#predatory behavior

“you like the quiet” he says, his voice echoing off the tile walls. he doesn't stop until he’s right behind you, his hands coming to rest on your shoulders. his grip is firm, possessive, a silent claim that makes the hidden wire taped to your ribs feel like it’s burning your skin. “it’s peaceful, isn't it? after the sirens and the hysteria.”

“it’s lonely” you reply, your voice steady despite the adrenaline. you lean back slightly, resting your head against his stomach.

anton hums, a low vibration that you can feel through his jacket. he’s been acting strange all week—more attentive, more observant. he’s been watching you with eyes that seem to see right through the facade you’ve built, through the fake identity and the manufactured hobbies.

he moves to sit beside you, his arm sliding around your waist, pulling you flush against his side. the intimacy is suffocating. you’re so close you can smell the sharp, metallic scent of the pool water on him, mixed with something darker—something like burnt paper and cold rain.

he turns to look at you, his gaze dragging over your face with a terrifyingly slow intensity. he isn't flirting tonight. the mask is gone. there’s just a cold, analytical curiosity in his expression, like he’s finally solving a riddle he’s been working on for weeks.

“you’ve done a remarkable job, you know” he whispers, his fingers tracing the line of your jaw, his thumb brushing over your bottom lip. it’s not a caress; it’s a measurement. “the way you swim, the way you laugh at my jokes, the way you pretend to be so utterly, hopelessly in love with me. it was almost convincing.”

your pulse spikes, but you don't pull away. you can’t.

“i don’t know what you’re talking about, anton” you murmur, meeting his eyes.

he laughs, a dry, humorless sound that makes your blood run cold. he leans in, his face inches from yours, his lips brushing against your ear. his hand shifts, moving from your jaw to rest over the spot on your chest where your microphone is hidden. he presses down, hard enough to feel the slight outline of the device beneath your shirt.

“you are quite soft for an agent” he says, the words barely a breath. “all this time, i thought you were a student. i even let myself wonder if you were a distraction i could afford to keep. but you’re just another part of the system, aren't you? another person sent to look for ghosts in my house.”

he pulls back, his expression shifting into something so painfully gentle it’s worse than the threat. he reaches up, tucking a stray strand of hair behind your ear, his touch lingering.

“you’re scared” he notes, his voice soft, almost pitying. “you’re terrified that i’m going to kill you right here, in the place where we spent so many nights pretending to be normal.”

he stands up, offering you a hand with the same casual ease he’d use to help you out of the pool. he doesn't look like a killer. he looks like a boy in love. but his eyes—those dark, hollowed-out eyes—tell a completely different story.

“i’m not going to hurt you” he says, stepping back toward the exit. “not yet. i’m actually quite curious to see how long you can keep this up. consider this a game, darling. you try to prove what i am, and i’ll try to see if i can make you believe i’m something worth saving.”

he turns and walks toward the door, his footsteps silent on the wet tile. he pauses at the threshold, glancing back over his shoulder one last time.

“oh, and agent?” he calls out, his smirk widening. “try not to get too attached. it makes the ending so much harder to handle.”

he pushes the doors open and disappears into the night, leaving you alone in the silence of the pool, the weight of the secret you’ve been carrying finally feeling like it might just crush you.

the week after the pool felt like walking through a funhouse mirror. everything was the same—the brutalist architecture of the campus, the smell of damp textbooks in the library, the way the late afternoon sun hit the quad—but it all felt poisoned.

every time you sat in the cafeteria, you felt eyes on the back of your neck. you’d turn around, heart hammering against your ribs, expecting to see anton, but there would just be a group of freshmen laughing or a professor rushing to class. the paranoia was a physical weight. you started checking the locks on your apartment twice, then three times. you even caught yourself tracing your own footsteps, wondering if the person walking two blocks behind you was just a student or if it was him, waiting to see if you’d finally crack.

the worst part wasn't the fear; it was the memory of the "sweet" date you’d had just three days before the pool incident.

it had been perfect—almost annoyingly so. you’d gone to that hole-in-the-wall bookstore downtown, the one with the creaky floorboards and the smell of vanilla and dust. anton had been so charming, so terrifyingly attentive. he’d spent twenty minutes browsing the poetry section, eventually pulling a worn copy of rilke from the shelf and handing it to you.

“i thought you’d like this” he’d said, his voice dropping into that soft, melodic register that made you forget you were wearing a wire. “it’s quiet. like you.”

he’d bought you a coffee after, holding your hand as you walked back to campus, his fingers tracing slow, hypnotic patterns against your knuckles. he’d even stopped at a flower stall to buy you a single, wilted-looking sunflower, tucking it behind your ear with such genuine tenderness that you’d almost felt guilty for the hidden camera in your coat button.

he’d laughed at your jokes until his eyes crinkled. he’d listened—really listened—as you talked about your fake major, nodding at all the right places, occasionally brushing a stray hair from your face. you remembered thinking, this is it. he’s just a student. maybe the report was wrong. maybe he’s just a lonely guy who likes poetry.

now, sitting in your apartment while the rain lashed against the window, the memory made you want to retch. you finally understood what that date had actually been: it was a test. he hadn't been listening to you; he’d been analyzing your reactions, testing the limits of your mask to see how much of a "sweet, naive student" you could play. he’d known exactly what kind of attention would make you let your guard down, and you’d fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.

the next day on campus was a nightmare. you saw him near the physics building, leaning against a stone pillar, reading a book. he didn't approach you. he didn't wave. he just looked up, locked eyes with you from across the crowded quad, and held your gaze for three seconds too long. he gave you a small, almost imperceptible nod—the kind you’d give a friend—before turning the page.

it was a signal. he wasn't running. he wasn't hiding. he was inviting you to keep playing, and you realized, with a sinking feeling in your gut, that he already knew where you lived, what your shift schedule was, and probably who you were calling in the middle of the night to report your findings.

meet dalton! he's a 33 year old from indiana with a self admitted fetish for "young adults" (i.e. minors). he jacks off to a 14 year old anime girl, futaba from persona 5. but most importantly, he's also admitted to receiving sexually explicit photos on at least two occasions, which he apparently deleted after his "hormones stfu" (aka jacked off to), from a 17 year old girl. he sought her out on tumblr and messaged her after going through lana del rey tags, a tag known to be filled with minors. he seriously considered meeting up with her and heavily implied he wanted to eventually have sex with her. after admitting to this without any prompt, he later had the audacity to accuse ME of making the profile to catfish him and entrap him. he is convinced i pretended to be a 17 year old girl, with an already active secondary blog, posted in a lana tag in the very slim chance he would see it and message me first, proceed to talk to him for hours (after i've spent years trying to avoid talking to him), send nudes and beg him to have sex, then stalk all his social media accounts when he cut contact. it's bewildering and libel. i don't know if he's been involved romantically or sexually with any other minors, but he is a predator. him trying to pin his disgusting behavior on me is what truly finally prompted me to compile a "compendium" (his words) and make this post. but i've been considering it for a long time.

let's backup so you have context of how this all happened and how unhinged his behavior has been. dalton has been stalking me for over two years. it started january 2024. now, these past 6 years of my life have gotten increasingly worse. i've been in an incredibly turbulent relationship since 2020. i lost everything. i lost more and more of myself as time went on. my boyfriend and i got evicted from our apartment in texas at the end of 2023, we were kinda together but not, and i had nowhere to go. he decided to move home to north carolina to live with family, leaving me stranded with nothing. the only thing i could do was beg and plead for him to take me with him. he made it clear he didn't want that at all, didn't want to be with me anymore and it took awhile to convince him, but he reluctantly did. since he didn't want to be with me, he wanted me to find somewhere else to go as soon as i was able to.

so i started using dating apps, explained the situation and tried to seek out help. i have no connections here and have agoraphobia so i rarely go out. i received quite a few offers, dalton being one of them. i tried to chat a bit to everyone who offered, and tried to make sure it was known how grateful i was for their offers. i was doing horribly mentally and emotionally due to how much my life was falling apart. being completely isolated to a room in a house where i'm not wanted, having no support whatsoever, my failing relationship, and the impending doom of possibly being homeless or forced to live with someone i don't know. the support i started to receive online genuinely meant a lot to me. i wanted to express that, all the while just wanting to save my current relationship and hoping he'd change his mind. which he eventually did because he does it often. the things dalton fixates on, remembers so fondly, and makes him assume i had any feelings for him, were just me being overly polite and appreciative. examples:

-he said he was ready to be a rock for someone, or at the very least be supportive. i replied saying i needed that so badly and wanted my boyfriend to be my rock and the one who was supportive. not dalton.

-me telling him "love you too", once, after he told me i was cared about and he loved me. he convinced himself that meant i was in love with him and had romantic feelings for him. it was nothing more than me expressing my gratitude. i often tell friends and people online that i love them because of their support and kindness. that does not mean it's ever intended to be viewed as romantic. he also said i was being manipulative in a donation post i made with the tag "if you're able to help me, i'll love you forever!!!" because it could be interpreted as romantic.

-i said "thank you for being a light in the darkness" for him offering a place to stay and for being kind. i didn't want to seem ungrateful to anyone and was overly sweet. i was scared and desperate for help, so i wanted to make sure i had options if necessary. i did not think that he would take the things a stranger said to him the few times we talked, so seriously and misconstrued.

i started talking to him in march 2024, sent 19 messages overall, and stopped replying completely a month later. that was around the time my relationship was getting somewhat better and i wasn't being threatened with homeless anymore. i stopped seeking somewhere else to go. dalton continuously spammed me with messages to the point i started feeling uncomfortable and stopped using social media altogether, even deactivating my instagram and changing my tumblr url. he never relented but i did my best to ignore it. it wasn't until december that year that things really escalated. my mentally ill, abusive, paranoid and delusional mother who i do not get along with, called me in a panic. she said dalton contacted her saying he thinks i'm being held hostage by my boyfriend and sent her screenshots of our personal conversations. i had to contact him and make it clear he crossed a line and i wanted nothing to do with him and to never contact my family again. he convinced himself that my boyfriend had sent those texts, not me, so he contacted my mom again, asking her to pay half to hire a private investigator. he had found out personal information about me, my family, my boyfriend and his family by paying for it on a website. he initially denied this and said it was free, but eventually admitted he spent money on it. this caused me so much emotional turmoil. dread, panic, fear, anxiety, paranoia, violation, anger, discomfort. this went on and on for months as i occasionally expressed how upsetting this was and pleading for him to leave me alone. it was constant.

suddenly in july 2025, my boyfriend wanted me to move out again, immediately. i had grown more and more isolated while living here that i had literally no options. except for dalton. i absolutely dreaded the idea and felt i had no other choice. he agreed to let me move in. we planned the move, all the while i felt sick to my stomach that something bad was going to happen. i didn't want it at all. i complained to my boyfriend constantly how much i didn't want to do it. made it clear how afraid i was of him and his behavior. i begged him to reconsider. eventually he stopped talking about me leaving and i stopped talking to dalton less and less.

now, i need to talk about the topic of money. i've been struggling very badly since moving here, with everything, but especially money. my boyfriend has been fired twice, didn't make much when he was working, and is an alcoholic that spends a lot of money on drinking. i can't work and have no other income. i can't pay for the things i need. i rely on donations online. dalton has sent me quite a lot of money these past two years. sometimes to be manipulative, he's confessed to that. i didn't ask him for money. he'd make me feel guilty for it. i've offered to refund it, told him he didn't need to do it. his stipulation was that i don't use any money on my boyfriend. my phone bill, which is a necessity, needed to be paid. my boyfriend and i share an account under my name. we use a payment plan that splits it into two payments a month. my boyfriend would often contribute to half of it and so did i. so i used dalton's money to pay for my half of the bill. he mentioned that the payment went through and hoped i felt less stressed on two occasions. i didn't reply, and eventually he randomly sent me a text, angry at me for breaking his trust and using the money on my boyfriend. at that point, i was so exhausted with everything in my life, but especially him. i told him to leave me alone for good and tried to cut contact. he continued his stalking and harassment as i isolated from social media again.

in december, he tried to find my address to call the police for a wellness check, knowing my home life is very tense. he got the address incorrect but they canvassed the neighborhood. i explained the situation to them and they agreed not to follow up with him. later that month, someone who knew dalton in person messaged me on tumblr because they were concerned about my safety due to the things he had been saying. i replied and much to my surprise found out at least three other people were also being harassed by him. specifically 19-22 year olds. he met one of them when they were 17. he recently developed feelings for them despite them not feeling the same way and feeling uncomfortable. i was added to their group chat on discord dedicated to talking about all of dalton's disturbing behavior. if anything ever good happened from knowing dalton, it was getting to know these very kind people who have been nothing but supportive and i'm glad to have met them.

we all feel that this post needs to be made, not only to warn others about dalton's predatory behavior, but also to maybe give him some perspective and self awareness. he's told me personally he wants to fully understand why his behavior has caused so many issues with his relationships, so here it is.