Chapter 1 echoes in the apartment
No one ever called him by name anymore.
Not at work—where “hey man” or “can you grab this?” sufficed. Not in the apartment complex—where he was just the guy in 3B with dead eyes and a microwave dinner habit. Not even online, where his handle was some forgotten lyric from his teenage years: @endlessstatic89.
He was twenty-nine. Thirty in four months. A number that used to feel like adulthood but now just felt like failure with cake.
Every morning he woke to silence, made coffee that tasted like burnt regret, and stared out the window as the city moved without him.
The apartment was small, but quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that crawled under your skin. He filled it with noise—TV reruns, podcasts, rain sounds on YouTube—but none of it sounded real. The laughter from sitcoms felt like a language he’d forgotten.
His phone never lit up with texts unless it was from spam or his mother asking if he was still alive. He’d answer, sometimes. Just enough so she wouldn’t show up at his door again.
He was in love. Thought he was, anyway. Her name was Leah. She had the kind of smile that made people believe in summer, and the kind of secret that ruined everything. She cheated—no dramatic reveal, no soap opera scandal. Just a slow unraveling, a shadow of someone else’s name on her lips in her sleep, texts that didn’t make sense, a gut feeling that turned out to be a scalpel.
When she left, she said it wasn’t about the other guy. That it was about him. “You’re… hard to reach,” she’d said, like he was an island. “You build walls and then get surprised when no one climbs them.”
He never fixed what she broke.
Now he lived like a ghost—half-here, half-somewhere else, scrolling through days without touching anything real. His friends had stopped inviting him out. His family thought he needed time. He thought he needed a cigarette and maybe a meteor to hit the earth.
Most nights, he scrolled.
Instagram. Reddit. Twitter. TikTok until his eyes dried. Not for fun. Not even to feel anything. Just to not feel everything else. He’d stopped posting a year ago. Stopped liking things too. Sometimes he would look at his own profile and wonder if anyone would notice if it disappeared.
Then, one night, somewhere between a half-eaten frozen burrito and an ASMR compilation, a message slid into his DMs like a spider.
No profile pic. No bio. No mutuals.
He stared at the message for a long time.
The screen dimmed once. Then again. He tapped it to wake it up, as if the words might change.
Let’s play a game.
Three rules: You don’t get to know who I am. You’ll never see my face. And if you tell anyone, I disappear. Do you accept?
No emoji. No flirtation. Just stark, surgical wording. A message that didn’t ask—it dared.
His first instinct was to ignore it. Probably a bot. Or worse, someone bored and cruel. He locked the phone, dropped it face-down on the couch, and went to brush his teeth.
He didn’t stop thinking about it.
It wasn’t just the weirdness—it was the timing. It had been another hollow day. No messages. No calls. No touch. Just him and his echo.
He rinsed, spat, stared at himself in the mirror. His eyes looked tired. His jaw was tense. The toothbrush dripped onto his shirt and he didn’t even care.
Back on the couch, the phone stayed silent. No follow-up message. No “just kidding.” Whoever she was, she wasn’t trying to bait him with spam.
She was waiting.
He unlocked the phone.
His thumbs hovered over the keyboard. He typed:
Who are you?
Then deleted it.
He typed again:
This some kind of prank?
Deleted.
Finally, he typed what felt the least pathetic:
Why me?
The typing bubble appeared instantly.
@venus_spectral:
Because you look lonely.
His pulse jumped. That one hit harder than it should have. His profile pic hadn’t changed in over a year. He didn’t post stories. He didn’t comment on anything. How did she know?
@venus_spectral:
You don’t have to answer. But if you do… I’ll make sure you never feel alone again. Not even for a second.
I can satisfy what you’re too ashamed to ask for.
His throat tightened. He swallowed. Hard.
@venus_spectral:
Say “yes,” and I’ll show you what I mean. Just words. For now.
He could hear his own heartbeat in his ears. Something primal unfurled in his chest—need, ache, hunger. A part of him wanted this. The danger. The thrill. The illusion of intimacy with zero risk of being left again.
Or so he thought.
He typed:
Yes.
Three dots. A pause.
@venus_spectral:
Good boy.
Then, the next message arrived, and it wasn’t innocent. It started simple—descriptions, suggestions, temptations written in velvet and knives. Her words painted fantasies with surgical precision. She knew what buttons to press, what voids to fill.
He read every word.
He read them again.
And when he finally closed his eyes, her voice lived in his head—even though he’d never heard it.
