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The street is busy with loud cars and somehow louder people. There’s a band playing in the bar across the street, but she can only look at him now. There’s a confidence in his voice that stands her nerves at attention.
“I should take a photo of you, the streetlight coming from behind you looks quite nice.” He pulls his phone out of his pocket. She can feel her cheeks burn
“St—no..” She mutters bashfully, turning her head away from the lens and looking down towards the concrete sidewalk below her chair. His gaze, and the gaze of the camera are one and the same, a hot beam tearing a hole into the side of her body. Whether embarrassment or flirtation, she’s affected.
For Nathan, Lia is viewed from behind the screen, his phone settings changed to allow the streetlamp to coat her in near mysterious golden glow. This is where she belongs, in front of him on this screed, things just feel right.
He shows her the picture and she asks for it to be sent to her right away. She nearly instantly puts it up on her Instagram. Before she can get to the do not disturb button, a cacophony of vibrations hit her phone as the likes roll in, but in an even briefer moment those notifications are snuffed out like a candle deprived of oxygen. She stands up and requesting to be pardoned, heads to the bathroom. Nathan sits expectantly. His head twirling at a million miles a minute he’s kept calm only by the benzodiazepine in his blood.
Lia closes the door to the stall and peaks at herself in the mirror, for a while she sees her face and it looks different. For a moment she wonders if this is what she looks like. And in this moment she looks nice, regular maybe. What’s even the harm in regular? She’s not twisted like the funhouse mirror in the bathroom of her apartment. She touches up her lipstick in the mirror and smiles to herself as she pushes the door open to the restaurant. Walking towards their table, she sees the chairs pushed in, some cash on the table and Nathan standing next to it.
“Better head home for the night.”

As they walk through the city streets, the lights of apartments flicker on and off and cars with loud engines test eardrums as they pass through the tunnel under the highway. Lia wraps her arms around Nathan as they head towards his apartment.
There’s a small wine store on the way and Lia stops and asks if she can grab some.
“Of course, let me know what you’d like and I’ll grab it for you.”
“No, no you paid for dinner, this is on me.” She’s insistent and gets her way in this instant. She snags a bottle of red, nothing particularly expensive, but a full litre bottle nonetheless. It gets bagged by the cashier, who’s barely hanging onto consciousness as the clock reads 9:45, their shift ending shortly.
“So what do you do at your apartment alone on a Friday night?” Lia asks.
“Not a ton, I read a little, maybe go for a walk,” he claimed, “Some nights are spent at that bar right up there. I’ll go and grab a beer, have some dinner and head home. I remember a friend of mine saying some nights, hanging out with yourself is all the company you need. No need to be afraid of it.”
“Your friend is smart. I stop myself from doing things I want to do because I am afraid to do them alone. My boyfriend never wanted to do things with me. He liked to game, that was really it.” Lia looked contemplatively up at the sky. “Not that I don’t game; admittedly I do a fair amount.” She was withholding and knew it, but her occupation wasn’t one to introduce in detailed specifics on the first date.
“I dabble as well ahaha,” Nathan confesses, “But only a little, I used to a lot more when I was younger, but I started since university I haven’t.”
I silence fell between them, but it wasn’t awkward per se, it was more a case of two individuals who weren’t sure if the other was lying to them agreeing to find out later.
At the entrance to his apartment, Nathan went to say his goodbye when Lia said, “Do you mind if I pop in for one last drink?”
Nathan’s mind stirred, the hair on his neck rose and he began to shake a little. His heart rate increased and without thinking he said, “Yes, of course.”
She followed him up the stairs to his apartment. Nathan’s knees weakened. Not what he had been expecting, whether or not what he thought was happening was real, but he wasn’t sure he intended it to go this way.
Lia looked at the clean staircase and quaint little floor mats outside the other apartments. In front of Nathan’s was four sheep lined up in a row. She giggled, and Nathan noted, “That was from the woman who lived here before me, but I do like it.”
The apartment was spacious, the door open was across from a small washroom, the hall leading to the living room slash kitchen area was moderately long. There were two rooms on either side of this hallway, one being Nate’s room, which the door was shut by Nathan as they made their way to the living space. The kitchen was clean, with one or two plates in the sink. There didn’t appear to be a dishwasher. Nathan grabbed two wineglasses from his cupboards and plants them on the coffee table, not long after Lia unbags her litre of wine. They both poor a glass and sit on the same seat.
“So was school tough for you, or were you always smart,” Lia laughingly prods him for this info.
“School wasn’t terrible, I had friends and when they couldn’t be there at least I had family. I struggled in school and I could never understand why. It wasn’t like I was dumb, but I just didn’t want to try.”
“I understand, I didn’t want to try in school at all. I nearly flunked my last year I had so many absences.” This was when Lia started her current job, but she makes no mention of this. “I almost knew I wouldn’t go to school. I don’t think my parents care either. They weren’t apathetic either, they just seemed to know I wouldn’t be happy doing it so they never forced it upon me. I’m not doing so bad now, though.”
“I wish that were the case for me. My parents put a lot of pressure on me to succeed. They were saddened by what happened to me in high school, they couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t try. To be honest, I didn’t understand myself. I just was thinking about other things. Just like your story though things sort of worked out, at least on my side of things. My parents can be a little overbearing at times, but I get it. They don’t really believe me when I tell them things.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
Another silence, this one broken by more wine being poured into glasses.
“They pay for a lot of this, I don’t have a job. It lets me focus more on school.”
“That’s good, it must help resolve some stress that portion is figured out for you.”
“It is nice, I understand the privilege that’s involved there and I really try and appreciate it. They did everything they could to set me up for success. I’ll never not be appreciative of that.”
“That’s really nice, it’s funny in a completely different way, my parents did the same for me. Sometimes I think the only reason I was able to succeed was that they really trusted me to go after what it is I truly want in life.”
“What is it that you want in life?” Nathan isn’t aware of this question being a turning point.
“Right now? I’ve been forward enough, I think it’s your turn.” Lia looked into his eyes and does not look away.
Nathan doesn’t initially understand, but his awareness is heightened due to the adrenaline that has been coursing through his veins since the moment he laid eyes on her at the grocery store today. It was kind of hard to believe for him, he really felt like he has known her this whole time, and that fact made everything he’s done since then so much easier. This was honestly the easiest thing he’d done today. He closed his eyes and moved towards her face for the kiss. At first they are just two sets of lips, wine stained and flavoured. She bits his lip and he bits back. He sticks his tongue in her mouth and their tongues dance aggressively against one another. He wraps his arm around her back and guides her down to the sofa. She starts with her hands in his hair and they move down to his back. She takes a detour to unbutton his shirt, he tears it off as soon as the last button is undone. He grabs her by the side of the hip and they both move in sync with another, their bodies like waves moving together.
Nathan is on high alert, this is not how this was supposed to go and yet he can’t hold himself back. They could not go into his room, they could not have sex. She needed to leave soon, but he was no longer making the decision alone.
“Let’s go to your room,” Lia whispered into Nathan’s ear, his hair stood on its end and he was at full attention. “Let’s do it, here, my rooms a mess.” This was a deviation and Nathan knew it, but this is all he had wanted for so long. This is what everything was for.
“I’ll be back,” he says. He wanders into the bathroom and primed and ready is Lia, sitting on the couch, shirt off and confused.
Wanting to surprise him, Lia goes to the bedroom, she thinks maybe that they’d have a chance together.
At dinner, Nathan ticked off all the right boxes. It was almost comical, every feeling and thought she had expressed about what she wanted in a man, Nathan seemed to get it. She really hadn’t believed in love at first sight, but this was as close as it got. As she walked down the hall, Nathan was trying to come to his own conclusions. Concerned about his potential performance, in his left hand, his phone was displaying a video, a video of a streamer name Lia. Lia played games on twitch, she did cosplays and had a rather large male following, she just so happened to live in the same city as Nathan. Nathan was a little drunk and achieving release in this instance was proving to be a touch more difficult than what he was used to, he wondered if he should have just let alcohol dampen his first performance.
Lia walked closer to the door. Her head was starting to wrap around the situation, but only just. Many of the things that Nathan had displayed in terms of her preferences in a partner were things that she had said. She wasn’t sure if she had said them all on stream, but as she slowly remembered each instant and they all were inevitably while she was live, her brain was thinking a thought that scared her.
Nathan switched the video in an effort to make things go faster.
Lia cracked the door to the bedroom. His computer was on and the room was incredibly clean. On his desk sat a bottle of vaseline and tissues. She opened the browser on his computer and typed the letter “L.”

At this point Nathan had released, his legs were weak, and he stood there for a moment in the shower, then he heard a scream from somewhere closer than the living room, he knew the moment that scream rang out that the jig was up, too full of adrenaline to get disappointed he went to race out of the tub to go after Lia, but foolishly stepping on his discharge he lost his footing and slipped, he went to grab onto the shower curtain as he fell, but it wouldn’t hold his weight and thus he awkwardly fell hitting his neck onto the side of the tub.
Lia was crying and raced to get her shirt and cardigan back on. She heard the slamming in the bathroom and thought he was trying to get out of the bathroom. When she heard nothing but the static of the shower, she grew curious as to what had happened. If he was aware of her scream, he certainly would’ve exited the bathroom by now. She slowly cracked the door open she heard as Nathan gasped and sputtered, he was in an immense amount of pain. Lia was utterly confused and distraught, it took not a minute and forty-five seconds for her elation around finding someone to be turned around on her. Nathan’s history was full of her stream. He’d typed her name into AI Deepfake sites, he’d been banned on her twitch channel for lewd comments previously. She had no idea to what extent he’d gone to track her down to try and find her, and the worst part was she was found and she had nearly…

She left the apartment, Nathan still sputtering words in the bathroom. He was alone again.