by Abbott, Alex
Miss Maudie: That sounds perfect.
Atticus Finch: Good. I’m glad. Is there anything else you’d like to add or talk about?
Miss Maudie: I’ve never done any sort of cybersex before. I’m a little nervous about that.
Atticus Finch: You have nothing to be nervous about. It’s easy. But we’ll take things slow if you want. Now that you know what it is I hope to get out of this, I’m really in no hurry.
Miss Maudie: Okay.
Brooke couldn’t tell what she was feeling in that moment. It was a queer mixture of relief and disappointment. Earlier, before they had gotten onto chat, she had felt as though he had this dominant presence. In her head she had expected their relationship to be more fast-paced. At the same time, however, she knew that while that scenario was more sexually exciting to her, this was the type of relationship she was better equipped to handle.
Atticus Finch: Are you still nervous?
Miss Maudie: Just a little.
Atticus Finch: Have you done any sort of internet role play before?
Miss Maudie: Nope, never. I wouldn’t even know how to start.
Atticus Finch: It’s easy. I can show you, if you’d like. With nonsexual content to begin with, of course.
That sounded like it could potentially be a very awkward lesson, but at the same time, if she wanted this to work she knew that it was something she’d have to learn. If he was willing to teach her, she figured it would be unwise to turn him down.
Miss Maudie: Sure, that sounds nice. Thanks.
Atticus Finch: *smiles at you* No problem.
Quickly Brooke took note of the format.
Miss Maudie: *smiles back*
Atticus Finch: See, that wasn’t so bad. You’re already getting the hang of it.
Miss Maudie: I’m a quick learner.
Atticus Finch: I can see that. *takes your hand in mine.* It’s really not so difficult, it’s just like having a normal chat online, but you take note of your physical interactions as well, which is marked by the asterisks for easy differentiation.
Miss Maudie: Not nearly as difficult as I was afraid of.
Atticus Finch: Good. I would hate for you to be afraid.
It was strange. Even though they were nowhere close to each other, couldn’t see or hear one another, within the first hour of their conversation, Brooke felt herself really able to connect to him. She could read his tone as he typed out messages to her, and the whole thing felt very natural to her in almost no time at all. It was almost like she had known this man all her life, though in reality he was a complete stranger to her.
The two of them ended up talking well into the next day, before he finally told her he had to leave for work. She felt immediately guilty for keeping him up all night, but he told her not to worry about it and that it was worth every second. The reassurance not only made her feel a million times better, but she found it to be quite flattering.
After he had logged off, she sat at her computer smiling giddily. She felt as though the entire conversation, the entire night in fact, had been a dream. She couldn’t figure out which part of the situation seemed the most unrealistic, though the cynic in her was practically screaming that she was making a mistake, and that this whole thing was too good to be true. In fact, all of her felt as if this was too good to be true, but for once, the majority of her didn’t care.
She felt herself smiling as she finally went to the bedroom. The sun had long since risen and light was pouring into the cluttered room. She pulled the blinds shut and stripped down before climbing under her soft comforter and letting her exhausted body melt into the mattress. As soon as her head hit the pillow she fell into a deep, peaceful sleep.
***
“Hey, wake up. Brooke. Brooke!” The poor girl was shaken awake, jumping as it registered that there were hands on her. She looked immediately to the hands to confirm that they were there, and then with terror looked up to the person in her room.
Her racing heart began to settle down once she saw the face of her best friend. “Sara,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“You stood me up,” her best friend said, the irritation plain in her voice.
“I what?”
Sara pointed to her clock. It was 4:30 in the afternoon. “We had lunch plans, remember? I waited for like an hour. I called you a million times.”
Brooke instinctively reached for her phone, which normally she kept by her pillow in order to see the calls that Sara was talking about, and she realized it wasn’t there. Being as drowsy as she was, it took her a moment to piece together why. She remembered she had put it on the kitchen charger at some point when Sara had been over the previous night. That wasn’t out of the ordinary; she often charged her phone while she was having dinner or cleaning. But her forgetting her phone? That almost never happened. She knew Sara had stayed over late but-
Then it all came rushing back to her. The site, the message, the guy, the hours of conversation. Just like that a smile broke across her face, and she was momentarily lost in the feeling of bliss that she had felt when talking to the man.
Sara looked at her, quizzically. “What’s gotten into you all of a sudden?”
Brooke opened her mouth, but realized that she didn’t even know how to describe it. She could, of course, just say that she had met someone, but it would be very obvious where and there was that nagging voice still in the back of her mind that didn’t want Sara to be right about something as insane as anonymous online dating.
She didn’t get the chance to figure out how to break the news to cause the least amount of gloating, because almost instantly after she had asked, Sara d caught on. “Oh my god, it worked didn’t it? It worked! You bitch, you said you were going to call me if anything happened. Tell me everything, right now.”
“Sara, I just got up. Can I at least get dressed, maybe have some food or coffee?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll give you five minutes. Then you’re going to spill everything on the way.” Sara had almost left the room when she turned back. “I told you this was going to be amazing.”
Brooke really wished that hadn’t had so much to drink the night before. A mild hangover caused her head to hurt, but combined with an aching hunger and lingering exhaustion, she knew it was going to make for an unpleasant day. She pulled on some fresh underwear before looking around her room desperately for some clean clothes to go on top of them. She settled for the same shorts she had been wearing the day before and a t-shirt that was draped over her dresser. Not her cleanest outfit, nor was it her most flattering, but it would have to do. She ran a brush through her hair, which was helplessly matted, and was pulled out of the apartment with barely enough time to grab her keys and phone.
In the car, she was grilled so endlessly with questions that she didn’t have time to answer in between. Lunch faded into an abyss of the endless gloating that she had expected. Sara was, if anything, more ecstatic about her new love interest than Brooke herself seemed to be. She wanted to take her out to celebrate, but as was normal for her, she already had a prior commitment. That was fine with Brooke, though, as she was in no mood to go out and celebrate. She wanted to go home, get cleaned up, do her laundry and go back to bed.
Of course, that plan didn’t work out either. She got home, exhausted and dead tired, wanting nothing more than to collapse. She made a pot of coffee for herself and set about her chores unenthusiastically, but barely fifteen minutes into her housework, she checked her computer.
Despite how well things were going with her first experience with online dating, she was still reluctant to admit that she was in any way invested, even to herself. She checked her email first, as was her routine, trying to keep her heart from racing as thoughts of her new mystery lover crept up from where she tried to keep them hidden in the back of her mind. She spent a few minutes idly deleting spam before she finally could wait no longer.
She clicked over to the other tab, which she had left open from the night before, and to h
er delight, there was one message. It was, as she had been hoping for, from him.
She smiled as she opened it.
Atticus Finch: Hey, on my lunch break. Can’t stop thinking about last night. I’ve never had a connection with someone so fast. I hope to see you online tonight. Around 9:30 pm your time?
She was happy to see that he had been thinking about their connection as much as she had and eagerly wrote him back.
Miss Maudie: That sounds really good. I can’t stay up very late because I have to be up early for work, but I would really like to talk to you again as soon as possible.
She didn’t include any of the mushy stuff, about how she had been thinking about him too, or about how their one night of conversation was starting to erase eight years of cynicism. She didn’t want to scare him off, and she certainly didn’t want to let anyone know how high her hopes were for this.
She had trouble keeping busy in the hours waiting for him to get back online. She spent a lot of the time switching back and forth between trying to get her housework done and texting Sara. She considered going outside and spending some time on the beach, but she found herself reluctant to stray too far from her computer.
She also spent a lot of time contemplating about her views on romance. Though she was not really the type of girl for chick flicks, Sara had made her watch more than just a few. It seemed to her that in the movies, people who weren’t searching for love, people who had given up on it like she had, were always the people who found it the easiest. That had been one of the contributing reasons behind her hating the genre so much, as it just seemed so unlikely. In reality (as based off of her life up until the previous day), the people who didn’t believe in love were the people who were least likely to find it.
Now she was starting to think that perhaps there was a grain of truth. If you tried to push romance because it was something you craved, you were more likely to force relationships that didn’t work. Being honest and not having unrealistic expectations did seem to be the better strategy for finding not just love, but any type of happiness. She had spent the first sixteen years of her life believing in fairy tale endings and wanting the perfect boy more than anything else in the world, and it had gotten her more hurt than she would have believed possible. Now that she was grown up and cared about more important things, the love part was coming more naturally.
The other thing she realized was that when she didn’t crave these fairy tale romances, and she was honest about that, men who wanted to sleep with her had no reason to lie or to aim to be impressive. That was one of her favorite things about this guy. They connected well, they were honest, the feelings were amazing, but they didn’t run too deep. Things weren’t serious, and while they may seem too good to be true, they weren’t so good as to cause her suspicion. Their screen names gave it away, she thought. They had both chosen aliases from a classic American novel, but neither one was particularly romantic. If it had been any other couple, she had no doubt that their usernames would have been something more like Juliet and Romeo, something cheesy and trite like that. She was eternally grateful that this was not the case here.
She found herself blushing when she realized that in her inner-ramblings she had referred to them as a couple. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that she wasn’t really sure what would describe them. They certainly weren’t exclusive or anything, and though she definitely had feelings of attraction for him, she couldn’t describe what they had as anything serious, or really a commitment of any sort. She thought about that a lot as she tidied up. By the time he had signed back on, she was confused and concerned, but her apartment was cleaner than it ever had been.
She went to her desk instantly when she heard the ding of a new message, eager to once more converse with her mystery man. Talking to him was like talking with her oldest friend, better even since her oldest friend was Sara and they couldn’t make it through a conversation without it turning to her love life and the eventual possibility of marriage. None of that was stuff that Brooke wanted to think about, and her new partner seemed to get that. They talked about real substantial things, and it was what Brooke looked forward to every single day from then on.
Their conversation that night went late into the night, so when Brooke returned to work the next day, she was exhausted. She barely even cared though, because from the second she woke up, her thoughts were not on her miserable work life, but rather on the man who was now officially her boyfriend. She thought of him to get her through the day, and often her talks with him would get her through the night. This became the routine, and Brooke could not have been happier with it.
She was tentative when at first he suggested taking things a bit further, but after just one session of roleplaying with him, she was not only comfortable with it, but more aroused than she had been in years. She had fallen into bed with all her favorite toys that night, and none of them had quite been able to ease the fire that now burned within her at the thought of her mysterious lover from far away.
After just one month of dating, she could barely remember her life from before. The cynical Brooke who had hated romance and all things related since her freshman year of high school was gone, and the woman who had taken her place was happier than she could believe possible. Everything before her boyfriend seemed like it had happened a lifetime ago, and her days now passed in a blur, almost as if she was giddily dream walking through life. She felt as though her happiness would go on forever, but life seemed to have other plans.
***
Shortly after they reached their fifth week anniversary, Brooke was fired from her job. At first, she maintained the same attitude about it that she had about everything: “it doesn’t matter because I’m in love,” but slowly she realized how much she needed that job. Her apartment was expensive, very expensive, and she needed to pay her bills as week. There were not a lot of places hiring, let alone hiring full time. Panic was starting to set in by the time she got home and signed onto her chat. Immediately she was greeted with a message.
Atticus Finch: Hey
Atticus Finch: I didn’t expect to see you on so early. Aren’t you supposed to be at work?
Brooke wasn’t sure how to answer. She wanted to tell him, to share her bad news with him as she always did, but she was reluctant to do so. Given the nature of the other women on this site, she realized that complaining about money might come across as asking for money. She hoped that he knew her better than to think she’d be after his money, but she just didn’t want to risk it. She sat at her computer, wishing she had taken the time to make a plan before she had signed on.
Atticus Finch: Did you get called off or something?
She was about to just say yes she had, but she just didn’t feel comfortable lying to him.
Atticus Finch: Hello?
She realized she had no choice but to tell him the truth. She would just explain, if it came up, that she’d have enough to find another job and that he should not worry about it.
Miss Maudie: Hey
Miss Maudie: Sorry, I’m here. Just been a rough day.
Atticus Finch: What happened?
Miss Maudie: I got fired today.
She waited. At first there was no reply and she grew nervous.
Miss Maudie: It’s no big deal, though.
Miss Maudie: Like, it sucked, but I can find another job.
Miss Maudie: Seriously, it’s okay.
She wished he’d say something, anything at all really, but when he did, she wasn’t sure what to make of it.
Atticus Finch: No, I think it’s perfect.
Atticus Finch: I’ve been wanting to talk to you about something for a while now.
Miss Maudie: Uh, okay, sure.
Atticus Finch: I know that we haven’t known each other that long, but I’m starting to have real feelings for you. It’s fast, but I’d like to meet you. In person.
Brooke’s mind was reeling. She could feel color rising
in her cheeks and her
heart pounding in her chest.
Miss Maudie: I’d like to meet you too. Will you come to California then?
Atticus Finch: Well, I’ve actually been thinking I would fly you out here. If you’d be willing. I didn’t want to ask before, because I didn’t want to get you in trouble at work, but now…
The rational part of Brooke’s mind, the part of her that had been quiet for the last five weeks, was screaming at her that this was a horrible idea. This was how horror movies started. She should tell him that she needed some time to think it over. But, in spite of all of that, the next message she sent was “I’d love to.”
That message would change her life, she knew. One way or the other, there would be no going back from a meeting like this. Sara was, of course, ecstatic for her when she found out. Several shopping sprees and a salon trip later, Brooke was waving good bye to her best friend from a private jet that would be taking her to Hawaii.
The flight was long, very long, and it gave her a lot of time to think about what she was doing. She had made plans with a stranger on the internet to have him arrange a private jet for her that would take her to a car that would take her to an exclusive restaurant so she could meet him for the first time on one of the most remote islands in Hawaii. It sounded crazy. It felt a little crazy even, but she couldn’t stop herself from being excited about it. All the time she was in the plane, then the car, she kept fantasizing about their introduction, about him and what he would look like and even what his name would be. Her mind was so lost in thought she barely even noticed as the car pulled up to the doors of the restaurant.