The Heart Wants Ch. 05-09

We jumped in the car like two horny teenagers, which I guess was only half untrue...

Really, I had intended to back straight out and hit the road... I did.

Instead I found myself kissing her. This time, her hand found its way into my lap, stroking me. My hand went down the front of her shirt this time...

Feeling my zipper slide down I felt her take me out of my pants. It felt so good I had to let my head drop back to the seat. She smiled at me and looked down. Her smile got a little wider, "Not bad white boy."

It was that moment that my phone decided to chirp in my pocket...

I tried to ignore it, instead focusing on kissing Isha while she gave me some more intimate... attention...

My phone chirped again.

And again...

Then it started ringing. I threw my head back in exasperation, holding a finger up to a very pissed Isha... "Just give me a second here, please?"

She ground her teeth at me and I realized...

That was a mistake.

Taking my phone out I saw Laurel's smiling face lit up on the display and reality slammed back into me hard. I turned away from Isha and, embarrassed tucked myself into my pants while thumbing across the face of my phone, answering the phone, "Hello?"

Isha's jaw actually dropped and her eyes lit up in anger.

I could still hear music in the background, but it was faint, "Hey cutie!" her voice was a little on the slurred side. I could hear another voice yell something at her and it sounded like she covered the phone and yelled something back. I waited on the line patiently for her to come back on, "Hey, Rachel and I were thinking about bailing. Do you need a ride home, or are you going home with Isha?"

I looked over at Isha, who had her arms crossed and was staring out the passenger side window.

It was right then that I realized. There was no way I could do this. Well, that wasn't exactly true. I could do it. I could take Isha home and have sex with her all night, but in the morning I was definitely going to regret it...

I could hear Rachel scream something that sounded suspiciously like... no, there was no way she said what I thought she said, because it sounded a hell of a lot like she screamed at Laurel to ask if I wanted to go home with them...

Laurel again yelled something at Rachel.

I snuck another glance at Isha and this time she was giving me a look that told me she wasn't happy about me breaking off from making out with her but that she was willing to forgive me if I gave her a little... immediate attention.

I made my decision...

"I'll be good getting home on my own." I told her as Isha smiled.

Laurel paused a moment, her voice brittle, "Oh... okay..."

I looked at Isha, seeing crankiness starting to seep back into her features.

"I'll uh... see you later, okay?" I asked.

"Yeah..." her voice sounded... off...

Looking at the phone I punched the red disconnect button.

Isha started to lean over the center console, moving closer to me, "Now that we're done being interrupted..." she purred.

I pulled the keys from the ignition, holding them up to her...

She pulled up short, a surprised look on her face.

"I... uh..." I dropped the keys in the cup holder, "I can't do this."

Her head snapped back in surprise, "Excuse me?"

I put my head back on the seat, rubbing my face with both hands as my brain, and my dick, started screaming at me about the decision that I was making, "Look. I'm sorry, but this isn't me. It's just not me."

She ground her teeth, her accent growing stronger as she got madder, "Are you fucking kidding me?"

I looked at her, anger suddenly pouring into me, "Look, Isha, I'm not one-night stand guy. If we go back to my place tonight, what happens in the morning?"

She looked at me like I was crazy, "Do you really care?"

I actually had to think about it for a moment.

Once I had, I looked at her, "I think I do. I'm... I'm sorry. Have a good night..."

And with that, I got out of her car.

Chapter 8

I made it home in about three hours on the bus...

I had to make four bus transfers and still walked about twenty blocks to get home...

It was not what I would call a fun night. The third bus transfer in I got to watch a hobo puke in the back of the bus, and then I got to smell that very same puke for the next twenty minutes or so.

Once I got home, I immediately pulled myself out of my clothes and dropped numbly into bed... alone.

There was a part of me that regretted turning Isha down just for the very fact that I would have at least had a warm body next to me all night...

The only comfort I had was thinking about the fact that had I gone home with Isha I would now be using someone for sex...

I lay on my back, staring up at the light that came in through my little window cast upon the ceiling. I lay there for a very long time, thinking about the decisions that I had made tonight. Thinking about the reasoning that drove them.

My first big question for myself was why I had turned Isha down?

At first, I made the standard excuses. I didn't really have any emotional connection to Isha, and I knew in some deep down part of me, a part that no man wants to admit exists within himself, that that was important to me. Sex was fun, and it was fine but I knew that on some level, for me at least, there was more to it than simply thrusting myself into a woman until I came. It was a time of connection. A time where two people came together as one. Stupid and overly romantic as it sounded there was something magical in the very act and simply throwing it out there only cheapened that magic.

I thought of the good sex I had had, the times when it had been best for me and the common factor each and every time was that it had been with someone I really and truly cared about...

That made me think of Kim, my first girlfriend. The skinny little girl with her too big ears and her heart of gold. I thought about the fact that when I had first gotten into her pants it had been more of a glorified conquest than anything else. I hadn't, at that time, really had any true feelings for her. I had simply been horny and curious, and very, very ready to get rid of my virginity. We had lost it together and while the sex was okay, it just seemed very empty.

I had continued dating her afterward as more of an obligation than any real desire to be with her. I could see afterward that she had an expectation that I stick around...

Just thinking about how immature I was, and the planning that had gone through a much younger me's head made me feel very, very guilty.

Had I really been so selfish that I had planned on simply dating her for a few weeks after I had bedded her? Was I really that shallow?

In the end, it hadn't mattered. The time that I had given myself, that I had promised myself to make it up to her for taking her virginity came and went and as the days sped by I managed to find a deep, unabating love for her. I remembered how full of life she had been. How chipper, how she always made me feel like the glass of life overflowed. I remember her big ears and how she had always been self-conscious about them and how I had always teased her about them. I remembered how she had used to love me nibbling along them when we made out and how in the darkness of us being together physically she had always seemed so happy when I told her that I secretly thought they were the cutest thing about her...

I thought about the fact that she dumped me...

I remembered the day that she told me that I was boring and she thought she was too mature for me. I remembered how she'd replaced me within days with a new, more exciting guy, a guy that then dragged her through the mud of life...

And then I thought about Brittany. Beautiful, athletic Brittany in her cute little volleyball outfit. I remembered the way she used to come to my desk and lean over it, her legs locked, her firm butt held up in the air. How she used to rock it back and forth as she bounced. Her cute little smile, the one where she wrinkled her nose as her eyes lit up like Christmas lights. I remembered how she and I had snuck off in the snow in the woods behind her house late one night. I remembered how tentative we have been, how tender.

Brittany taught me what it was like to be with a girl I really, really truly loved. How good that could be. I remembered stolen moments, little kisses. I remembered track meets where we would sneak off just to kiss and be kids. My melancholy made me think of warm spring days laying out in the pole vaulting pits, the smell of the warm mats and the feeling of her sweaty body next to mine as we talked for hours on end about all the stupid things that kids care about.

I remembered the tears in her eyes when she went off to her school and I went off to mine.

I remembered how we had promised each other that our love was different than everyone else's and that we'd make the distance of one side of the country to the other seem like nothing.

I remembered the year of loneliness. The year of avoiding people just to make sure that I was true to her...

I remembered when she called me and told me that she had met someone else. The way that she had sobbed on the phone as she confessed to me that she had cheated on me.

I remembered the way my heart had broken into a million, tiny, interconnected pieces when she told me that she no longer wanted to make the distance seem like it was nothing. How she wanted to be free of her obligation to me.

I remembered telling her that I understood what had happened. How I had justified to myself that I could happen to anyone at any time, and how I had felt justified in cutting myself off from the world so that I could make sure that was a mistake I didn't make.

Finally, I remembered how hard she had cried as she told me that whether I had forgiven her or not that she couldn't be with me anymore. How she told me that she had changed as a person and how I deserved better than her...

After that, after that pain, that misery, I had locked myself away.

Isha had asked me what girl fucked me up and I had told her that wasn't it, but the truth was, I was fucked up...

I thought about Laurel and the implications of my obsession with her. My brain warned me against pulling too hard on that thread. It warned me against pushing against the door that showed me far too many times how I had attached myself to someone that had no desire to be with me...

And then I thought about Rachel...

Guilt slammed into me as I thought about how I had behaved.

I felt so bad about it all I could do was shake my head and close my eyes. I had behaved like a child with Rachel. Like a horny teenager...

My eyes snapped open as I started to remember her body and how she had looked in that dress...

I had to take a moment of mental inventory and remind myself that I was busy drawing myself out on the rack of my own guilt. I had to remind myself of how I had basically taken a pass at my only friend's girlfriend. I had to remind myself of-

The gleam in her eyes as I had kissed her...

Stop that!

I shook my head like a wet dog, trying to clear the pure, unadulterated sexiness of Rachel from my mind...

My thoughts though would not be shaken. In my mind's eye, I started comparing Rachel to the women I had been with...

Kim was cute and kind and full of life, but she was like a match next to Rachel's forest fire. The energy and life she had was so much more than Kim's childlike glee...

Brittany was a challenge. She was a forest fire too. A life and energy so much like what Rachel possessed. That same kind of energy that took you in and burned you up and made you glad for the heat of her life. It made me realize how much I still cared for the stupid love I still held for her...

Only when I thought about Laurel did Rachel's fire turn to ashes. If Rachel was a forest fire, Laurel was the bottom of the sea. A place cold and filled with wonder that made you want to look in each nook and cranny. A place where even the intense heat of Rachel's energy meant nothing...

I shook my head, forcing the thoughts from my head.

I had to remind myself. I couldn't have Laurel. I couldn't have Rachel. I couldn't have Brittany. Hell, I couldn't even have Kim...

My thoughts spun and spun until I could stay awake no longer...

Chapter 9

I snapped awake at about nine in the morning. Not the gentle waking that was so normal on a lazy weekend morning, but that short drop that seemed to come when you had a dream about falling and woke up a moment before your head went splat on the pavement. I was breathing hard, my heart pounding and I knew that remembered or not, I had just snapped awake from a bad dream...

So I forced myself out of bed. Forced myself to start moving. I took a nice, long hot shower, and I made myself some breakfast burritos...

And then, then I went to work.

My brain would not stop chewing on the idea of people making money playing video games...

I was curious about it. About how Isha and Laurel ran it. About how the whole thing worked. It was a type of job that I had never really ever considered before and being business minded, that made me curious about the viability of it. It also didn't hurt that two people I cared for, Isha and Laurel, were obviously making their living at it...

That people made a living off of playing video games while people sat there and watched... it boggled my mind, and I'd be lying if I wasn't a little worried about them. It seemed so fragile that there was a part of me that genuinely worried about them.

I was also curious and knew my own nature well enough that I was never going to be able to put that curiosity away, at least not until I had sated it...

I spent the day researching it, reading business articles on it. I looked over every analytical figure I could pull about Isha's profile, hell, about her business. Truly, I wasn't stalking her, I was just doing some research. I tried to continue to remind myself of that...

Her page views and followers were impressive, but neither of those actually told me how many subscribers she had and that meant I had no true idea of the type of money that she pulled in. Followers and viewers watched her, but didn't necessarily pay to do so...

I'll be honest. I broke a few laws... technically.

I masked my IP, routing it through a VPN that I paid for every month, and using a little creative manipulation of a whole lot of settings in several different programs I had on my computer I created the false impression that I had a cookie in my browser with a false login positive and managed to sneak into her account.

Okay, so maybe the lawbreaking wasn't so technical. What I was doing was completely illegal. Illegal enough that were I caught doing it, I would most likely be looking at some pretty serious jail time...

The only way I managed to justify it to myself was to take out my trusty leather-bound journal and write out everything I did, making a mental note of how I had breached the servers so that I could file a white-hat report with the companies I was breaching. What I was doing was still illegal as hell, but my general experience with companies was that you could get away with near anything you wanted cyber-crimes wise so long as you filed the appropriate alerts and sent the appropriate emails later detailing how you exploited the system and how they could close up the doors you used to breach them.

It was something I had done in the past, something which gave me a little bit of spending money and something which kept me from having to get a real job while I went to school. Often my measures and techniques got the attention of somebody in some company's cyber-security department and every now and again I would get an offer to attempt a breach on some company or some website...

So, justifying my actions as something which would maybe help them, and probably put some coin in my pocket, I went digging...

I stopped myself for a second, really taking a moment to think about my motivations...

Okay, so sue me, I was curious, and this was low stakes hacking. I wasn't making changes to anything, I simply took the opportunity to take a look at her analytics page. Using a couple other tricks, I could have probably pulled her full subscriber list, but I didn't do that. Hell, if you wanted to get really technical, with this level of access I could have torn the majority of her channel apart, and most people would have thought that she had done it herself, not that I would ever do that. That, however, would most likely get some attention on the server. Simply looking at the analytic dashboard would get very little attention and as such was a very low risk of anyone even catching, much less paying attention to...

I found out she had a little more than five hundred subscribers, meaning she was pulling in about thirteen hundred dollars a month.

Not much...

I moved to her public profile and looked over her affiliate deals. The things she was advertising to her viewers as having her support. I could have probably bounced into her profile, found her email, and then either used a similar trick to fool her email client into thinking I was her or simply used a phishing scam on her to trick her into tipping her password to me, and then gone into her email and dug through to find the details about her affiliate connections. Honestly, I considered both approaches, but the more I thought about it, the more that made me feel like a total stalker...

So, I kept this part of the analysis nice and legal. Looking over her affiliate deals I ran a case analysis to ballpark value on them. My estimates seemed to me like she was pulling in a couple hundred bucks a month from that. Her YouTube presence was nothing.

Taking out a spiral notebook I made a note on that.

Something to talk to her about later...

All in all, I figured she was pulling in about fifteen hundred a month, maybe a bit more if she had a good deal with Amazon on her partnership split. She wasn't rolling in dough, but she was on a roll, gaining subscribers at a nice, steady rate. I looked up her subscriber levels and she was on steady growth at about eight percent per month. That was respectable.

Looking at my watch, I saw that I had been at it for hours. Figuring out the loophole in how to log in under her profile was not easy...

Part of me was tempted to shut it down and start working on some homework I had. It was getting to be about two in the afternoon, and I still had hours of homework that would be due on Monday morning...

I had to know though.

Curious, I started searching for Laurel's profile. It took me about an hour of digging through Twitch profiles on Socialblade, but I found it, LilLinLin...

Cute.

Shuffling my IP through my VPN mask I used the same trick I had come up with to get into Isha's profile to get into Laurel's. Doing my research, I was shocked. Isha was pulling down respectable numbers, but she wasn't even in Laurel's league. Hell, looking at the numbers, it didn't even look like Laurel and Isha were playing the same fucking sport. Isha had five hundred subscribers. Laurel had close to nine thousand. I'll be honest, at that level, I was really tempted to start clicking through the financials in her profile...

I was a good boy though. I took that information and started running a new business model on it. Figure an average rate on each subscriber, depending on the partnership deal she had, a partnership deal by the way that would most likely pay more than Isha's deal, and roughing it out, I figured that she was pulling down better than twenty thousand a month in just her subscriber deals. Add in the fact that her channel was big enough to run ads and that number went up by another respectable amount.