𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐒 𝐖𝐀𝐒 𝐀𝐋𝐋 𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐘𝐎𝐔 | 𝐊𝐔𝐑𝐓. 𝐊
CHAPTER ONE
After a late-night stream leaves you exhausted, overstimulated, and desperate to avoid a passive-aggressive PR email, you order a Spree to retrieve a forgotten pair of sponsored heels from your studio.
The driver is Kurt — better known in your chat as kurtworld99 — one of your most devoted viewers, and what starts as an awkward coincidence quickly turns into something harder to laugh off.
He knows too much about you for someone you’ve never really met, remembers details you barely remember sharing, and looks at you with the unsettling familiarity of someone who forgot he was still a stranger. By the time he learns where you live, the coincidence feels less like an accident than the beginning of something he had been imagining long before you arrived.
pairing: yandere!kurt x camgirl!reader
tags: kurt kunkle x reader, stalker!kurt, streamer!reader, camgirl!reader, parasocial relationships, rideshare driver kurt kunkle, late night los angeles, unsettling intimacy, internet fame culture, chronic oversharing, voyeurism, invasive attention, reader is deeply lonely unfortunately, kurt is trying sooo hard to seem normal, awkward men are terrifying actually, soft psychological horror, toxic romance, obsessive behavior, tension tension tension, kurt being weird as fuck, tyler catastrophe mention, brighton biter mention
warnings: parasocial relationships, stalking, obsessive behavior, kidnapping, stockholm syndrome themes, murder, violence, blood/injury, psychological manipulation, coercion, emotional dependency, toxic romance, delusional thinking, mental illness themes, manic episodes, voyeurism, ASPD themes, NPD themes, HPD themes, parasocial delusions, manic episodes, delusional attachment, obsessive behavior, emotional instability, distorted perception of intimacy/reality, toxic dependency, erotomania themes, invasive attention, loss of privacy, camgirl/sex work themes, explicit sexual content, unhealthy attachment, isolation, anxiety/paranoia, blurred boundaries, internet fame culture, misogyny, emotional instability, reader discomfort, dark romance themes, kurt kunkle being kurt kunkle, this gets progressively worse
wc: 11.3k
from jules: wow okay 😭 heavy one here guys.
this is EXTREMELY out of my comfort zone and definitely darker/more psychological than anything i normally write, but i got way too obsessed with the idea of parasocial relationships and kurt’s particular brand of awkward sincerity mixed with… literally everything else wrong with him.
also kurt is pathetic in this btw. deeply concerning. but pathetic.
also yes the chat message choices physically hurt me to write.
i’m not very happy with how this turned out so don’t be surprised if one day soon i just completely rewrite it <3 OKAY THANKS BYE MWAH
The paid portion of your brilliant titled “Squirt Sunday” stream had ended almost thirty minutes ago, but nearly twelve thousand people were still watching you drag an oversized hoodie over the pink lace straps digging into your shoulders while you came down slowly beneath the studio lights.
Not even for the actual content anymore. Half the time people stayed just to watch you turn back into a person afterward.
People loved pretending this was the real you: hoodie pulled over lingerie, makeup half-gone, voice rough from hours of giving them something to want.
Like watching you wipe off eyeliner and slowly turn back into a person meant they had been let in on something intimate, some softer private version of you they could carry around afterward.
You never understood why.
Without the sexual part, you mostly felt like you disappeared into yourself, like wanting was the only language anyone had ever taught you to mistake for love.
Sometimes the actual stream felt easier than the hour afterward. During the paid portion, at least, there was still a version of yourself to hide inside.
By one in the morning, your bedroom had stopped looking like a bedroom and started looking like the aftermath of a very specific kind of mental illness.
Or worse — a successful woman’s apartment according to men with podcast microphones.
Pink LED lights glowed dimly against the walls while your ring light still burned hot beside the desk, bleaching one side of your face every time you leaned too close to the vanity mirror balanced against your monitor. Makeup wipes littered the desk beside tangled charger cords, half-empty Celsius cans sticky around the rims, and an eyeshadow palette with one shattered shade you kept pretending you were eventually going to repress.
One heel lay overturned near the edge of your bed where you’d kicked it off sometime during hour two after somebody tipped a hundred and fifty dollars to watch you dance in six-inch platforms that wrecked your balance and made your ass look good enough to justify the possibility of a concussion.
Chat moved too fast to properly read anymore, individual messages smearing together into one endless stream of thirst, bad opinions, unsolicited therapy, and people revealing deeply concerning things about themselves for ten dollars at a time.
You squinted at your reflection while dragging a makeup wipe beneath one eye hard enough to sting in its wake.
“Whoever just tipped twenty dollars to tell me to fix my eyeliner,” you muttered, squinting toward chat, “count your fucking days.”
The skin beneath your eyes already felt raw from scrubbing at it for the last twenty minutes. Tomorrow morning’s makeup artist was absolutely going to complain about it again.
jesuslovescumsluts: pop one mommy
daddyissues77: leave her ALONE 😭
fingeringfrank: she’s one vape hit away from astral projecting
luvbot222: the eyeliner survived six hours it deserves a medal
kurtworld99: Told u chat was being dramatic 😂
hotnsingle44: wait lowkey he’s right
Another donation alert chimed through your speakers.
kurtworld99 donated $10: SEE i told you 😂😇
You laughed despite yourself, the sound rough around the edges after six straight hours of talking. “Oh my god, Kurt, you are literally the reason I’ll never develop healthy self-esteem.”
Kurt had been around long enough that your eyes found his username automatically before your brain really registered you were looking for it.
kurtworld99: IM JUST HONEST 😂
angelbabyx: kurt defending his queen once again
daddyissues77: bro folded under ZERO pressure
kurtworld99: Somebody gotta defend her in here! 😂
“Thank you for the ten gifted, jesuslovescumsluts,” you said automatically, barely finishing the sentence before the message disappeared upward beneath the rest of chat.
You glanced toward the camera with the exhausted seriousness of somebody about to commit a misdemeanor. “Actually, maybe some of you needed to get bullied a little harder in high school.”
You tossed the ruined makeup wipe toward the trash can beside your desk, missed by at least two feet, and decided almost instantly that sounded like tomorrow-you’s problem.
“No because this is literally how cult leaders get started,” you informed chat, leaning back farther in your chair. “You people validate me way too fast. I could become genuinely evil in this environment.”
Somebody immediately tipped five dollars just to announce that evil women were their type, which only earned them a long, exhausted sigh.
Chat exploded again while you reached for your water bottle, knocking your knee against the desk hard enough to rattle two empty Celsius cans before curling one leg beneath yourself in the chair.
Most nights ended like this somehow.
Exhausted. Overstimulated. Peeling yourself slowly out of streamer mode while thousands of strangers watched you remove mascara and complained every time you threatened to log off.
Some nights chat stopped feeling like people entirely and started feeling more like electrical noise — constant movement, constant attention, something your brain had quietly trained itself to reach for before you even realized you were lonely.
Ending stream had become its own performance at this point. Every time your cursor drifted toward END STREAM, chat suddenly sped up again like the room could physically feel you trying to leave it.
acidburnzz: who WOULDNT follow a cult leader with good lip combo
chatspam101: collab with bobby PLEASE
peachykeen: NOT BOBBY BASECAMP 😭
acidburnzz: didn’t a girl fall off his roof at his last party?
luvbot222: no fr he acts like every conversation is a podcast clip
penissucker: i want to peg bobby
daddyissues77: tiktok rizz party mention??
sussyimposter91: yo is nobody gonna acknowledge the pegging comment
jackattack: WAIT are you still going to Bobby’s thing tomorrow???
A groan slipped out of you immediately at the sight of the message.
“Unfortunately,” you sighed, dragging the sleeve of the hoodie over half your face, “apparently networking is important for my career or whatever.”
The inside of the hoodie still smelled faintly like vanilla body spray, sweat, and expensive setting powder cooked beneath studio lights for the last six hours.
At this point you were probably going to smell vaguely like setting spray until Thursday.
“I hate going to influencer parties alone,” you admitted, unscrewing your water bottle. “Everybody at those things talks like they’re waiting for somebody to hand them a podcast microphone.”
Half the time you couldn’t tell whether people were actually talking to each other or just clip farming in real time.
“Everybody already knows each other and then there’s just me standing there pretending I understand what looksmaxxing is.”
user4410: I’ll go with you fine shyt 😉😘
basementboy92: imagine being trapped in a room with thirty people who all think they should have a podcast
basementboy92: Is it a orgy party?
angelbabyx: just dont go honestly
“Honestly? Tempting,” you admitted, rubbing absentmindedly at your cheek while squinting toward the vanity mirror beside your monitor
You seriously needed to find your glasses.
Your makeup had started giving up hours ago, eyeliner smudged faintly beneath your lashes now that the actual performance part of the night was over.
“Last time I went to one of Bobby’s parties some crypto guy spent forty straight minutes explaining NFTs to me like it was foreplay.”
frogsmoker88: HORROR STORY
luvbot222: you da real nft
penissucker: “dream guest on my podcast?” deadass 😭
kurtworld99: You always joke harder when chat actually annoys you 😂
kurtworld99: Wait, that sounded sus my bad 😥
joemamakeery: sybau squirts world 99
jesuslovescumsluts: bobby the kinda guy to molest a homeless man and clickbait it and somehow make it inspirational
“No literally,” you said, pointing accusingly toward the monitor like Bobby could somehow hear you through it. “Every conversation with that man turns into a TED Talk against your will.”
acidburnzz: “heh.. present!” ass dude
ghostgirl444: bobby talks like he learned human interaction from alpha male podcasts
Another donation notification chimed softly through your speakers.
kurtworld99: You’re way funnier than he is anyway 😇
Your eyes found the message automatically in the blur of chat, which was annoyingly nice to realize.
“Oh my god,” you laughed softly, reaching for your water bottle. “You guys are such saboteurs.”
You caught your reflection in the preview monitor while you drank and straightened automatically before the realization caught up to you a second later.
The stream had already been over for almost thirty minutes.
Even alone, your body still adjusted like somebody was watching.
Streaming had probably rewired something irreversible in your brain chemistry at this point.
daddyissues77: KURT SHOOTING HIS SHOTTT
kurtworld99: IM JUST SAYING 😂
user1023: lowkey he fine tho
basementboy92: BOOOOO
kurtworld99: This stream got me through my shift tonight 😎
You slouched deeper into the chair until one knee knocked the desk hard enough to rattle three more empty Celsius cans, then curled one leg beneath yourself while chat raced upward across the second monitor in a blur of usernames, emojis, and people treating your exhaustion like bonus content.
The content itself wasn’t even the part that got to you anymore.
It was everything after. The slow dividing of yourself into smaller, easier pieces for strangers to keep taking home with them.
By the end of the night, it sometimes felt like too many versions of you were still awake at once: the one on camera, the one smiling through donations afterward, the one pretending attention didn’t start feeling a little bit like oxygen when you got tired enough.
The real one always got harder to locate after midnight.
prettygirl94: wait are u actually going tomorrow??
ghostgirl444: wear the black dress from ur birthday stream!!!
mothgrl: NOOO the silver one w the slit
kurtworld99: WAIT yes the black one!!! It actually changed lives 🤣
Your eyebrows lifted slightly. “Jesus, Kurt,” you snorted, reaching blindly through the mess on your desk again. “Do you take notes during streams or something?”
The joke felt light enough when you said it that you barely thought about it afterward.
Kurt clearly took it more personally.
Another donation chimed before you’d even found the lip balm.
You’d started recognizing some people in chat by typing patterns alone. Some viewers changed usernames so often that names barely mattered anymore; you knew them by cadence, punctuation, the specific ways they tried to be noticed.
kurtworld99 used too many emojis and always sounded like he was leaning too close to the screen.
A quiet laugh slipped out as you twisted sideways, still feeling blindly through the disaster zone of your desk for the lip balm you swore had been there ten seconds ago.
jerkilisouos: dudical was SAT UP for that question
hotnsingle44: bro remembers EVERYTHING 😭
kurtworld99: What can i say im observant 😂
“That is such a bold thing to say somewhere other people can screenshot it.”
angelbabyx: LMFAOO
kurtworld99: Nah chat just doesn’t pay attention enough 😇
certifiedhater: BROTHER ITS JUST YOU
“See, that is exactly the kind of sentence you maybe workshop privately before posting, Kurt.”
You shook your head, still smiling faintly despite yourself, and leaned down to peer beneath the desk, because apparently the lip balm had chosen tonight to enter witness protection.
When that also turned up nothing, you shoved a hand through the layer of random bullshit covering the desk — phone charger, makeup wipes, more empty Celsius cans sticky around the rims, one press-on nail you’d lost sometime around midnight and apparently chosen not to acknowledge until now.
Then your fingertips stopped amongst the clutter.
“Wait.”
The word came out quieter than you meant it to, and for some reason the room seemed to notice.
For half a second, your exhausted brain started running through every possible emergency with absolutely no useful order.
ghostgirl444: everyone got quiet at the same time im scared
user1023: WHAT
jesuslovescumsluts: bro kurt decided it was your time
peachykeen: WHY DID U SAY THAT LIKE U HEARD SOMETHING 😭
basementboy92: girl dont scare me like that at 1am
“Oh my god,” you groaned, dropping your forehead against the desk hard enough to regret it immediately. “My shoes.”
angelbabyx: ???
jackattack: WHAT ABOUT THEM
luvbot222: people are dying kim
daddyissues77: post nut clarity hitting her live on camera
“The stupid shoes for tomorrow,” you mumbled into the desk. “The brand sent them for Bobby’s party and I left them at the studio”
You could already picture the email if you showed up tomorrow without wearing them. PR girls had always somehow figured out how to make exclamation points feel like threats.
“And if I don’t wear them tomorrow, some twenty-two-year-old PR coordinator named Chloe is going to send me an email written entirely in passive-aggressive smiley faces.”
frogsmoker88: GO GET THEM
kurtworld99: okay but i KNEW she forgot something 🤣
peachykeen: girl call a spree
user4410: no shot ur driving anywhere after three orgasams😭
jesuslovescumsluts: girl CLOCK OUT
You paused, eyes catching on Kurt’s message before the rest of chat swallowed it.
kurtworld99: WAIT the melrose studio is still open i think 😂
“…Why do you know which studio I use?”
basementboy92: OH MY GOD 😭
angelbabyx: kurtworld99 lore deepens
certifiedhater: hes in your walls
basementboy92: kurt knowing lore no one else remembers is killing me
kurtworld99: WAIT no u mentioned it during a stream once 🤣
A laugh slipped out through your nose before you could stop it, and you shook your head at the monitor. “See, this is exactly why you scare me a little bit, Kurt.”
kurtworld99: WOW okay 😂
peachykeen: not her calling him out LIVE
basementboy92: bro got humbled in 4k
ghostgirl444: this man studying streams like hes applying for citizenship
You lifted your head with a long, suffering sigh, already regretting the decision you were clearly about to make.
“You people are genuinely horrible influences,” you informed chat while already opening the Spree app.
user1023: STREAM THE DRIVE
peachykeen: NO don’t die your so sexy ahaha
acidburnzz: everyone smile we are gonna be in the netflix documentary!
kurtworld99: Be safe 🙃
You laughed under your breath before finally clicking END STREAM.
The smile stayed on your face for a second after the stream cut, then faded once there was nobody left to react to it.
And just like that, the apartment went quiet.
No music, no notifications, no constant blur of messages moving faster than your eyes could follow. Just the low hum of your ring light and your own reflection staring back at you through the darkened monitor.
The apartment always felt bigger once nobody was watching you inside it.
You barely glanced at yourself in the mirror while pulling on sneakers, too tired to decide whether the smudged eyeliner made you look exhausted or just human.
One shoelace dragged behind you all the way down the apartment stairs, catching beneath your sneaker every few steps before snapping loose again.
Which was how, less than five minutes later, you ended up standing outside your apartment building in an oversized hoodie, waiting for a white Spree sedan like every cautionary tale you’d ever ignored on purpose.
Nothing good had ever happened to a woman standing alone outside her apartment building at one in the morning waiting for a rideshare.
Besides, people with good survival instincts probably didn’t spend six hours livestreaming their orgasms to strangers and then decide midnight errands were where they drew the line.
You checked the Spree app three separate times in less than thirty seconds, like the tiny car icon might suddenly speed up out of respect for your suffering. The cold air felt sharper than it had any right to against skin that had spent the last six hours baking beneath studio lights, and you tugged your sleeves farther over your hands as you shifted your weight on the cracked sidewalk near the curb.
The city always felt strangely suspended this late at night, never quite exactly, because Los Angeles didn’t know how to do quiet, but softer around the edges somehow. Music drifted faintly from somewhere down the block, muffled by walls and distance, while headlights moved lazily through intersections like background extras in a scene nobody cared enough to cut.
Maybe it was the silence more than anything, the sudden absence of your own voice layered beneath music, donation alerts, and thousands of people talking at once. No chat moving too fast to read. No donation alerts interrupting your thoughts every thirty seconds. No little burst of attention arriving just in time to keep you from sitting alone with yourself too long.
Just the buzz of a dying streetlamp overhead and your reflection ghosting faintly across your phone screen every time it dimmed.
For a second you actually missed the chat noise.
Which felt pathetic enough that you immediately pretended you didn’t.
Your phone buzzed before you could justify checking the app a fourth time.
Your driver has arrived.
You stared at the notification for one beat too long, thumb hovering over the screen like there was still some alternate version of you who might cancel and go back upstairs.
Headlights swept slowly across the street a second later before a white sedan eased toward the curb and stopped directly in front of you.
You pushed yourself upright, too tired to examine the decision any further as you stepped off the curb toward the passenger door.
The handle felt cold against your palm, metal chilled from the night air. Your acrylic nail clicked once against it before you pulled.
For half a second, your hand stayed there.
Not long enough to understand why. Just a quick, shapeless flicker somewhere beneath your ribs before exhaustion smothered it back down again
Just get the shoes, go home, and go to bed.
You slid into the passenger seat, balancing your phone awkwardly against your thigh as the door shut behind you with a dull, heavy thud.
The driver leaned halfway across the center console the second you looked up, and something near the dashboard blinked red in your peripheral vision before disappearing again.
He smiled immediately in that over-practiced customer-service way rideshare drivers mastered after too many late nights with too many strangers.
The car smelled like stale fries, old fabric, and so much citrus air freshener it burned slightly in the back of your throat. Warm air pushed steadily through the vents despite the July weather, which only made the citrus sharper every time you breathed in.
“Hi,” you said, reaching for the seatbelt. “Sorry in advance if this ends up being the most depressing ride of your night.”
“Oh my god.”
The response came so fast your hand stopped halfway to the seatbelt buckle.
You looked up properly now.
The driver stared at you with the kind of startled recognition you were used to seeing through screens, not three feet away in real life.
“Wait—” The word burst out of him so fast he was already leaning farther across the center console before he seemed to realize he was moving. “No fucking way.”
For a second he just stared at you outright.
He looked young. Around your age, maybe a little younger. Messy brown hair kept falling into his eyes every few seconds, and every time he pushed it back, it immediately fell forward again like his body physically rejected staying still. A pair of headphones hung crookedly around his neck, one ear cushion pressed awkwardly against the collar of his hoodie like he’d forgotten they were there hours ago.
There was something unpolished about him in a way that didn’t immediately feel threatening. His reactions moved across his face too quickly, like his brain hadn’t figured out how to send things through the proper channels before they reached his mouth. In another context — a party, a gas station, some terrible influencer event where everyone was pretending not to look at themselves in reflective surfaces — you probably would’ve flirted with him without thinking twice about it.
Even sitting still, he looked like he was barely keeping himself contained. One knee bounced hard enough beneath the steering wheel to rattle the half-empty Monster can in the cupholder.
“It’s actually you,” he said again, shaking his head once like saying it out loud might make it start making sense. “Holy shit.”
Each time he said it, the words seemed to land harder on him.
A small smile tugged at your mouth before you had time to decide whether you actually meant it.
“Uh,” you laughed softly, tugging your sleeve farther over your hand. “Yeah. Hi.”
The response came out with the same practiced friendliness you always reached for when somebody recognized you too fast, before you’d had time to figure out whether you were flattered, uncomfortable, or just tired.
There was always that strange little shift where a conversation stopped being a conversation and became something you were expected to manage.
His entire face became radiant the second you answered him back.
Like your voice had finally confirmed something he still hadn’t fully believed was happening.
“Sorry,” he said quickly, shoving a hand through his hair only for it to fall right back into his eyes. “I just—Jesus Christ. I literally had your stream open like twenty minutes ago.”
Like he’d been part of your night long before you ever got into his car.
He scrubbed a hand over his mouth, trying and failing to pull himself back under control, and for the first time you noticed the tired shadows beneath his eyes.
“I almost said hi in the Spree chat before I picked you up,” he admitted. “But then I was like, okay, maybe don’t announce yourself before the ride starts. That’s probably how you end up in a documentary.”
It should’ve been nothing. Viewers had said stranger things to you with far less embarrassment attached.
But hearing it from three feet away inside a locked car changed the shape of it somehow.
He laughed again, quieter this time, the sound still carrying that stunned little edge like he hadn’t adjusted to you being real yet
“This is actually kind of insane,” he muttered, glancing toward you again before forcing his eyes back to the windshield. “Like, what are the odds?”
You tugged your sleeve farther over your hand again and only noticed because the cuff was already stretched over your knuckles.
Nothing about him felt openly threatening, which made your own discomfort harder to justify.
It was more the unsettling realization that someone could feel familiar and still be a complete stranger.
Online, Kurt had been easy to flatten into the rest of chat.
Another username moving too fast up the screen, another burst of emojis, another person existing safely behind pixels and irony.
Sitting beside him now collapsed that distance faster than you knew what to do with.
It felt a little like seeing a teacher at the grocery store as a kid and realizing, with mild horror, that they existed outside the classroom
Except this was worse.
Teachers didn’t usually know what you looked like naked.
They definitely didn’t know what your face looked like right before you faked an orgasm for twelve thousand people.
Or what your real laugh sounded like after midnight.
The longer he rambled, the more something about him pulled at your memory with an irritating little sense of recognition.
The voice, the restless energy underneath every sentence, that same overly enthusiastic friendliness that showed up in your chat almost every night around two in the morning.
Your eyes dropped to the phone still glowing faintly in your hand.
DRIVER: KURT K.
The letters sat there, ordinary and black against the app screen, while your brain took one stupid second too long to understand them.
You’d been trying to place him since the moment he opened his mouth, apparently, and your exhausted brain had waited until now to be useful about it.
Oh.
Oh, fuck.
Kurt’s expression changed almost immediately the second something shifted on your face, like he could physically see the realization happening in real time.
kurtworld99.
“I’m Kurt,” he said, brightening once he realized you’d connected it.
“Kurtworld99,” he added, like he wasn’t sure whether saying it out loud would make the whole thing better or significantly worse. “From your streams?”
You stared at him while the situation rearranged itself into something stranger than it had been ten seconds ago.
Then you laughed, because apparently that was the reaction your body had chosen before consulting you.
“Wait—” You fumbled with the seatbelt, the strap catching against your sleeve before you yanked it across your lap.
“You’re kurtworld99?” Saying the username out loud made it sound even less like a real person and more like something that should have stayed trapped in chat.
“Yeah,” he said, the word coming out too fast. “Yeah. Sorry, this is just—” He laughed under his breath and dragged a hand over his mouth again, like he needed somewhere to put the reaction before it got too big. “This is kind of blowing my mind right now.”
He reached for his hair, then the steering wheel, then seemed to realize he’d done both and gripped the wheel harder than necessary.
He exhaled hard through his nose before immediately reaching for his hair again, then the steering wheel, fingers tightening briefly against it like he needed somewhere to put all the nervous energy vibrating through him.
He reached over to turn the music down even though it was already barely audible, fumbling with the knob until the car went almost completely quiet.
“I literally almost canceled,” he admitted, glancing toward you and then back at the windshield too fast. “I thought somebody was fucking with me.”
The tiny camera clipped near the dashboard trembled when his knee started bouncing harder beneath the steering wheel. “I saw your name pop up and I was like, no way. Like actually no fucking way.”
The car stayed idling at the curb long enough for another set of headlights to sweep over the back window.
Kurt kept talking anyway, like the ride itself had become secondary to whatever impossible thing had just happened to him.
“That’s actually insane,” you said, laughing because it seemed safer than letting the silence sit there.
His shoulders loosened a little at the sound, relief moving across him so plainly it almost made you feel mean for noticing.
“Right?” he said, finally throwing the car into drive hard enough to jolt both of you forward. “This is literally the kind of thing people repost with Subway Surfers gameplay underneath and captions like, ‘the universe is insane.’”
You laughed again, quieter this time.
Kurt’s grin flashed briefly across his face before he looked back toward the road again like your reaction had affected him more than he meant to show.
Somewhere behind you, another car honked and swerved around the sedan. Kurt flinched, mumbled something that might’ve been “my bad,” and eased into traffic while neon signs dragged pink and blue across the windshield.
Once the car was moving, you finally had enough room in your head to look around properly.
The car looked less like a rideshare and more like a livestream setup that had slowly infected every available inch of space.
Fast-food receipts and crumpled napkins had been shoved beneath the passenger seat beside tangled charging cords and loose camera mounts, while an old hoodie sat crumpled in the backseat like he’d cleaned in a panic and given up halfway through.
Cheap LED strips had been taped beneath the dashboard, throwing dim blue light across scratched plastic, old coffee stains, and a piece of tape labeled battery??? in black Sharpie. The inside of the car had the same exhausted curation as streamer bedrooms after long broadcasts, like everything visible had been arranged for an audience that might appear at any second.
Your eyes snagged first on the dashcam mounted beneath the rearview mirror.
Then another clipped near the passenger window with wires hanging toward the floorboard.
And then another near the dashboard angled inward toward the seats themselves.
Tiny red recording lights blinked from different corners of the car, reflecting against the dark windows until it became hard to tell how many cameras were pointed at you and how many only looked like they were.
“Jesus,” you muttered, glancing around again. “How many cameras do you actually have in here?”
“Oh.” Kurt followed your gaze toward the dashcam, then rubbed quickly at the back of his neck. “Yeah. Sorry.”
He reached up to adjust the dashcam, though all he really did was touch it and let his hand drop again.
“I kinda record everything.”
Your attention returned to one of the tiny red lights blinking near the dashboard.
“Wait,” you said, looking around the car again. “Are they recording right now?”
You heard how casual your voice sounded and hated that too, like some part of you was still trying to file the cameras under rude instead of frightening.
Kurt blinked once. “Oh. Uh—yeah. Sort of.”
Your smile stayed where it was for one beat too long before it slipped.
All at once, you became aware of where your face was pointed.
You resisted the stupid urge to check your reflection in the window.
“What does ‘sort of’ mean?”
“Not live,” he said, too fast. “Not, like, in a weird way. It’s just for content.”
He said content with the bright, automatic confidence of somebody describing an actual career path and not several cameras taped inside a rideshare.
“I have a channel too,” he added, a little too quickly. “Kurtsworld96.”
He said it with enough hope in his voice that you almost felt guilty for not recognizing it, one hand lifting from the steering wheel in a small shrug before dropping back again.
Outside the windows, neon signs smeared across the dark glass while the sedan rolled through another mostly empty intersection, tires hissing over pavement still holding onto the day’s heat.
“I’m trying to switch it up right now though,” Kurt said, reaching over to touch another tiny camera near the dashboard like it needed reassurance. “More personality stuff. More authentic.”
He made vague air quotes with one hand, then grabbed the wheel again a second too late, like he’d remembered he was technically supposed to be driving.
“Which apparently the algorithm fucking hates, so.”
A crooked little laugh slipped out afterward, like he was trying to beat you to whatever judgment he thought was coming.
“People always say they want authentic content,” he continued, already talking faster, “but then you post something actually authentic and everybody’s suddenly like, ‘uhhh, this is uncomfortable.’”
He said authentic like he still believed the word meant something.
He laughed again afterward, too quick and too bright, already trying to make the sentence sound less vulnerable than it had.
His eyes cut toward you for half a second before snapping back to the road.
Every time he looked at you, there was a tiny pause afterward, like he was waiting to find out whether he’d chosen the right version of himself.
You cracked a smile before you could talk yourself out of it.
Kurt brightened impossibly further it almost ruined the smile.
Like your reaction had given him permission to keep going.
“Honestly, rideshare stuff does weirdly good numbers,” Kurt continued, his words starting to run into each other now that your smile had apparently unlocked him again. “People are obsessed with, like… accidental human interaction.”
“Which honestly makes sense,” he said. “Nobody talks to each other normally anymore.”
“Not saying this is normal either,” he added. “This is probably significantly worse.”
The corner of his mouth pulled briefly like he regretted hearing himself say it out loud.
“But like—” he glanced toward you again, visibly trying to rebuild the sentence while he was still inside it, “in a memorable way. Not a traumatic way.”
“Hopefully,” he added under his breath.
The light ahead turned yellow, and Kurt eased off the gas instead of trying to beat it, brakes humming beneath your feet while red neon from a taco stand slid across the dashboard and caught along the side of his face.
The car settled at the light, and Kurt checked one of the tiny camera screens mounted near the dashboard for barely a second before looking away again, like he couldn’t help checking how the moment looked from outside himself.
Then the thought seemed to break loose before he could contain it.
“Honestly, this is huge networking for me. Follow for follow?”
You stared at him for a second before laughing, because even now, exhausted and trapped in a camera-riddled sedan with a viewer from your chat, some stupid automatic part of you still reached for politeness first.
“Kurt,” you said flatly.
“What?” A grin tugged at his mouth like he knew exactly how bad it sounded and had decided to commit anyway. “I’m serious.”
“You are literally driving me to pick up a pair of sponsored heels I’m contractually obligated to pretend I like,” you said, rubbing carefully beneath one eye before the leftover eyeliner could get any worse.
You almost felt mean the second the words fell from your lips.
Kurt’s mouth twitched before he shrugged one shoulder against the seat, trying very hard not to look pleased with himself and failing.
“Yeah, but rideshare stuff isn’t really my main thing,” he said, words starting to overlap again now that he’d found somewhere to put all the nervous energy. “I do content too. Or I’m trying to.”
One hand came off the wheel so he could gesture vaguely around the inside of the car, which would’ve been more convincing if he hadn’t nearly clipped the edge of the lane and corrected too fast.
“This is mostly temporary while I build everything else up,” he continued, touching one of the tiny dashboard cameras again without really looking at it.
Yellow streetlights dragged across the windshield while the car rolled through another intersection, bass from somewhere outside vibrating faintly through the doors before fading behind you.
Kurt glanced over, waiting just long enough to check whether you were laughing with him or at him before continuing.
“Cross-promotion matters,” he added, a little defensive.
Your attention wandered around the inside of the car again. Tangled charging cords spilled from the console to the floorboard, looping around loose camera mounts and enough half-empty water bottles to make you wonder if Kurt experienced hydration as a series of unfinished side quests.
“You have, like, six followers,” you pointed out.
“Seven, actually,” he corrected.
Then, after the smallest pause:
“My aunt subscribed last week.”
Another laugh slipped out of you, quieter this time, and Kurt visibly relaxed again at the sound of it like your amusement was functioning as reassurance somehow.
“See?” he said, almost to himself. “Good content chemistry already.”
The phrase sounded painfully online inside the car.
“You cannot say ‘content chemistry’ out loud to women.”
“Okay, fair,” he said, rubbing at his jaw. “That sounded less normal once it had to exist out loud.”
Outside, Los Angeles blurred past in closed storefronts and washed-out headlights while the turn signal clicked steadily beneath the low music.
Somewhere during the conversation, the rest of the city had started to feel farther away than it should have.
Like Los Angeles had kept moving around the car while the two of you stayed sealed inside it.
The blinking camera lights, the dark windows, Kurt talking too fast because silence seemed to make him nervous — all of it made the car feel strangely sealed off from the rest of the street.
“Most creators are fake though,” he said, careful enough with the words that you could tell he was trying not to include you in them. “Like, genuinely fake.”
His thumb tapped lightly against the steering wheel in the same restless rhythm.
“Not fake fake,” he corrected before you could respond. “Just… filtered, I guess. Even live.”
“You can always tell when somebody’s performing,” he said.
The uncomfortable part was that you weren’t sure he was wrong.
“The fans want authentic content,” he added, with the faintest edge of mockery in his voice, like he’d heard the phrase too many times and still wanted it to be true.
He looked at you again, longer this time.
“You don’t really do that though.”
He said it with enough certainty that you wondered how long he’d been forming opinions about you in private.
The certainty in his voice made you glance toward him again.
The compliment unsettled you more than flirting would have, mostly because it didn’t feel like flirting at all.
The rest of the drive passed in uneven waves after that, conversation slipping into silence before Kurt filled it again a few seconds later, like quiet made him physically aware of himself.
Every topic somehow became three more before the first one fully landed. Influencer drama turned into passenger stories, passenger stories turned into algorithm complaints, and algorithm complaints somehow turned into Kurt passionately explaining why mukbang creators had better audience retention than most podcasts.
At some point, he told you about a girl who cried in his backseat after Coachella because a TikToker with veneers ghosted her, then pivoted into a ten-minute rant about a guy who had once tried tipping him in crypto like that was a normal thing to do to another human being.
You found yourself laughing more than you meant to, which honestly started irritating you a little.
The uncomfortable part was that Kurt wasn’t hard to talk to. He was weirdly easy to fall into conversation with.
Like he already knew the rhythm of your responses before you gave them.
Which, in a way, he probably did.
“Why do you always say you’re ending stream and then keep talking for another forty minutes?”
You scoffed softly. “Because I have this really niche condition called ADHD. Not sure if you’ve heard of it.”
Kurt smiled faintly, but it faded as his fingers tapped once against the steering wheel and went still again.
“No, I think…” He glanced toward the windshield, like he was trying to decide whether the thought was allowed to leave his mouth. “I think you just hate the part where everybody leaves at once and then your all alone.”
The words landed too softly for how hard they hit.
Heat crawled up the back of your neck, your first instinct irritation — not because he was wrong, unfortunately, but because he’d been paying close enough attention to notice patterns you didn’t even like acknowledging to yourself.
The more unsettling part was how quickly he’d figured you out.
You would never admit that to a viewer.
You barely wanted to admit it to yourself.
You’d spent years getting good at turning loneliness into something louder, something easier to laugh through and easier to perform around. Most people never looked past the version of you that existed on camera long enough to notice there was anything underneath it at all.
Kurt had looked.
Or at least he was trying to, and your jaw tightened before you fully realized you were reacting.
Your attention stayed fixed stubbornly ahead while your thumb rubbed absently against the sleeve pulled over your hand, neon reflections sliding across the passenger window in uneven streaks of red and white.
Kurt glanced toward you, then back to the road, his fingers shifting once against the wheel like he knew he’d said something he couldn’t make casual again.
“That sounded weirder out loud than it did in my head,” he admitted.
A quiet, humorless laugh slipped out of you, but neither of you tried very hard to pick the conversation back up after that. Kurt turned the music up one notch, not loud enough to cover the silence, just enough to pretend he’d done something with it.
You didn’t realize how much time had passed until the studio building appeared at the end of the block.
It sat wedged between a tattoo parlor and a twenty-four-hour dispensary glowing red through dark windows, the whole block looking emptier than it ever did during the day.
Kurt’s fingers stilled on the steering wheel when he saw it.
He covered it almost right away by adjusting his grip, but you’d already caught the tiny break in his rhythm.
Like some part of him hadn’t realized the drive was ending until that exact moment.
His fingers tapped once against the steering wheel before he eased the car reluctantly toward the curb.
“Unfortunately,” you said, grimacing toward the building. “Somewhere in there is a pair of heels ugly enough to legally qualify as a hate crime, and apparently I need them for networking.”
Kurt huffed out a laugh, but it didn’t last.
He looked toward the studio entrance, then back at you, his mouth moving slightly before he seemed to decide against whatever sentence had gotten too close to escaping.
“You want me to wait for you?” he asked, trying for casual and missing by just enough that you noticed.
The offer came out gently enough that your brain almost filed it under normal before the rest of you caught up.
“Oh.” You blinked. “You definitely don’t have to do that.”
“No, I know.” He nodded too fast. “I just mean—”
His fingers tightened around the steering wheel, then loosened like he’d noticed himself doing it.
“It’s late.”
There wasn’t anything wrong with what he said. That was the problem. The concern sounded ordinary until you remembered he had still been a username in your chat less than an hour ago.
“Right.” Kurt nodded again, clearing his throat while his fingers shifted restlessly against the wheel.
The doors stayed locked for one second too long.
The engine hummed low beneath the distant bass from somewhere down the block before the locks finally clicked open.
Kurt looked over as you reached for the handle, his expression caught between wanting to say more and knowing he probably shouldn’t.
“You’re coming back though, right?” he asked, a little too fast.
The question should have sounded like a joke. It didn’t quite make it there.
“Because if you get another driver home after all this, I think that might actually bruise my ego a little.”
He rubbed at the side of his neck afterward, already looking like he regretted letting the sentence exist.
You looked at him for another second, trying to decide whether the comment was funny or unsettling, and somehow landing on both.
“You’re so weird,” you muttered, pushing the passenger door open with your hip because one hand was tangled in your bag strap and the other had disappeared halfway inside your hoodie sleeve.
Kurt grimaced like the comment landed exactly where you meant it to, dragging one hand across the back of his neck while his eyes jumped toward the windshield.
“Yeah,” he admitted, mouth twisting like he was trying not to smile too hard. “I know.”
Cold air spilled through the open door, cutting through the stale warmth from the heater and the faint electronic heat of everything he’d left running.
Somewhere down the block, bass thudded through a wall you couldn’t see while red neon from the tattoo shop next door pulsed weakly across the dashboard, catching against the side of Kurt’s face whenever the sign flickered
“You seriously don’t have to wait,” you told him again, hiking your bag higher on your shoulder even though you hadn’t stepped away yet.
“I know.” His fingers tapped once against the steering wheel, then stilled. “I just think it’d feel shitty driving away and not knowing you got home safe.”
Your teeth pressed into the inside of your cheek.
It wasn’t scary, which was almost the problem. He sounded genuinely worried, like the thought had slipped out before he remembered he hadn’t earned the right to be worried about you.
Awkward men always looked safer than confident ones right up until they weren’t.
You rubbed your thumb over the seam of your bag strap until the stitching started to bite.
Kurt noticed, of course he noticed, his eyes dropping briefly to your hand before returning to your face.
“I mean—” He rubbed at his jaw, then gave a small, helpless shrug like the sentence had already left the building without him. “That sounded less weird in my head.”
“A little,” you admitted, keeping your voice light because some practiced part of you had already decided this would be easier if he didn’t know it had unsettled you.
Women learned early how to keep discomfort from becoming socially inconvenient.
Especially around men who technically hadn’t done anything wrong yet.
Smile, keep the interaction easy, don’t make somebody feel embarrassed for making you uncomfortable unless you absolutely had to, because half the time they got embarrassed first and somehow you ended up apologizing.
“I’ll be right back,” you said, mostly because standing there any longer felt like giving the moment enough room to turn into something else.
You shut the car door before he could answer properly, catching only the muffled shape of his “okay” through the glass as you crossed toward the studio entrance.
The warmth trapped inside the car disappeared the second the night air hit you, cold enough to sting your eyes after twenty minutes of recycled heater air and the citrus air freshener.
Inside, the studio looked embarrassingly unimpressive without cameras running.
Clothing racks crowded the walls beside half-built sets and extension cords taped crookedly across the floor. A fake marble backdrop leaned against the far wall near a stack of unopened PR boxes, and glitter from some earlier shoot still clung to the concrete, catching under the motion lights when they flickered awake overhead.
During the day, the place photographed well enough to pass for glamorous online. After midnight, stripped down to exposed cords, wrinkled fabric, and sets nobody had bothered to break down properly, it mostly just looked tired.
The studio smelled faintly like hairspray, overheated lighting equipment, and synthetic fabric cooked too long under LEDs.
Somebody had abandoned a half-finished Alani beside the makeup station, condensation dripping onto the counter beside disposable lash applicators, bobby pins, and makeup wipes stained beige around the edges.
You stepped around a rolling rack of sequined dresses without really looking at them.
Three years ago, you probably would’ve stopped to touch the fabric.
Back then, places like this had still felt aspirational instead of exhausting.
At nineteen, you’d been convinced modeling would become glamorous eventually, if you worked hard enough and pretended not to notice the parts that weren’t.
Everybody in Los Angeles believed some version of that lie at nineteen.
You took pictures in bikinis for brands nobody actually wore in public, stood barefoot on freezing studio floors while photographers told you to laugh naturally and look “less aware of the camera,” and learned very quickly that being beautiful professionally mostly meant letting people examine you without visibly shrinking beneath it.
Then your following exploded, and suddenly everyone around you started talking like visibility itself was something to be monetized before it disappeared.
The money came fast after that.
Then one night at a launch party in the hills, a drunk girl fixing her lip gloss in a bathroom mirror casually mentioned making thirty thousand dollars a month selling porn from her apartment.
She said it the same way people recommended restaurants, casual enough that the number stopped sounding real halfway through the conversation.
Like none of it was heavy enough to permanently reroute your life.
Looking back now, you still couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment it stopped feeling temporary.
After that came more money, a better apartment, a larger audience, and somehow worse sleep than you’d had back when you were sharing a studio with two other girls and stealing toilet paper from restaurant bathrooms because none of you could afford groceries and rent in the same week.
You got used to strangers recognizing you from cropped screenshots instead of conversations. Got used to men speaking to your chest while pretending they were making eye contact. Got used to feeling visible long before you ever felt understood.
Which was probably why every time Kurt looked at you for a second too long, your body stayed quietly braced for reasons you still couldn’t fully explain.
Eventually, all of it blurred together into something your brain stopped treating as personal.
Comments, DMs, strangers building entire versions of you from cropped screenshots, livestream clips, and whatever fantasy they could project onto a body they had never actually touched.
After enough years online, you learned how to move around that kind of attention without letting it sink too far beneath your skin. It became environmental more than emotional, constant enough that your brain stopped reacting to it the same way you stopped noticing extension cords taped across studio floors after a while.
Which was maybe why Kurt unsettled you more than he should have.
Attraction barely registered anymore. Men wanted you constantly — in bars, in grocery stores, in comment sections moving too fast to read. Most of the time, you could feel exactly where their interest ended: with the version of you they had already constructed in their heads.
Kurt was attracted to you. That much was obvious.
But underneath the attraction was a strange sincerity that kept catching you off guard, like somewhere between the late-night streams and the endless flood of chat messages, he had started believing he knew something beneath the performance too.
Not just the version of you that knew how to perform well on camera.
That should have felt flattering. Instead, every time his attention stayed on you a second too long, your body braced before your brain could decide whether anything was actually wrong.
The shoes were still exactly where you’d left them earlier, tucked beneath one of the styling stations beside a collapsed garment rack sagging under sequined dresses and half-zipped garment bags.
You stopped in front of them for a second, irritation tightening quietly in your chest.
Six-hundred-dollar heels designed almost exclusively for standing still under flash photography and pretending discomfort looked glamorous.
“Stupid fucking shoes,” you muttered, crouching to grab the box.
Tissue paper shifted noisily inside the box as you adjusted your grip, too loud in a room with no music, no voices, no one telling you where to stand.
You tucked the shoebox beneath your arm and pushed yourself upright, one hand bracing against the edge of the styling table when your knees complained.
You stood there longer than you needed to, listening to the hum of the lights and the distant rush of traffic beyond the walls.
Annoyingly, your mind went back to Kurt before you even made it halfway toward the hair and makeup room.
You had known him in person for maybe half an hour, less if you wanted to be technical, which made the amount of space he was taking up in your thoughts feel vaguely humiliating.
If Kurt had been the kind of creepy you were used to, you would have known exactly what to do with him.
There was a routine for that: smile without encouraging too much, keep your voice light, don’t give them a reason to feel embarrassed, because embarrassed men were unpredictable in ways angry ones at least had the decency to announce. Get home, block them, maybe turn it into a story later if it stopped feeling gross by morning.
Kurt didn’t fit cleanly into any of the categories you had spent years building for men like that.
He kept reacting to your reactions too quickly, like he was watching the conversation for damage before you had fully decided anything was damaged.
And beneath the awkwardness was that same sincerity you didn’t know what to do with, because it didn’t arrive in any shape you recognized.
You were used to being looked at with that blunt, lazy kind of wanting, the kind that skipped your face entirely and settled wherever it thought it had paid admission to stare.
Kurt wasn’t polished enough to make his interest feel practiced. Even through the front windows, he looked all restless edges and distracted movements, one knee bouncing faintly beneath the steering wheel while the glow from his dashboard washed unevenly across his face. His mouth moved slightly like he was thinking through something to himself, thumb dragging along the edge of his phone case, stopping, then starting again a second later.
Nothing about him looked designed to be desired, which was maybe why looking at him felt so different from being looked at by him.
Kurt made you feel watched in a way that was harder to dismiss because half the time, it didn’t feel like he was watching your body at all.
You had spent years learning how to separate yourself from the version strangers thought they knew online.
So why did it bother you so much that Kurt seemed to be trying to look past it?
You reached the front doors with the shoebox tucked against your side, already fishing your phone from your pocket out of habit, then stopped before you unlocked it.
You stood with your hand resting against the metal push bar, staring through the glass at the soft blue glow coming from inside the car.
Through the glass, the white sedan was still there beneath the tattoo shop’s flickering red sign, idling at the curb like it had been pinned in place.
For some reason, seeing it still there made the thoughts reverberating through your mind go quiet.
It wasn’t relief, because relief would have meant you had wanted him to stay, and you were not ready to admit anything that embarrassing to yourself yet.
Blue dashboard light washed over his face through the windshield, making him look younger, almost boyish with his head tipped down and his hair falling forward while both thumbs moved quickly over his phone.
You had expected him to leave, maybe not consciously, but in the automatic way you expected people to forget whatever soft, decent thing they had said once the moment no longer required them to be soft or decent.
People performed concern all the time. They typed it into comment boxes, said it in green rooms, offered it with one eye already on their own reflection. It rarely survived outside the frame.
But Kurt was still there, hunched in the blue glow of his dashboard, waiting with the same strange, overearnest commitment he seemed to bring to everything.
Even after you had given him every polite opportunity not to.
Which was ridiculous, because he was still a viewer. A stranger with too many cameras in his car and an oversharing problem.
You shouldn’t have been standing there studying the way he hunched over his phone through the windshield like it meant anything.
The entire thing had the exact same energy as that guy on TikTok who got so parasocial about a British Minecraft YouTuber that he auditioned for his band and started a GoFundMe to move to England after meeting him once.
Not to that degree, obviously.
Kurt didn’t roleplay Minecraft or have a band.
And he definitely wasn’t British.
But the fact your brain was making the comparison at all felt deeply concerning.
As if sensing movement through the glass, Kurt looked up so quickly it almost felt like he’d been waiting for the exact moment you came back into view.
The glow from his phone vanished somewhere near the center console as he straightened in his seat, his attention locking onto you through the glass doors.
You stayed on your side of the glass with one hand still on the push bar while he sat frozen behind the windshield, both of you caught in the awkward little pause before someone had to make the next movement.
The street noise thinned beneath the buzz of the tattoo shop sign and the low hum of the car idling at the curb.
Then Kurt reached toward the driver’s-side handle like he was about to get out, only to catch himself halfway there. His hand hovered against the door for one awkward beat before dropping back into his lap.
The hesitation caught you off guard more than if he had actually gotten out.
You pushed through the doors before you could keep pulling the interaction apart.
Cold air wrapped around you again as you crossed the sidewalk, the shoebox bumping against your hip with every step toward the curb.
Kurt unlocked the doors before you even reached the passenger side this time.
The sharp click echoed softly through the quiet street.
The heater was still running when you climbed back into the passenger seat, warm air hitting your face hard enough to make your skin prickle after the cold outside. You pulled the door shut with your elbow while balancing the shoebox against your hip, and the car closed around you again all at once — citrus air freshener, dashboard lights, the low mechanical hum of the engine idling at the curb.
Kurt glanced over when the door shut.
The reaction looked almost involuntary, like he had spent the last few minutes trying not to watch for you through the windshield and failed the second you came back into view.
His shoulders loosened a little before he looked back toward the road.
“You found them?”
You dropped the shoebox near your feet hard enough for the tissue paper to crinkle inside it. “Tragically.”
A quiet laugh slipped out of him as he pulled away from the curb, one hand dragging across his mouth afterward like he hadn’t meant to let it happen.
Blue dashboard light slid across the side of Kurt’s face as he drove, catching on the tired shadows beneath his eyes and the greasy pieces of hair falling toward his forehead.
Your first thought was that he needed shampoo.
Your second thought was that it was genuinely irritating this somehow wasn’t a dealbreaker for your brain yet.
It would have been easier if he smelled bad too.
Instead, every time he moved, you caught traces of laundry detergent and stale coffee beneath the obnoxious citrus still filling the car.
You briefly tried to determine whether there was a socially acceptable way to tell another adult human being they looked like they needed both sleep and shampoo.
Probably not.
The car had gone quieter now that the awkward adrenaline from earlier had started to burn off.
Outside, Los Angeles drifted past in smeared neon and empty intersections while the turn signal clicked beneath music playing too low to make out.
Somewhere between seeing him still waiting and getting back into the car, the whole interaction had shifted slightly off whatever axis it started on.
You still didn’t fully trust him, but you weren’t sitting pressed against the passenger door anymore.
Most men reacted badly once they realized they had made a woman uncomfortable.
Sometimes they got defensive. Sometimes they pushed harder, like your discomfort was secretly negotiable if they joked enough, smiled enough, acted wounded enough afterward.
Kurt had looked genuinely upset with himself.
Like realizing he had unsettled you embarrassed him.
Which should not have been distinctive enough to keep replaying in your head.
Kurt’s gaze flicked toward the shoebox near your feet as another car’s headlights swept across the windshield, washing the sedan pale for half a second.
“Okay,” he said after swallowing once, like he was bracing himself. “How bad are we talking?”
The turn signal clicked beneath the low music humming through the speakers.
“Like ugly ugly?” One hand lifted vaguely from the steering wheel. “Or ugly in the really specific influencer way where you can tell nobody normal was allowed near the design process.”
You looked down at the box.
The embossed brand logo irritated you on sight.
“Influencer ugly,” you said. “Like if a shoe was trying to rebrand itself from TikToker to designer brand.”
The laugh escaped him so suddenly the car drifted toward the lane divider before he corrected too fast with a quiet, embarrassed “shit—”
He cleared his throat and adjusted his grip on the wheel like he could physically steer himself back into composure.
The smile stayed anyway.
“That is such a specific genre of ugly,” he muttered.
Streetlights slid across the side of his face as the car moved through another intersection, catching at the corner of his mouth where he was still trying not to smile.
Weirdly enough, the less Kurt tried to impress you, the easier it became to see the person underneath all the nervous performing.
Which was inconvenient, because the more he relaxed around you, the harder it became to keep flattening him back into just another viewer.
By the time your building appeared at the end of the block, your phone had died quietly in your lap. You pressed the side button once anyway, stupidly, like the black screen might decide to forgive you. The black screen reflected faint pieces of dashboard light beside the crushed corner of the shoebox balanced against your knee.
Kurt slowed near the entrance without asking where to stop.
The realization brushed unpleasantly down your spine before logic caught up a second later.
Right.
The app gave him the address.
Obviously.
Still, your eyes lingered on him while he pulled carefully against the curb, one hand tightening and loosening around the steering wheel like he was already bracing for the interaction to end.
Outside, most of the apartment windows were dark except for one glowing blue several floors up, television light flickering behind crooked blinds. The dashboard cameras blinked their tiny red recording lights into the dim interior while another set of headlights swept past, washing pale light across Kurt’s face.
Now that he had stopped talking for more than a few seconds at a time, exhaustion showed up more clearly on him. His hair sat flattened in uneven directions from constantly pushing his hands through it, and the dashboard glow sharpened the tiredness around his face until he looked younger and rougher at the same time.
You bent awkwardly toward the floor for the shoebox, elbow knocking against your bag while the tissue paper inside crackled loudly enough to fill the silence for a second.
“Thanks for waiting.”
Kurt looked over immediately at the sound of your voice, his expression changing in that same quick, involuntary way it kept doing whenever you addressed him directly, like every sentence from you still caught him slightly off guard even after the entire drive over.
“Yeah,” he said softly, one shoulder lifting like he almost meant to shrug it off. “Of course.”
No joke attached this time. No rambling recovery sentence to make it sound less sincere.
That almost threw you off more than the rambling had.
You shoved your bag higher onto your shoulder and forced yourself not to overthink the heaviness settling inside the car now that the drive was ending.
“Goodnight, Kurt.”
Saying his name made the goodbye feel more personal than you meant it to.
For half a second, his expression tightened strangely, like another sentence had almost made it out first before he swallowed it back down.
“Night.”
You shut the door before you could second-guess leaving that quickly.
Cold air hit your face hard enough to sting after the overheated car, and halfway across the sidewalk, you realized your keys were already threaded between your fingers like tiny metal claws.
Which felt dramatic.
And maybe slightly insulting to him, honestly.
But women also didn’t survive very long by ignoring instincts just because they felt socially impolite.
The shoebox kept slipping awkwardly against your hip while you crossed the sidewalk toward the entrance, your shoulders tight beneath the oversized hoodie as the glow from the street lights farther down the block smeared beige across the wet pavement.
You told yourself not to look back.
Unfortunately, that only made the awareness of him worse.
The glass doors caught pieces of the street behind you while you unlocked them: passing headlights, blurred neon, the pale outline of Kurt’s sedan still sitting at the curb exactly where you’d left it.
Your grip tightened around the keys hard enough for the metal edges to bite briefly into your palm before you forced yourself to relax again.
He was probably checking his phone. Fixing one of the cameras. Waiting for another ride request.
There were normal explanations for someone sitting in their car for an extra minute before driving away.
Weren’t there?
By the time you got upstairs and locked the apartment door behind you, tension had settled so deeply into your muscles that the quiet inside felt almost disorienting.
No chat racing past faster than you could read it, no donation alerts, no Kurt talking through every silence before it had the chance to settle.
Just the refrigerator humming faintly from the kitchen and traffic outside your windows, soft enough to make the whole city sound half-asleep.
You dragged yourself into the shower mostly because you couldn’t stand the feeling of the night still clinging to your skin anymore.
The water came out almost painfully hot at first, steam gathering across the mirror while makeup, setting spray, and the stale citrus smell from Kurt’s car disappeared down the drain in diluted streaks around your feet.
Your scalp ached from where your hair had been pulled tight for stream, and when you finally worked shampoo through it, exhaustion hit hard enough that you had to brace one hand against the tile just to stay upright.
You scrubbed harder than necessary at the last stubborn streak of eyeliner beneath one eye, watching black smear across your fingertips before the water carried it away.
Tomorrow kept circling uselessly through your head while you rinsed conditioner from your hair: Bobby’s party, the stupid shoes, whatever version of networking apparently required standing in six-inch heels while men explained cryptocurrency at you for three hours straight.
And underneath all of it, Kurt.
The way he kept looking at you like he was trying to solve something. The way he backed off every time he realized he had crossed some invisible line. The cameras. The awkwardness.
The cameras made sense. The awkwardness too.
Those at least felt familiar.
It was the sincerity underneath all of it that kept knocking uneasily against instincts you normally trusted.
You hated how quickly your brain had started reorganizing the night around him.
By the time you stepped back into your bedroom wrapped in a towel, skin still damp and warm from the shower, the apartment had gone heavy with that late-night stillness that only really existed after two in the morning.
Pink LED light still bled faintly across the walls from your streaming setup while traffic hissed somewhere below the windows, distant enough now to sound almost like rain.
You crossed the room to close the curtains, rubbing at one eye with the heel of your hand as you reached for the fabric.
Movement outside caught your attention first.
A white sedan sat farther down the street beneath a flickering streetlamp, partially tucked between two parked cars.
Something cold brushed briefly through your chest before common sense caught up a second later.
Millions of people lived in Los Angeles. Thousands of them probably drove identical white sedans around at two in the morning, and Azusa wasn’t exactly some secret little town nobody had reason to pass through.
Obviously it wasn’t Kurt.
The more you thought about it, the more ridiculous the idea started sounding in your own head.
You exhaled slowly and forced yourself to stop thinking about it.
And still, you stood there another second anyway.
The windows looked dark from here. No movement inside. Probably not even the same model.
Your grip tightened slightly in the fabric before you finally dragged the curtains closed, the metal rings clattering softly against the rod in the quiet.
Down on the street, the sedan stayed parked for another minute after the light disappeared from your bedroom window.
Several floors below, blue light briefly illuminated the inside of the white sedan before disappearing again.
A few seconds later, the car finally pulled away from the curb.
just wanted to add that i know this chapter felt repetitive and boring but i used this chapter mainly to establish the characters and setting! i pinky promise it gets better and im excited for you all to read it! :)
xoxo, jules
