Reddit Collection (Fresh-Short #9), DeYtH Banger [best novels to read for beginners TXT] 📗

now! I am calling the police! Leave!"

I didn't even get to finish before he was dashing off my yard and into a car across the street. Before I could even tell the make and model, let alone a license plate, he was gone. All that remained was a crude crowbar on the front step.

Now, it's up for debate what that man was at my house for. I certainly didn't recognize him in the few seconds I looked at him. While this definitely shattered my imagined immunity from danger if the lights were still on, part of me wonders if he might have still attacked if I wasn't awake that night. One thing is for sure though, Tuxedo saved my life that night. I don't even want to imagine what might have happened if Tuxedo wasn't looking out the window that night.

I left myself open to being stalked by a rapist...

 by datgirlnamedblank

 

 

I posted part of this story awhile back, but it was deleted because it focused primarily on something that happened to someone else. Now that it has developed further into a stalking and general creeping story of my own, I figured I might as well return for round two.

I had recently had a relationship end, so I was in rebound mode when a friend introduced me to a guy I found attractive. We ended up hanging out more on our own, hitting it off pretty well, and began seeing each other exclusively, although casually. I wanted to like him, he seemed nice and everything, but my gut instinct told me that there was something off about him. It was several months before I figured out what it was.

I went to stay the night with him one evening, and we decided to get drunk. It got pretty hazy after a point, but I vaguely remembered getting really nervous at a point, making up an excuse to go home, walking myself back, and going to bed feeling rather troubled. I racked my brain for hours trying to remember what had gone wrong as he texted me like everything was normal, and then I finally remembered. We had been discussing some touchy subjects regarding our pasts when he decided to tell me a story about an ex of his. He described in explicit detail how he had violently raped her and "gotten away with it" due to her failure to press charges without a hint of remorse in his face or his voice.

I started ignoring his texts and calls after that. There was about a week where I was getting 20 missed calls and texts a day, although none of it was threatening or creepy, the frequency was way too much. I started placating him with the occasional text claiming I was busy, sick, tired, or otherwise too occupied to talk or hang out, and he actually stopped trying to contact me for several months. During that timeframe, I became seriously romantically involved with someone else and started a customer service-related job in a centralized fairly high crime area of the city. I was dreading the day he would come in to buy something at my place of work, and after about a month of working there, he did. Later that evening, he texted me wanting to get together, so I told him I have a boyfriend, and I heard nothing out of him for quite some time.

I thought he was finally out of my life, but there was one day he came back to the place I work to tell me he factory reset his phone and lost my number, so he wanted me to find him on Facebook. I never did. He began coming to my workplace significantly more often, and I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, but he never seemed to come in when there were other people in the store, and if a lot of people stated coming in after him, he would leave and come back later. There was one day that he stood there for over half an hour, repeatedly telling me how he misses me and whatnot. I had gotten to the point where I didn't react much to anything he said, and it didn't seem to phase him.

There was one day that he had come in right as a large rush was starting, so as usual, he left. After all of those customers cleared out, my boyfriend called me, so I decided to talk to him until the next customer came in. I was pacing around while we talked, and I kept noticing movement outside the window from the corner of my eye, but when I would take notice and look dead on, nothing would be out of place. I positioned myself so that I could see the window in a mirror, and I watched him walk by 6 times, look in the window to see if I was occupied, and quickly leave before he figured I'd see him. Sure enough, when I got off the phone, he came back in, pretending to have forgotten to buy something he needed the first time around.

I ended up getting engaged to the man I was with (still am), and there are a lot of people in his past and my past who aren't very happy about that. People have been doing all kinds of shit to try to drive a wedge between us, but we already know all of each other's dirty laundry, and we're both smart enough to tell fact from fiction when it comes to rumors, so we're good. Well, this creep decided to try to take it to the next level and circulate explicit photos of me from when we were seeing each other to a number of people that my fiance knows. Of course it didn't hurt my current relationship, but we're both pretty pissed at the one who did it. Even after that, he still pulls the stalking and talking shit at my workplace, and there's not really anything I can do about it. I'm really glad I have such a great future husband, because I'd hate to have to start dating all over again and risk getting myself mixed up with another head case like this one...

UPDATE: I'm really late getting around to this, as I've been very busy with my new job where I don't have to deal with this creep ever again. I've seen him around a few times since changing jobs, but he hasn't seemed to see me or tried speaking to me. I'm glad to say that this situation has finally settled down.

The perils of online roleplaying.

 by  wonkytardis

 

 

Hey Reddit!

You know how it goes: Long-time reader, first time poster. This happened when I was a young and impressionable 14, back in 2011/12, and was frequenting online chat sites for role-playing purposes. It was a bit of a bad habit, but as an introvert who didn't have many friends, it was how I did social interaction. I'll say for myself that even now I still have some of the friends I made back then. But let's not talk about them, let's talk about my friend Alex.

Alex was a guy that I met in a Doctor Who chatroom; he sent me a private message for something I had said in the room that I don't remember, and we struck up a conversation. I remember he had really good grammar and he typed paragraph-long messages. He told me that he was two years older than I was and lived on the West Coast, somewhere in California. At the time, I was living with my parents in North Carolina, so it was quite a considerable time difference. Yet he always seemed to have the time to talk to me.

As long-distance friendships often do, we sort of disintegrated. I could tell that he was making valid efforts to talk to me, but I just lost interest and found myself moving on after a few weeks of talking to him. One night he sent me what amounted to an essay's worth of messages describing his love for me, how he just knew that we were meant for each other, yadda yadda yadda. It was completely out of the blue, so I politely rejected him and ended our correspondence. He would continue to send me paragraphs of text every night, talking about our love and how perfect I was, blah blah blah. I eventually blocked him.

Fast-forward a couple of months to early 2013. I wasn't role-playing anymore, and it was the second month of my first serious relationship. One night my phone buzzed with a text message from an unknown number. The owner of said number was apparently looking for a friend of his. I informed him that he had messaged the wrong number, laughed it off, and then we texted off-and-on for the rest of the evening.

Dude seemed pretty nice, and he said he was pleased to have made friends with a supposed wrong number. I concurred. (Still kicking myself for that). As we talked over the next few days I found myself telling him about Alex: what had happened, how uncomfortable it made me, how relieved I was to have found someone else and be in a happy relationship. My new friend was unresponsive for a couple of hours; I just figured I had annoyed him with my sob story and wrote it off. I was woken up from sleep by my phone practically exploding with new notifications from my friend.

It was Alex. He had changed his number just so he could text me and pretend to be a stranger who had the wrong number. He said that he still loved me, that I was a dumb slut for moving on from him, and that I had to break up with my boyfriend and "rekindle our flame" or I would be sorry. Yikes. I blocked him and didn't tell my boyfriend anything.

More months passed and I eventually forgot about Alex. I would still get occasional messages from unknown numbers saying innocuous things like "hey" and "what's up"; I blocked it every time. I wasn't taking any risks from someone I didn't know. It wasn't until I was 16 that shit finally hit the fan.

At this point I had changed phones and numbers. I was facetiming my boyfriend (same one from before), when I got yet another text from an unknown number. But this one was different. It just said, "I'm here." I had no doubt that it was Alex. I said