me crazy for real, Nilla. I want to do the same to you.”
Nothing. The cursor hung like heavy silence between them.
“Hmm, Rider. Are you okay? You don’t seem like yourself tonight.”
Jack shook his head and ran his hands over his face. It was all he could do not to track her down in real life. During the day, he would think of her, something they’d shared, something she’d said, and feel immediately aroused, which wasn’t always convenient. When he wasn’t losing sleep, he dreamed of her at night. Of knowing her. Finding her.
He was an Internet security expert. He certainly had the skills to find her, to get past the pseudonym and find out who she really was. Hell, at his level of expertise, locating her wouldn’t even be a challenge. Even though they used generic e-mails with pseudonyms, it was a simple matter of finding her network address, locating her service provider and making some phone calls.
What most people didn’t understand in the miraculous age of the Internet was that the most common method of hacking wasn’t done with computers, but by finding out the information you needed the old-fashioned way: talking to people who could tell you what you needed to know.
Most people were afraid of putting their credit card number online, but didn’t think twice about handing it over to a waiter who disappeared with it for five minutes. It never failed to amaze him, but those curious social and psychological traits made his work interesting. Computers, he knew, were all about the people sitting in front of them.
A few keystrokes, a few casual requests, and he could know who she was, where she lived and worked, and probably anything else he wanted to know in just a few hours. But he wouldn’t do it, though he damned his sense of ethics to hell. His job was to enforce the rules, not break them himself. Though he was desperately tempted.
“Nilla, baby, I am in knots. That’s the problem. You tie me up.”
“We could certainly try that, if you want.”
Jack nearly broke into a sweat. She could do this to him just with the words. What would the reality be like? There was some kind of wild connection between them, though he didn’t know how it happened, or what to do about it.
He reached down, slid his hand over his crotch, felt the stiffness pushing at the seam of his jeans and dropped his head back, the sharp edge of need burning through him. But this time, it just wasn’t right. He was sitting on his sofa in the dark. Again. Alone.
No. No more of this.
This wasn’t what he wanted, how he operated. It just wasn’t enough anymore, not nearly enough. He sometimes felt as if he lived in front of the screen—it was where he worked, kept up on current events, had his morning coffee and sometimes his dinner—but he was damned if he was going to have his sex life there, too! He typed impatiently this time.
“Nilla, I want to meet you. We need to meet. For real.”
“Not a good idea. I could be fat, bald and seventy-five years old, for all you know.”
He let out a heavy breath. She was trying to deflect him. Disappointment doused arousal as he realized she wasn’t as avid to make that connection as he was.
“Nilla, we’re two healthy adults who are driving each other crazy and then ending up in bed alone every night. I want to kiss you. I want to stop imagining and pretending. I want to see what color your eyes are. What’s wrong with that?”
“I don’t know, Rider. We don’t know each other well enough. This is just a game. I like it this way.”
“It stopped being a game a while ago. For me, anyway. Think about what we could be missing.”
“Like I said, it could be all lies, Rider. How can we know? We are creating a kind of fiction here, right? That’s what this place is for, not truth. But at least here we know that outright. Why do you want to complicate this?”
“Have you lied to me, Nilla?”
He
