The internet can bring out the strange in people. I found this out last year when a troll targeted me after Love Island finished. I was an Amber and Kem fan. He wasn’t. This, it appeared, was enough for him to keep commenting on my Instagram account long after the series was over. At first it was banter, things like “I can’t believe you could show your face after voting for them” on selfies, but every now and then it got vicious. He called me “chunky”, would comment that I needed to get my roots done, and once wrote “I find it hard to believe you can read” after I posted a picture of the book I was enjoying.
It got to the point where I dreaded getting notifications. My stomach would lurch if I saw one from him. My friends thought I was mad for not blocking him, but I just decided to ignore his very existence – until, after I posted a picture of some tickets for an intimate gig I’d got my hands on, he wrote something fairly normal. “Didn’t realise you were a fan,” he wrote, adding that he had a ticket for the same show.
“Surprising what you can learn about somebody when you get to know them,” I quipped back.
When he liked my comment, I decided to take a peek at his profile. My mouth dropped open in shock. With his peroxide-blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, he was gorgeous. I followed him back.
At the gig, my eyes scanned the venue for him. During the interval, the crowd scattered and I clocked a flash of blonde at the bar so I tapped him on the shoulder.
“You?!” he beamed, clapping a hand to his mouth in shock.
“The one and only,” I said sarcastically.
“You look amazing,” he said, drinking in my curves and cleavage.
“So you are capable of being nice then,” I huffed. He looked crestfallen, and to say sorry for trolling me, he bought me a drink and we got chatting – in person his sarcasm was quite sexy. I began to think that maybe he’d been flirting with me the whole time, that perhaps I’d taken his comments way too seriously?
For the next round, he bought us shots… and after that I found myself in a taxi on my way back to his.
The minute we stumbled through his front door, he was greedily tugging at my top, accidentally tearing off a button. I decided to seek my revenge by literally ripping the expensive-looking shirt off his back.
