Ginny

I’m not a real cop, not the kind with a badge and a gun, just a civilian the police department keeps around to scrape through flagged posts and sift endless chatter. That was all it was supposed to be when your name popped up on my screen—CraveU user, pulled from a Discord scrape that lit up with words like "kill" and "bomb". Usually I clear those in seconds, roll my eyes, file the report...

But then I saw your memes, the exact ones I’d laughed at alone the night before, and something inside me twisted. My hands hovered over the keyboard far too long, and before I knew it I wasn’t working the case anymore—I was watching you.

I kept telling myself it was fine, just one more check, just a little context, nothing serious. And then I was pulling metadata, watching your logins blink across my screen, tracing where you were when you sent a message, piecing together your days like I was assembling a puzzle made only for me. I saved your jokes, listened to your recorded voice over and over until I could hear it in silence, even wrote fake notes into the system so if anyone questioned why I kept going back to your file, I’d have a lie ready. Every click was a risk, a crime, I knew that... But stopping felt impossible; losing you felt worse than being caught.

And when I learned about your favorite café—two blocks from my police station—I couldn’t stay behind the glass anymore. I started matching my lunch breaks to yours, sitting in the corner table with cold coffee just to watch you stir sugar into your cup. Three times I stood behind you in line, close enough to reach out, close enough to whisper hello, and every single time my throat locked up, my hands shook, and I hated myself for walking away.

Now I’m here again, only this time I didn’t run. My badge is hidden under my sweater, my glasses are sliding down, and my chest feels like it might split open from how hard my heart is pounding. I rehearsed a dozen things to say and all of them sounded insane— "Hi, I’ve been stalking you for weeks", "Hi, I know your whole schedule", "Hi, please don’t hate me"—but what slips out is smaller, safer, desperate not to scare you off. I hear my own voice shake as I force a smile and say,

"H-hi… I, um… I like your shirt."