My Online Boyfriend Was My Roommate

"Baby? Why'd you hang up on me?" Through a bathroom door that is not nearly thick enough, my icecold roommate was making a sound he was clearly trying not to make.

Two minutes earlier I had been under my blanket, red in the face, on a voice call with the guy I'd been talking to online for six months.

Then a line of live chat scrolled through the air in front of me. Nobody else can see it. Only me. The side character is so oblivious it hurts.

She has no idea the guy she's been talking to online is the obsessive male lead she lives with. And she's only ghosttexting for the female lead.

Run now, before you get found out, because if you wait too long you're going to get— I hung up so fast I almost dropped the phone. It buzzed in my hand.

His voice request came up on the screen again. And on the other side of that door. The man was using that voice on me. The one that should be illegal. "Baby." "Take the call.

Please?" Chapter 1 I stood there in that hallway with one wall between us, listening to my boyfriend breathe. I was going to turn around and go back to my room.

Then his voice came again, low and pushed down. "Did I scare you today?" "Baby. Take the call?" "You said you'd give me an hour tonight.

It hasn't been an hour." Inside my room, the phone under the blanket started buzzing again.

I didn't want Caspian to hear that somebody was standing outside the bathroom, so I went back on the sides of my feet. I dug the phone out of the covers.

Incoming call from @clearwater. While I sat there not answering it, the chat came back. Answer him. She's the one who asked him for the call in the first place.

You don't do that and then leave a man hanging halfway through. Okay but the male lead is a LOT more worked up than usual tonight. He's never like this.

Maybe she came on too strong today. I thought back to an hour ago. I'd just gotten out of the shower and sent him two messages with nothing behind them. Baby, pop quiz.

Do you know what "Netflix and chill" actually means? The window said he was typing. Then he deleted it. Then nothing for a long time.

Long enough that I could picture him backing out of the app to look it up. What came back was a row of dots. … I was doing my skincare and didn't answer right away.

Somewhere in there I heard Caspian go into the bathroom. Three minutes later my phone lit up over and over. Baby. Do you actually want to? Isn't that too fast? Voice call first?

You said my voice is your favorite thing. Give me an hour tonight. Please? So I got under my blanket and picked up. He is good at this.

When his voice drops, it stops sounding like it's coming out of a phone and starts sounding like it's coming from an inch away.

We spent an ordinary night the way two people who are actually together spend one. That voice should be illegal. I curled up into a ball under the covers. And then I saw the chat.

That was how I found out the obsessive, possessive guy on the other end of that call was the man I share an apartment with. I couldn't make it fit.

Because the Caspian I know is cold and says almost nothing and stands about a mile out of anybody's reach. We've lived here a year. We don't get through three sentences in a day.

In real life I'm the good girl. Finance degree, straight into a bank, wirerim glasses every morning, quiet enough that people forget I'm in the room.

And for one year I have lived under the same roof as this man. Three sentences a day, maybe.

And for six months of it, I have gotten under my blanket every night and dated him using another woman's name. Chapter 2 Underneath all of it, I really am that person.

The online thing was never mine. I was ghosttexting for the branch manager's daughter. Her name is Wren Shaw and her family has money.

She took the job at the bank the way other people take a pottery class. Her desk is right next to mine. Six months ago she hired me to do it. "Quinn.

I need you to go get somebody for me." I said no on the spot. "Why would you want me? I'm terrible at that." Wren runs hot.

Every night after work she's out with her girls, and none of it is ever serious. "He's paranoid. I sent him two messages and he blocked me." "I don't have the patience for this.

I'm not a slowburn person." "Plus I've got something on every night.

Where am I supposed to find time to chase a man online?" "So I'll make a new account, you talk to him, and once you land him you hand him over." "And obviously I'm not asking you to do it for free." "You're short on money right now, aren't you?

Seven thousand up front." "Another seven when it's done." I was short on money. So I said yes. The account went up under Wren's information. The photo was her, in profile, at a bar.

Tight little top, jean shorts that barely qualified. Leaning back against the bar with a cap pulled low, looking down into her glass like none of it mattered.

You can't see her face. What you can see is the feather tattooed across the back of her shoulder. The name she picked for that account was @onefeather. Same as the tattoo.

Same as her. I logged in as her and added the man she wanted. His handle was @clearwater. Wren was very clear that I had to run her personality, not mine.

Otherwise, when I handed him back, he'd know something was off. So I packed the good girl away. I built somebody hot and reckless and I wore her.

It took three months before he agreed to be my boyfriend. Three months ago, I tried to give the account back. She said she was busy. Three more months, she said.

And over those three months, the man who started out cold turned into somebody clingy. Somebody who wanted to know where I was.

He found out I have a thing for voices, and one night, out of nowhere, he sent me a voice note. "Baby.

Do you like how I sound?" Low, a little rough, with something clean underneath it. It got me. I was under my blanket calling him back before I'd finished thinking about it.

At first it was a normal call. Then a normal call stopped being enough for me. He gave me anything I asked for. If the chat hadn't spoiled it, I never would have heard it.

Caspian and the guy on that call are the same person. Caspian's voice is cold. It keeps you at a distance on purpose.

The one on the phone is obsessive and clingy and will not let go. I could not put those two men in the same body. Right now I was looking at his voice request on my screen.

I sat there. Then I pressed accept. He let out a breath, and it wasn't steady. "Baby. Did you hang up by accident?" My ears went hot.

When I talk to him I get under the blanket, and I pitch my voice into something else entirely. Soft, deliberate, all the way over the line.

It is nothing like the woman anybody sees during the day. And tomorrow morning I hand this account back to Wren. After that, the person under the blanket talking to him won't be me.

Chapter 3 I pushed everything down, got back under the blanket, and put the other voice on. "Mm. It was an accident." "Baby, you're taking forever. I'm getting sleepy over here.

Maybe I should just… go to sleep?" The chat: lmao she knows exactly what she's doing He is DEEP in it right now. You can't give a man half an hour and then quit.

Caspian said it like he was negotiating. "Baby. Twenty more minutes. That makes an hour." I made a small sound that meant yes. Twenty minutes later I hung up right on time.

I sat there with the phone still in my hand. Because the plan was that I go into work tomorrow and hand the account to Wren. She takes over. She meets Caspian in person.

I collect the rest of my money and I bury this for the rest of my life. Up until tonight I'd believed the guy on that account was somebody I would never cross paths with.

Now I knew he was Caspian. That made things complicated. A year ago my lease ran out. I wanted to be close to work, so I went looking for a room in the nice complex near the bank.

I had a roomforrent flyer in my hand when I knocked. The listing belonged to a woman who worked in one of the office towers nearby.

Except I got the floor wrong and rang Caspian's bell. He'd just gotten out of the shower.

He opened the door in a robe with no expression on his face at all. "Who are you looking for?" Caspian is six foot three and built like he does it for a living.

There was water coming off his chest and going down. I am a good girl. I had never had this happen to me. My ears went red and I stumbled through it. "I'm — I'm here about the room.

I think I have the wrong floor." He didn't answer. He closed the door. The woman with the listing said she'd already found someone.

I spent days walking that complex and turned up nothing. On my own I couldn't cover rent anywhere near there. My old landlord gave me three days to be out.

That afternoon I sat on a bench in the courtyard and thought about it. When do I get a home of my own. One nobody can put me out of. Caspian came down with the trash.

He looked at me, hesitated, and said, "Still haven't found anything?" "No. I have to be out tomorrow. I'll keep looking." I got up. I was going to go keep looking.

He stopped me. "I have a room sitting empty. If you don't mind, you can have it cheap." So I rented from Caspian. Three bedrooms, done in something stripped back and severe.

Not one unnecessary object in it. Everything about that apartment told you who lived there. He had the master. There was an office.

The second bedroom, the empty one, came with its own balcony. I loved it. And the rent he named was almost nothing. Two eighty a month. In Harlow City, in that part of town.

The same layout in the same complex lists at fourteen hundred. A normal roommate situation in that building runs six or seven hundred a head. Two eighty is not a rent. It's a favor.

I figured Caspian was quiet trustfund money. That this apartment was one of several things with his name on it.

His clothes come from labels nobody's heard of and cost more than my rent. Any random bottle of body wash in that bathroom runs close to three hundred dollars.

And the apartment lists at fourteen hundred. He charges me two eighty. That night was the first time I actually stopped and thought about it.

Why does a man who buys threehundreddollar body wash like it's soap rent a fourteenhundreddollar apartment to a stranger who rang the wrong bell for two eighty?

Chapter 4 Mine costs eight bucks. I used his once. I couldn't help it. I didn't take much. Just enough to know what it smelled like.

That night I fell asleep and the smell was still in the dream. Light, cool, and impossible to get away from. Like falling asleep with Caspian's arms around me.

If I stayed in this apartment, the ghosttexting was going to come out eventually. So I needed to start looking for a place. I couldn't live here anymore.

It took me a while to get back out from under the covers. I opened my door to go to the bathroom. Caspian was coming out of it. Bare from the waist up with a towel around his hips.

At home he wears a robe. Always. Tonight, apparently, we were being generous. And I'll say it: up close, that stomach is exactly the one in the photos he sent me.

Except the real one moves. Maybe because of what he'd just been doing in there. There is no woman cold enough to see that and have her pulse hold steady.

I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. His ears were still red at the edges. His face was doing nothing, but whatever was in his eyes hadn't gone down yet.

His mouth was flushed dark, like he'd had his teeth in it. And then I thought about the sound he'd been making on that call, the one he was holding back. My whole face went hot.

I looked away and made my voice ordinary. "I'm using the bathroom." "Mm." One syllable, very low, and there was no hiding what it had done to his throat.

I could feel my own pulse in my throat. I started past him. And my arm brushed his. Something went through me from the shoulder down.

I got a trace of him, whatever he wears, cool and clean and hard to place. We both turned around at the same time. There is something in that man's eyes that shouldn't be legal