her addiction.
One that was starting to get out of hand, if having to break and enter that day was any indication. The urge was always with her, and it was getting worse. How does one quit exhibitionism?
The possibility of having to do so rankled with her as she approached the intersection where she had taken her pictures that morning. She wasn’t addicted. She just liked the novelty of her pictures. One day the novelty would wear off, and that would be the end of it.
This new obsession had everything to do with Frank and the shitty card he’d dealt her. She needed the pictures now. She needed the pictures to feel, to stamp out the embers of anger and betrayal that still rekindled themselves far too frequently.
As much as she wanted to retreat to the sanctuary of her apartment, she had run out of tea. Tea was her last excuse. As long as she had tea, she could put off going to the grocery store and just pick up her lunch at one of the dozens of shops that surrounded her workplace. She could pop down to the pizza shop at the end of her road, or head in the opposite direction for fish and chips to go, from the pub around the corner, but she would not do without her tea.
She pulled into the grocery store and, before getting out of the car, slipped her hand into her purse to touch her phone, then yanked it away.
I don’t have to look, she thought. Not yet. Not until I get home. There’ll be time enough for that after the dishes are clean.
And so she went shopping, gritting her teeth as she ‘excuse me’d and ‘sorry’d her way from aisle to aisle. By the time she’d amassed a cart full of goods to get her through another week, she was seething. She hated being in large crowds of people, or even small crowds. She’d made it less than an hour and was standing in the checkout line when she caved, reached into her purse and pulled out her phone.
It was a mistake to even look, but she just couldn’t help herself.
One hundred and eleven messages.
She smiled and opened the app.
‘I’ll bet it doesn’t take much to make you wet, Maggie.’
She peeked over her shoulder at the older man standing behind her with a scowl. He probably didn’t even own a computer and got his rocks off with the same VHS he’d had since the 80s, playing it in the same worn-out machine.
She scrolled down.
‘At work, rubbing myself under my desk. Can’t stop thinking about you touching yourself through your panties.’
Her finger quickly swiped through the messages, catching the ones from her favourite readers – though some professed as much, she still couldn’t bring herself to think of them as fans:
‘Gorgeous, but need more of that clear dildo opening you up to get me hard.’
And from a bisexual tattoo artist in Oregon, ‘Would love to bury my face between your thighs.’
And from the couple who kept their own record of their swinging lifestyle, ‘Love it when you wear garters.’
The usual suspects, and a few newcomers, some of whom didn’t even read English and responded in what she guessed was Swedish.
She kept scrolling, contemplating her Sunday performance, when, in the midst of the adoration, a startling phrase caught her eye.
‘Keyes Tower?’
Her blood ran cold as she read on.
‘Can’t believe it. So close. PMed you. Please message me back.’
Keyes Tower.
Her office building.
Someone had recognised it.
Finger shaking, Carrie deleted the comment and dropped her phone back in her purse.
The next few minutes stretched on. She leaned on her cart feeling frozen.
Someone, some stranger, knew where to find her.
* * *
As soon as she threw open her front door she dropped her bags and headed straight for the computer. The damn machine seemed to take for ever to boot up. She clicked the shortcut for her blog and enlarged the last photo she had taken that afternoon.
She had been so eager to take her pictures that she didn’t think about the view from the window. And there it was, behind the lewd woman in the pictures. It was barely noticeable in the corner, but unmistakable to anyone who worked or played downtown: the domed clock tower that squatted in the centre of the city. Behind it, the signal masts from the fortress in the background.
As careful as she had been to turn off geotagging, as careful as she had been to show as little of her apartment as possible, she had given herself away with a single landmark.
Carrie rested her elbows on her desk and buried her face in her hands.
Could it really have been so thrilling just hours ago when she took that picture? Could she really have been flooded with glee over being adored as she stood in the grocery lineup? And now she felt sick.
Since starting her blog, since becoming Maggie, Carrie had been careful to keep the persona separate from her true self. It was why she never showed her face. She wanted the adoration. She wanted the fantasy. She wanted to keep her obsession behind drawn curtains and locked doors.
Someone knew where to find her.
She sat back in her chair and placed her hand over the mouse. Click here, click there, and she reached her account page.
The arrow hovered over the delete button.
Stupid.
She could hear herself talking to Frank that night he had pulled out his camera. ‘No, I’m serious. Once it’s out there, there’s no taking it back. Would you want the whole world seeing you sucking a dick?’ It had become a joke at the time, and in the end she’d agreed to let him take the video, but whenever she thought of it she wondered if he had deleted it when they’d called it quits, or if it was still on the memory card. Or maybe he had uploaded it. If his attempts at sexting after the break-up had been any indication, he probably still had it tucked away somewhere on his hard drive. When they had been together she had trusted he wouldn’t, but now, well, since she didn’t know Frank as well as she thought …
This picture, the one that told the world exactly where she had been when she took the picture, was out there. Even if she took it down, even if she deleted her account, it was out there, and whoever had contacted her would still know she had taken that picture in Keyes Tower.
She went to her private messages, scrolled through the junk she usually ignored and found the message with the header ‘Keyes Bldg’.
Carrie opened the message but didn’t read it, not at first. She needed a minute to brace herself for whatever the message contained, and so she dragged her groceries into the kitchen. She went to the bedroom and changed into a pair of yoga pants and a T-shirt. She poured herself a glass of wine, gulped down half right there at the counter, and returned to the living
