The Forum by Marie Reyes (short books for teens .txt) 📕

it. As she shuffled by, he moved his knees out of the way to make room for her, and she sat gingerly, as if not comfortable, yet she had been there for days. The hot tea burned his lips, so he put it back down to cool a little, admiring his Star Wars mug, before looking at his phone. Something had created some buzz on the forum.

"You're glued to that thing." She snatched it from his hand and put it on the table. He'd barely had a chance to look at it, because whenever he did, she insisted he tear himself away from it. Maybe if she gave him five minutes to check his updates, then he wouldn't feel the need to keep peeking at it. "What?" She picked up the phone when a notification popped up on screen.

 

Lover_Sam: You ghosting me? Why even be on here if you're not going to reply to me?

"Who is this? What is flirt, match, meet? You're chatting with some girl from Chicago. What the fuck?"

It took Aadesh's brain a moment to catch up. He always assumed he had done something wrong, and it took him a while to realize that he hadn't, despite not being able to do anything right these days. He had that horrible, guilty feeling that he had whenever he had to go through customs at an airport. Not that he'd ever done anything wrong, but airport workers were always suspicious by default. "It's not what you think."

"Seems pretty obvious. You're flirting with someone called Samantha online, and who knows what else."

"It's a guy."

"A guy?" Nadia gasped and clicked on the man's profile picture, recoiling in horror, looking at Aadesh as if she had just found out he liked to torture puppies for fun.

"It's not what you think."

An open-mouthed look of horror spread across Nadia's face; her eyes wide as she scrolled through the rest of his chat history. "This is sick."

"Seriously, you're going to laugh when I tell you—"

"What else can it be? You can't wheedle your way out of this one."

"If you're not going to let me explain, you can go." This was the last straw. If she didn't trust him, they didn't stand a chance. They were too different anyway. It was inevitable.

"I can't believe you're not even going to try to justify this."

He took a deep breath. He needed to keep calm. She hadn't given him a chance to explain, yet it was his fault somehow. "Me and some people online wanted to track down the killer in that video we saw the other day. We were trying to do a good thing."

"This is not a good thing. This is..." The look of confused disbelief was stuck on her face like a mask.

"Look at the history on the forum if you don't believe me. We were trying to solve a crime. To catch this person before he does it to anyone else."

"That stupid video. I don't want to hear any more about it. Why would you want to associate with something like that?"

He sighed and softened a little as his defenses went down. It was time to get real, and he had been dreading it. "Because that's who I am. I like true crime documentaries, and crime novels, and horror. I'm not flowers, and rainbows, and chamomile tea."

"If you didn't want the chamomile tea, you could have just said."

"It's not about the chamomile tea, okay. It's everything."

Next, her face softened, as if she realized she had crossed a line, and was now furiously backpedaling. Her voice grew calm. "I'm sorry okay. I haven't been the best girlfriend. I realize when I'm being that way, and it's already too late. I can't stop myself. It's like a sickness. I don't want to be a control freak. It's just... hard." Her head tilted down to the threadbare blue tile-carpet, and she twirled her hair between her fingers, something she would do when she was nervous. She did it a lot on their first date, and it made him want to scoop her up and hold her close.

When she was real with him, and not trying to be perfect all the time, he liked it. He liked her without makeup, wearing one of his oversized T-shirts in the morning, when her hair was all over the place. He liked it when she was honest with him. Shit, why wasn't he just honest with her from the start? Of course, it was going to be a shock to see some message from a dating site. He should have deleted it already. It clearly was nothing to do with anything, as the other victim was unrelated, and did not frequent the dating site.

"Let's start over, shall we?" He smiled, wanting her frown, and the hurt in her eyes to dissolve from her face.

"I know it's totally irrational, and wrong, but could you stop using that forum, and those other websites. It scares me. You never know what kind of psychos are on the other end. I'm just worried about you. That's all"

"Okay." The words leapt from his mouth before he had time to mean them or think them through. He just wanted her happy again. It was probably for the best anyway. He needed to concentrate on his career, which was flat lining. He had even asked his old boss for some shifts, as he wasn't earning enough with the comedy. Nadia laid her head on Aadesh's lap as she laid across the sofa. She twisted her head to look up at him with her big brown eyes.

"We're okay, aren't we?" Something about her intonation, told him this was more of a rhetorical question, or a statement, than an actual question, but her voice wavered with uncertainty. Her deep eyes glistened in the lamp-light, and her long hair splayed out across his lap. Why